UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 424-ii

House of COMMONS

MINUTES OF EVIDENCE

TAKEN BEFORE

DEFENCE COMMITTEE

 

 

RECRUITMENT AND RETENTION IN THE ARMED FORCES

 

 

Tuesday 1 APRIL 2008

 

MR TIM CORRY and MS SARAH BAXTER

MR RICHARD LONGSON and MR KIERAN GORDON

MR CHRIS SANDERSON and MR CHRISTOPHER BEESE MBE

Evidence heard in Public Questions 83 - 211

 

 

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Oral Evidence

Taken before the Defence Committee

on Tuesday 1 April 2008

Members present

Mr James Arbuthnot, in the Chair

Mr David S Borrow

Mr David Crausby

Mr David Hamilton

Mr Dai Havard

Mr Bernard Jenkin

Mr Brian Jenkins

Robert Key

Richard Younger-Ross

________________

Witnesses: Mr Tim Corry, Campaign Director, and Ms Sarah Baxter, National Relationship Manager, SaBRE, gave evidence.

Q83 Chairman: Thank you very much for coming to give evidence to our inquiry into recruitment and retention. Would you please introduce yourselves and tell us what you do?

Ms Baxter: I am national relationship manager for SaBRE. I liaise with large organisations in both the public and private sectors as well as their key influences, namely professional membership bodies and key bodies such as the Chartered Institute of Professional Development and the Federation of Small Businesses.

Mr Corry: I am Tim Corry, SaBRE campaign director, and I have been in post since October 2002 and before the launch of that organisation.

Q84 Chairman: When you first heard of this inquiry what did you hope would be the result of it?

Mr Corry: I think it is a very good thing to examine the pressures on those individuals who have to recruit individuals to the Armed Services. What we bring to the party is the special relationship that reservists must have with their employers which is the third leg of the stool that does not apply to the Regular Services. I believe we have quite a good insight into the difficulties that may arise in recruiting reservists in particular, and therefore I hope to have the opportunity from this inquiry perhaps to expose some of those difficulties so there is greater understanding of them.

Q85 Chairman: Has the economic climate had much of an effect on the recruitment and retention of volunteer reservists?

Mr Corry: I have no particular evidence of it. I suppose there may be an argument that where there is full employment perhaps people do not look for that extra bit, but the motivation of reservists is slightly different anyway. Most of them work for an employer and have chosen voluntarily to serve their country in one of the reserve forces. From my perspective - I have no evidence either way - I do not believe that the economic climate has made that much difference.

Q86 Chairman: Therefore, you have not been aware of the consequence that people might have to spend longer hours at work or anything like that and have been unable to devote such limited time as they might have to serving in the Armed Forces?

Ms Baxter: The negative influence in this instance is lack of flexibility with civilian employers in terms of being able to leave slightly early to undergo training.

Mr Corry: Over the past few years there has been a development particularly in the case of shift workers where traditionally reservists - I am talking of training rather than mobilisation - have relied on having the weekends, if you like, to go away to train. Clearly, that has become more difficult for some employers because they have to change shift patterns, etc. I believe therefore that where employment has moved in that direction there are greater difficulties.

Q87 Mr Jenkin: Do you think that the deployment of reservists overseas to Afghanistan and Iraq over recent years has made it more difficult to recruit and retain reservists?

Mr Corry: The Committee will be more aware of this than I am, but anecdotally one finds a different type of reservist now joining the reserves. If one goes back five years or more, very few if any reservists expected to be mobilised. Now they all join the reserves knowing there is a very great likelihood that they will be mobilised, so in that sense perhaps one is getting a different sort of person, though not comprehensively so. There are perhaps still people who join the reserve forces in the traditional way, but there is certainly a trend in that direction.

Ms Baxter: We are now getting to the point where a reservist has been deployed for a second or even a third time. We are keeping a very close eye, as I think are all military stakeholders, on the effect of second and third mobilisations, but as yet we do not have any strong evidence either way.

Q88 Mr Jenkin: Has One Army Recruiting assisted the recruitment of reservists, and would you like to see that extended to the other Services?

Mr Corry: One Army Recruiting came in only on 1 April of last year and the jury is out on that. We work quite closely with the reserve forces cadet associations, of which there are 13 spread round the country, who traditionally had the role of specifically recruiting reservists. That was something they were particularly good at. They are waiting to see whether or not One Army Recruiting will produce results. Depending on those to whom you speak, anecdotally they are not all convinced yet.

Q89 Mr Jenkin: I go back to the earlier question put by the Chairman and extend it to the reservist review that the Government is undertaking. What do you think should be the key conclusion of that review? Would it be that perhaps there should be two types of reservists, one who wants to be deployed on overseas operations and one who wants to be trained for more traditional national security-type operations?

Mr Corry: I hate to predict the conclusion of a review that has not even started, but it is important that what comes out of the review is that the way reserves are structured is either confirmed to support current or future operations or, if not, there is some other structure that makes best use of reserves which are needed for defence.

Ms Baxter: It is an incredibly complicated area. You can promote the taking of reservists who have civilian employers and the development of those two careers. Clearly, that is starting from the defence prerogative and working from there. I do not believe that I can comment.

Q90 Chairman: I go back to the answer you gave about people being deployed for the second and third time. Last week we heard evidence to suggest that once people had been deployed once, twice or three times in really dangerous areas they had almost got it out of their system. Do you find any evidence among reservists of the same feeling arising so that they leave the reserves earlier than they otherwise might have done?

Ms Baxter: There is no statistical evidence. The anecdotal evidence seems to reflect the same occurrence as for regulars. They do not want to be deployed necessarily to the same theatre; having been deployed in Iraq once they want to go on operations to Afghanistan. There is no hard evidence.

Mr Corry: Anecdotally, one picks up the idea that for some reservists they see joining the reserves, one mobilisation and then leaving almost as a right of passage. I alluded earlier to perhaps a different sort of person who now joins the reserves. He now knows that he will be mobilised and may think that it is exciting to start with. I suspect that after the first tour it is a bit more excitement than they have signed up for, but some people will join the reserves and do their bit for Queen and country or their own personal aspirations - whatever it happens to be - and then they will go. There is probably an element of that in the case of a number of reservists.

Q91 Mr Crausby: There is no legislation to protect employees who want either to join the reserves or stay in the reserves against the wishes of their employers. Does this fact deter people from joining the reserves or remaining in them, and would legislation help?

Mr Corry: Discrimination has been looked at. In the work we do we are very closely aligned to the policymakers within the Directorate of Reserve Forces and Cadets. There are two schools of thought here. I think there is discrimination but it is all anecdotal. People say they have been discriminated against but it is very difficult to prove. On the one hand you could say that we have it in the area of gender, paternity etc, etc, and there could be an argument for legislation in this area. My personal view is that it would be counter-productive. There are some people who, if you produced legislation against discrimination, would find a reason to work round it, whereas if it does not exist certainly based on our relationship with employers we talk to broadly it is dealt with as a case-by-case study. One of the issues behind it, however, is the perception among a number of individuals who join the reserves that they will be discriminated against, though there is no evidence of it, and as a result many, not most, are reluctant to tell their employers that they are in the reserves. That in itself creates extra problems because there is no openness and dialogue with employers. Therefore, when the guy is picked up for mobilisation it comes as a real surprise to some employers. That is not good management.

Ms Baxter: Under employer notification which has been in existence since 2004 employees give permission for the unit to write to notify the employer that they are volunteer reservists. These things take time to come into play and we have evidence that that is happening. Certainly, SaBRE has concentrated more of its activity on helping this dialogue with reservists and talking directly to them because historically we have focused more on employers than reservists. All of this will help because we strongly believe that the key relationship in all this is between the individual reservist and his employer, that is, the line manager and further up.

Q92 Richard Younger-Ross: As far as concerns discrimination, is there any geographical or sectoral difference?

Mr Corry: There are certainly regional differences as to the way people view the Armed Forces. As a general comment, in the North historically people tend to be more supportive, but I am not aware of regional differences in terms of whether or not people are discriminated against. There are perhaps certain sectors where one may find anecdotally more people who are reluctant to have reservists on their workforce but I do not regard that necessarily as discrimination as such.

Q93 Mr Crausby: What about more help for employees? Sometimes when people return from operations they have difficulty settling in again. What do we do to assist employers in helping that process?

Mr Corry: Reintegration is a real issue and a lot of work has been done on the welfare policy side of it to enable reservists to get the same level of support as regulars, but the reservist situation is very different inasmuch as when a regular comes back from deployment or mobilisation generally speaking he has his peer group around him and he can decompress, or whatever the expression is, whereas the reservist goes back to his civilian community. I am aware that a lot of work on medical follow-up has been carried out to make sure these people are looked after once they have been demobilised and are back in the broad community to be brought back into the military system should problems with stress, or whatever it happens to be, raise their head some time after demobilisation.

Q94 Chairman: In a few minutes we shall be coming to medical help for returning reservists, but this question is directed at help for employers.

Ms Baxter: Employers will have points of contact. We certainly explain to them the whole process of mobilisation and brief them in terms of what happens once reservists are demobilised and, I suppose, help them understand issues that may arise once those reservists return. At a more anodyne level we draw a parallel with longer-term maternity leave. We make the point that if the office has moved it is quite good to point that out on the first day before the reservist gets to his office. The larger organisations will raise awareness of inhouse counselling services, etc. Those are the sorts of conversations we have. Quite often, if issues arise it is not unlikely that the line manager will be the first person to detect them because these things bubble under the skin for a while.

Q95 Mr Havard: This is easier for large public sector organisations than perhaps large private organisations, and it is much easier for them to do than small employers. There are different types of employers as well as different types of support. I was interested in what you said about One Army Recruitment, for example. What is the relationship? I am trying to figure out who are the actors who deal with any of this. If I am an employer with three or four people and one of them suddenly pops up as a reservist, goes off and then comes back I get over the problem of their absence but I now have another problem of reintegration. Is it only you that I deal with, or, assuming it is an army reservist, is the relationship with the one army recruitment concept where the individual goes back to the person who recruited him? Do they help the individual and do you help the employer? How is all that joined up?

Mr Corry: It tends to be quite regionalised. As part of the SaBRE campaign there is a network of representatives who tend to link up by definition with employers in their region Broadly speaking, they are aware of which employers are affected by particular mobilisations. Part of what they do from SaBRE's perspective is to keep in touch with them. From the perspective of the Chain of Command the unit which mobilises that individual also has resource within that unit, that is, the regimental support officer who also has a welfare remit to link in. We in SaBRE sitting in London do not speak directly to those people, but certainly our regional representatives on the ground have regular contact with those individuals.

Q96 Mr Havard: But the person coming back and employer may have two very different perspectives. The person who comes back has all of the support mechanism available to him; the employer comes to you. At some point that has to be reconciled.

Mr Corry: That tends to be reconciled if there is an issue and the relationship is right, but I cannot guarantee that is so in every instance. The employer who has that mobilised reservist will have been contacted by the regional SaBRE campaign director and he will be the point of contact to pick up any particular issues. Depending on what the issue is, it is for him to point that employer in the right direction or give whatever help he can at the time.

Q97 Mr Borrow: The NAO report highlights the issue of training and reservists and makes the point that training levels and training priority are lower for reservists compared with regulars. In particular, if you are a regular serviceman or woman you do the training when you are there, whereas if you are a reservist you can book your training on annual leave and suddenly it is switched to a month later and you are stuck with huge problems. Does that have an effect on retention rates within the reservist forces?

Mr Corry: I think it does. Quite clearly, the priority is the support of current operations. Therefore, anecdotally for those who are not going on operations there is not so much emphasis on what you have just described as routine training. Having commanded a reserve unit myself, they look forward to their training and if it is properly resourced, exciting and everything else that encourages them to stay. If some of the resource in that area is now being used - I do not know - to support, understandably, current operations to get people mobilised that could certainly give rise to an issue.

Q98 Mr Borrow: Do you say there is also a gap in terms of the quality of training which would have an effect in theatre? One matter that has been highlighted is that some of the training given to reservists is more limited in terms of the range of equipment used and level of experience they have and in theatre there could be potential issues about a single unit fitting in with regular forces. Does that have an effect as well?

Mr Corry: I think it must have an effect. By definition, the amount of training will determine how much scope there is to learn things in the period available. Clearly, if regulars are not on operations they will spend more of their time training and reservists are back with their employers. What is important is clearly to match the reservist's abilities and training levels with the operations on which you put him. Clearly, an issue for the Chain of Command is to make sure that the reservist is given a job only for which he is trained. That presupposes that the Chain of Command and particularly the commanding officer is fully appreciative of what those levels are. Therefore, I would argue that training together would be a good thing prior to deployment, or at any other time, because then you would simply know what the levels of competence were.

Q99 Mr Borrow: Is there an element of catch-up in the sense that the traditional role of reservist forces has been to be there in the event of a major conflict and threat to the UK mainland and doing backfill in other operations, whereas now they are in theatre in Afghanistan and Iraq in a way which would not have been envisaged 10 years ago?
Therefore, that has an impact on the sort of training levels that need to be made available to reservists in order for them to be fully effective but also to feel confident in their continued membership of the reserve forces?

Mr Corry: That is a fair comment. My understanding of the previous role of reserves before we went to Iraq and Afghanistan was predicated on something like a six-month warning period when we got ourselves up to speed. Clearly, we are not now in that situation. From my observations, I think that the training for operations for deployment to Afghanistan, Iraq or elsewhere is pretty good and focused. People have picked up that previously there were issues. As to the people left behind, that is a different matter.

Q100 Mr Borrow: One matter picked up in the NAO report was concern about the robustness of the assessment of fitness levels of reservists before they went into theatre. The question was whether the assessment was as good as it should have been and potentially it created difficulties for reservists when they reach theatre and have not achieved the level of fitness required to be fully effective.

Mr Corry: I am not qualified to comment on that other than to say that if a person is not assessed at the same levels inevitably he will by definition be at a lower level than perhaps his regular counterpart. If that is the case then clearly it would be an issue.

Ms Baxter: To go back to the point of what they are going out to do, there may be a certain amount of flexibility. For instance, there may be a little more leeway for a surgeon compared with somebody who is concerned with force protection.

Q101 Robert Key: The NAO report looked at reservists who within a year of joining decided they wanted to leave. They found that 48 per cent cited personal and family pressures as the reason for wanting to leave. Can you explain the family pressures to which reservists are subject and to which apparently regulars are not?

Mr Corry: There is a range. If we are talking about routine-type training, every reservist takes on a commitment. From personal experience, for the TA the commitment is 30 days' training a year. Most of that is taken at weekends, but there is a period in the middle called the annual camp where in consultation with employers they get time off to go away and train. Some employers are very generous and will give additional time over and above annual holiday, and the most generous ones even pay them to be there, whereas others say they can go away but they must take it out of their holiday time. If you are an employee who has only four or five weeks' holiday a year and you have to use two of them to go away and do your annual camp then that person's partner or spouse might become a bit fed up with it and say, "Come on! This is holiday time." That is certainly the source of one of the pressures.

Q102 Robert Key: What is the answer to it?

Ms Baxter: We need to keep on plugging and doing what we do. Ultimately, while we are there to support employers we make no bones that we seek to create as supportive an environment as possible. When it comes to the three legs of the stool we try to make the employer's leg as sturdy as possible and encourage employers to be as flexible as they can be and, even better, to provide special leave for training.

Q103 Robert Key: One of the problems referred to last week by the families federations was that whereas the regulars tended to be in garrison communities the reservists were spread right across the country and that made a very big difference to the sense of welfare and belonging. Can you explain that to us a little more?

Mr Corry: For a regular the military culture is like one big family whereas reservists are dipping in and out of it. Clearly, there is strength in all being together and the reservist does not have that natural support mechanism. Therefore, when you are dealing with the support and welfare side it is very much more difficult to support reservists. I am not fully aware of what is being done to deal with that, but I can certainly understand why there would be difficulties there.

Q104 Robert Key: The NAO study said that part of the problem was that the Ministry of Defence did not have a family-friendly approach to getting information out to members of the reserve forces because, after all, a lot of reservist families were not used to service life and there is a big difference here. How do you think the Ministry of Defence could improve its relationship with reservists, making the whole approach to them more family-friendly?

Mr Corry: Probably the level at which that could happen would be the unit. I know that there are variations in how much people do and do not do, but certainly commanding officers, through the people who work for them, are able to make sure that families are included in broad communications about what reserves are doing and for them to feel included, particularly in the very difficult periods when reservists are away on deployment and perhaps are mobilised for 11 months with their training and then come back, to make sure that families are kept in the picture as to precisely what is happening to their spouses.

Q105 Robert Key: How does the Ministry of Defence keep in touch with families and employers? Do they just do it with the odd letter two or three times a year or do they have dedicated websites where families and employers can get information on a daily basis? How does the MoD communicate?

Mr Corry: I am not aware of what happens with families; that is not my speciality. Certainly, for employers generally SaBRE is there to provide an information and support campaign. There is a website that gives general information about what it means to employ a reservist. It is not a news site and so it will not give up-to-date information about what is happening to a particular individual. We certainly encourage the Chain of Command, but our particular remit is to encourage employers to maintain contact with their reservists when they are deployed because, apart from anything else, that also helps with reintegration. If the individual feels that there is someone back at home, his employer, who is still thinking about him then when he comes back reintegration is that much easier.

Ms Baxter: We focus very much on the support we can provide to the employer. Equally, there are examples of the support that employers provide to families when reservists are away. I have examples of dedicated reservist points of contact who have helped spouses with mortgage arrangements because reservists have departed, so it can work both ways.

Q106 Robert Key: On the SaBRE website is there information available for employers as well as families about this sort of thing?

Mr Corry: Employers, yes. What we tend to do - we are developing it all the time - is produce case studies where employers and reservists work very well together and, through peer pressure, we hope that other employers pick up the good practice. As a further step, last year we launched a list of supportive employers. We know that there are lots of supportive employers, but we want to get employers to put their heads above the parapet and publicly declare their support. There are definitions of what that support means. It is not just "I am supportive"; they must have a positive attitude and display supportive behaviour as well in terms of their HR policies, giving time off, etc. We believe that by promoting good employers others will through peer pressure will feel that they should do some of that too. It is encouragement rather than that they must do this.

Q107 Robert Key: When was the SaBRE website last redesigned?

Mr Corry: Five and a half years ago.

Q108 Robert Key: Do you have enough resources to do what you would really like to do with your website?

Mr Corry: Currently, no.

Q109 Robert Key: Whose fault is that?

Mr Corry: It is the defence budget.

Q110 Mr Hamilton: It would be the defence budget, would it not? Where I live we have Redford barracks and a number of other places that people can visit. I cannot recall regular meetings with employers in the various barracks throughout Scotland, for example Inverness, Perth and a whole host of places. We also have RAF Lucas and a number of other places where this could be done on an annual basis. Do we do that?

Mr Corry: We do have a programme of employer visits which is regionally organised. We also have a national programme where we take employers out to theatres of operation. A trip to Afghanistan with some key employers is to take place later this month. We have also done this in Faslane in Scotland. As to how much we do on visits, again it is a resource issue. In relative terms they may not be very expensive to do. It is not just a monetary consideration; it also requires manpower to organise it, but across the country there are lots of visits, and we could do more.

Q111 Mr Hamilton: Does that apply to the families of reservists?

Mr Corry: We do not focus on the families but I am certainly aware anecdotally that the Chain of Command does that. Having commanded a reserve unit myself, we used to have families in. It will vary from unit to unit and, whether or not there is a policy in place, there is certainly encouragement to do that.

Q112 Mr Hamilton: But it is left to the Chain of Command to deal with it?

Mr Corry: Yes.

Q113 Mr Hamilton: I think the point Robert Key makes is a valid one in the sense that it seems you have one organisation that does one thing and another does something else. I am trying to work out the crossover. Invariably, there is a crossover throughout the whole process and I am not very clear where there is co-operation between the different areas. How these things are dealt with is just as important to the family of the reservist as it is to the employer. Looking at the table, you can see quite substantial family pressure and that is one of the reasons why reservists leave?

Mr Corry: Yes.

Q114 Mr Havard: The idea of having mentors seems to be current all over the place. Is there merit in having people to whom employers and families can go in a consistent fashion to get advice and entry into the process? Robert Key is saying that you could make that information readily available so somebody could tap into it. It seems to me that it could be made more consistent. I refer to your case studies, for example, of how you get it across. Are people and employers given mentors? In that way you can help to guide them through the process rather than having to make telephone calls every time they have a strange question to ask.

Mr Corry: Perhaps they are not mentors in the way you suggest. I go back to the SaBRE regional campaign directors.

Q115 Mr Havard: Do they fulfil that role?

Mr Corry: No. SaBRE is very much a support campaign, if you like. We cannot do it by ourselves, so there is a bit of stove-piping in what is happening here.

Ms Baxter: We have to acknowledge that.

Mr Corry: Indeed, even in the employer support arena we find that there are a lot of people playing out in what I call the employer battle space. They are all doing really good work, whether it is the recruiters, the Armed Forces or the RSAs. It is not always that well co-ordinated.

Q116 Mr Havard: I was very interested in what you said about types of reservist. It strikes me that if you are to ask somebody to join in the first place a different type of person will respond to that question. If people are already in how you retain them is another matter. I wonder whether a number of reservists are ex-full-timers, as it were, because they understand some of these things. They have done their bit but then remain. Is the profile changing? Is it the case that you are now getting new people who have never been involved before? Is the profile changing in terms of how many old sweats you keep on, as it were?

Mr Corry: I am not aware of the profile of recruits that come in. I know that there are quite a lot of reservists who have had previous regular service. I suspect that the individual I describe will not necessarily have previous military experience. He is the sort of person who wants to give it a crack. He comes in for three years, or whatever the minimum period is, does his mobilised tour and then he will leave. I am not aware of the figures but I am sure that the recruiters have them.

Chairman: We shall have to ask the Ministry of Defence. I said that we would come back to medical matters.

Q117 Mr Jenkins: You mentioned stress. We have one statistic in the report of Kings College which identifies that reservists who come back from operations have a higher rate of stress than regulars. Are you aware of that report?

Mr Corry: I am but not in detail.

Q118 Mr Jenkins: My difficulty is that in the past evidence we have received shows that people present with mental health problems 13 or 14 years after the activity and we do not have a system where we can detect it early on. If we have reservists who have served in the Armed Forces in the past and have come back from action is their mental stress related to that or maybe a previous action? We do not know. What worries me is whether the report will get publicity. How well do you believe the MoD funds medical treatment for reservists?

Mr Corry: I know that it is better than it was. I am not an expert in this area. I am aware that a huge amount of work has been done to improve the medical provision for reservists post-operation for the very reasons you state. I am not aware of the detail of the report of Kings College.

Ms Baxter: This is another very complicated area. As a result of Professor Wessely's work, the reserves mental health assessment programme was set up. Certainly, SaBRE helps to publicise that clearly amongst employers to make them aware of the support available to them from the Chain of Command. I have heard that the programme is not being used as much as one might have thought it would be and so that raises some questions. All I am doing is putting more into the pot but not giving you any answers.

Q119 Mr Jenkins: In four years an average of 25 a year presented themselves with mental health problems. That does not really fit into the 25 per cent found by the Kings College report. There is a lack of information or misinformation. I can understand the difficulty, but in civilian life it may be thought that with a really abrupt return to the workplace the condition might manifest itself faster than remaining in the military. When they come back what does the sudden impact do to them and their families? Is there any data to show an increase in the level of breakdowns in families?

Mr Corry: I do not have that information and I just do not know the answer to that question.

Mr Jenkins: We have a lot of questions but we do not have the answers.

Chairman: Are you able to say how you see this flowing through into the work that you do?

Q120 Mr Jenkins: What about the retention rate? What impact does it have on people who are thinking of continuing or coming out and also on the rate of recruitment? If there is someone in the reserves working alongside you would you want to learn his experiences and how he had been treated?

Mr Corry: Again, I can speak only anecdotally. I am aware of the study and I can think of perhaps one or two instances where someone has had medical issues back in the workplace, but it is not something that is a big issue for employers. They are all concerned about it but I can probably count on the fingers of one hand the number of events when something goes wrong. The perception is probably greater than the reality. I am not being complacent in saying that. Who can tell what will happen to those individuals in 10 or 15 years' time?

Q121 Richard Younger-Ross: A young lad who comes back from Afghanistan may have seen a friend's legs blown off; maybe he has seen other people injured and killed. The chances are that at some point there will be a kickback particularly when he returns to civilian life. What do you do to alert employers to the dangers and risks to that person's health? If not, do you think there is anything that could be done because obviously it is important that there should be early intervention and help? An individual will be in denial; he may not be sleeping at night but says to himself that he is a big boy and he can cope with it when in reality he cannot. What can you do, or what can be done?

Mr Corry: At a slightly superficial level we do make employers aware of the reintegration issue because these people have had a stressful time. One issue is that employers and the public generally do not realise what some of these people go through, so trying to describe to people what the experience has been like is quite difficult. Therefore, at the level we work the most we can do is to make employers aware that there could be issues.

Q122 Richard Younger-Ross: Is there a pack or video you send to employers showing what people have been through and the possible consequences?

Mr Corry: Not in the detail that you suggest.

Ms Baxter: It can be difficult enough to engage in a meaningful dialogue with employers about reservists anyway. I am certainly not belittling the issues we are talking about, but it is a question of how far down the line one is with the relationship.

Q123 Richard Younger-Ross: Do you think it might put off employers?

Ms Baxter: It is a very delicate balance to strike. We are trying to get employers to accept employees who are reservists, let alone tell them that they could have broken individuals returning to them.

Q124 Mr Havard: They need to have realistic expectations and know what support might be available should this happen. I noticed that the programme for reservists was set up in 2006. My colleague Brian Jenkins referred to the experience of that. The point Richard Younger-Ross makes is: how do people present? These conditions do not always present. Not every employer can expect to have a broken reservist returning to him. Most reservists who return are not broken; they are enhanced. How do you make that clear? How do you identify the problem for the individual and how do you give clarity to the employer about what the expectations might be? I would guess that is a difficult route. What is your experience of the Ministry of Defence in helping you to do that because that come down to you as far as employer expectation is concerned?

Mr Corry: Indeed. Certainly, we would not be looking to hide the problems. I have no statistics to show how many people this affects. If we did we would not be ashamed to share that with employers and be realistic because one of the strengths of SaBRE is that it is impartial, open and honest. We have nothing to hide. Broadly speaking, there is a good, new story out there but there are also some down sides to it - the bit that you suggest - and they should be shared with employers too. If one had some concrete evidence of the real facts and the likelihood of this happening, etc, one would certainly package it up in a way to communicate with employers.

Q125 Mr Havard: But the programme of support is self-selecting by the individual who cries out for help in the area of mental health. How much do employers and others understand the process of support that is available? You appear to suggest that you do explain it in some fashion, but does it need to be done better by others as well as yourselves?

Mr Corry: The answer is probably yes.

Q126 Mr Havard: We know that the answer is yes.

Mr Corry: But I am not sure how best it should be done.

Q127 Mr Jenkins: Do you think that reservists are treated as second-class soldiers in any way by the MoD with regard to the provision of health?

Mr Corry: No.

Ms Baxter: I do not think so.

Chairman: Thank you both very much for starting us off this morning. We are extremely grateful to you for coming to give evidence.

Memorandum submitted by the Institute of Career Guidance

Examination of Witnesses

Witnesses: Mr Richard Longson, President, and Mr Kieran Gordon, Immediate Past President, Institute of Career Guidance, gave evidence.

Q128 Chairman: Thank you very much for coming to give evidence. Would you like to introduce yourselves and say what you do?

Mr Longson: I am Richard Longson, this year's present of the Institute of Career Guidance. My day job is head of careers at Leicester Grammar School. I am a qualified teacher and career guidance practitioner.

Mr Gordon: I am Kieran Gordon, immediate past president of the institute. My day job is that of chief executive of Connexions Greater Merseyside providing information, advice and guidance to young people.

Q129 Chairman: One of the influences on people in deciding whether to join the Armed Forces is the views of their families, friends and the people who have come to be described as gate-keepers. Do you think that enough is being done by the Ministry of Defence to influence these gate-keepers or explain what life in the Armed Forces is like so there is a realistic appreciation of that service?

Mr Longson: Sometimes it would be quite difficult to reach gate-keepers. There is information on the television. There are gate-keepers for parents, for instance. Parents then come to it once young people have perhaps made a decision to find out more about the Armed Services, and then it is further down the line before the point where they say that they want to join. It then becomes more of an urgent need to find out about it. Parents have come to me and asked. There have been situations where our Armed Services liaison officers have been prepared to give parents a ring and speak to them. In a sense, at that point there is support. As to the world of education where teachers are also gate-keepers, a lot more visits used to be offered by the MoD for people to go on things. They are still there. As head of careers I have been offered a visit to, say, Sandhurst to see how that works. I have also been to the Admiralty Interview Board in the past. There is support there.

Q130 Chairman: You say there used to be a lot more visits.

Mr Gordon: Yes. It was quite common for the Armed Forces to arrange a regular carousel of visits for teachers and advisers to spend some time with and get beneath the skin of what it was like to go through a recruitment exercise and the various trades and occupations that the Armed Forces provided. There seem to be fewer of those than there were.

Q131 Chairman: Why?

Mr Gordon: I do not know.

Q132 Chairman: When did they reduce?

Mr Gordon: I would say it has been perceptible over the past 10 years. I cannot quantify it for you; it is just my experience. I have been in the careers advice business since 1980. In my early years as an adviser there were regular trips and experiences to be had and there seem to be fewer now than there were then. There are some upsides to it; there are now more opportunities for young people themselves to get direct experience. Work experience and enterprise programmes are now run for young people and they were not so common years ago.

Mr Longson: Certainly in terms of local RAF bases there has been a greater number of people going out on work experience and a greater awareness and perception of how schools operate, whereas before there was less understanding.

Q133 Chairman: Your memorandum suggests that there is still quite a lot of interest in joining the Armed Forces. Would you say that was true nationally? Are there regional variations? How would you characterise that interest?

Mr Longson: I do not believe there is a set picture and it is really across the piece. I do not believe that compared with past years there has been a perceptible change.

Q134 Chairman: You spoke about visits to military establishments by teachers and career guidance people. What about visits to schools by the Armed Forces themselves? Are they as regular as they used to be or have they tailed off?

Mr Gordon: My experience is that they are still as regular as they used to be. Each of the three Services comes to the careers evenings and conventions run by a number of schools in my patch. The Armed Forces also become involved in interviewing enterprise projects in schools with a classroom-based approach. I do not detect any perceptible change in that. Of the forces, the Army seems to me to be the most active and proactive in that respect.

Q135 Chairman: From your experience would you describe them as worthwhile visits?

Mr Gordon: The visits by the Army to the schools?

Q136 Chairman: Yes.

Mr Gordon: Yes, I would.

Q137 Mr Hamilton: Is that also true of the visits to schools in Scotland?

Mr Gordon: I would be surprised if it was not, but I am not sure.

Q138 Chairman: Does not your institute cover Scotland?

Mr Gordon: It does.

Q139 Chairman: It would be helpful if you would let us know of your experience of Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland in that respect. Often in our inquiries we find there is a variation between different areas of the country. You say these visits are worthwhile. How do visits by the Armed Forces to schools compare in terms of quality with visits by other prospective employers?

Mr Longson: The quality of the people who come in is high; it is a quality service. They fall into two categories. There are visits about the Armed Services themselves, but there are also skills development-type visits where the Armed Services provide almost a service to support young people. Obviously, the spin-off is to see the Armed Services as part of the community which is very important and to develop the skills of young people so that they become more aware indirectly as opposed to direct adverts almost.

Mr Gordon: It is obviously very important that the Armed Forces have the personnel, training and resources to be able to present themselves very well in or out of the school environment which individual employers do not necessarily always have. Maybe some larger private and public sector employers can do that. Usually, you find that professional bodies and institutes or technicians compete on a reasonably level playing field, but the majority of employers cannot deploy the personnel, resource and expertise that very often the Armed Forces provide.

Q140 Mr Jenkins: You have indicated that the Services are different and the Army is probably better in this respect. In what way is the Army better? How do you compare the strengths and weaknesses of the Services in presenting their case to young people?

Mr Gordon: When I said "better" I was referring to the Army being more active and proactive than the other forces. Anecdotally, the Air Force and Navy tend to be more bespoke; they look for a particular skill level and attract people from specific areas of interest, whereas the Army tends to have a more comprehensive approach. Very often in major towns and cities the recruitment offices of the Armed Forces are cheek by jowl, so at that point there is no great differential. I am not sure whether it is due to resources or sheer weight of numbers of personnel. I do not say it is necessarily better or more effective but it is easier to make contact with the Army perhaps than the Royal Navy or Royal Air Force. But we have plenty of experience of working with those other Services and have also had some positive experiences with them. The Army however seems to be more evident.

Mr Longson: From the school point of view the key thing is the building of trust and relationships between the careers co-ordinator and the incoming liaison officer. That relationship is very important so that when talking to young people about a career in that area you have confidence in the person who is coming in. Accessibility to liaison officers is absolutely crucial.

Q141 Mr Jenkins: In a former life I was a teacher and so I understand it. You talk about youngsters making decisions when they are 16 or 18. When they get to the age of 18 they say they want to do such and such and then they are told that they should have done physics. They did not know that. We are talking about youngsters being informed at 13 that if this is the career they want to pursue they must take maths, physics or whatever is the requirement. Are we linking them back to that level in the forces, that is, that if a youngster wants to be a fighter pilot he has to meet certain requirements?

Mr Longson: That will depend institution by institution. The information is there. It does fit into a much wider picture and goes beyond defence; it is about access to good and impartial guidance in education, and external guidance coming into schools to support good decisions being made by young people. I think it goes beyond defence.

Mr Gordon: You touch on a very important issue. Whether it is the Armed Forces or other careers, more could be done to make people aware at an earlier age. Traditionally, the period at which young people move into key stage four and have critical options towards GCSE and other qualifications the emphasis will be more on the logistics of trying to timetable those subjects - I am sure you will be aware of that - than the career implications of those subjects for young people. We need to place greater emphasis on the fact that choices made at age 13 will have a bearing on choices made at 16, 18 and beyond. One hopes that with the new 14 to 19 curriculum and the idea of a continuous pathway choices made at 14 will have a bearing much later in life. Therefore, I hope that we see better support and evidence within schools for decisions at those points.

Q142 Mr Jenkins: I am a great advocate of the cadet force. I believe that it is the best youth service in the country bar none. Do you have any connection or link with youngsters who are in the cadets? Do you see how they do at school and their motivation? Is it a good thing? I am not necessarily worried about recruitment from the cadets. As far as I am concerned that is a bi-product, but do you see the cadets as a valuable force to pass on to other young people any information and knowledge of what the Services are about?

Mr Longson: Unequivocally, it is a great way for young people to develop their own personal skills and to learn about teamwork, good communication and the skills that we want to develop. As you say, a bi-product may be recruitment. It is interesting that when young people talk to their friends and discover that they go to cadets they ask what it is about. That type of statement is very good.

Q143 Mr Havard: I am interested in the quality of what you get when the Armed Forces do appear. Do they call themselves military presentation teams? I refer to problem-solving exercises and putting things into context. My experience is that the material they use is of high quality and therefore is a resource for educationalists on which to draw. You suggest that perhaps they do not draw on it in a way that is consistent and variable across the piece. Geographical variations seem to be quite significant.

Mr Longson: Who draws on what will depend on individual schools.

Q144 Mr Havard: My understanding is that these things happen only by invitation from the school to the military, so unless the school knows and asks it would not happen.

Mr Longson: For example, we receive a full list - I do not know whether it is every term - of things that are available certainly from the Army, whether it is about the bands going to Bat and Ball or whatever. It is then for the careers co-ordinator to decide whether that would be really good and should be utilised.

Q145 Mr Havard: I notice that some of the television advertising for the RAF is about science and how that is related to flying. The military and science - how that might come into your curriculum in relation to schools and an understanding of careers - is itself a very interesting debate. The point made about physics is crucial. I am interested to learn how people know. You seem to suggest that there is less activity to promote this and teachers used to go on visits. For example, are careers people brought together and presented with all of this in any consistent way by the Ministry of Defence? The answer is probably no. What do you think could be happening?

Mr Gordon: The answer is no. One of the problems is that when we start to look at the careers person working within a school the situation can be very variable. For example, my colleague is head of careers. I would not say that is typical of every school. Some schools will have careers co‑ordinators. Increasingly, fewer schools now appoint these people because the teaching and learning responsibility changes. We do not see the same level of investment in training teachers as careers co-ordinators. When that piece of jigsaw is missing it is difficult for any employer, Armed Forces or otherwise, to penetrate a school and get across the messages that it wishes to communicate. External independent expert career advisers come into schools but it does depend on the key contact in the form of a teacher who is experienced and trained and has the time to develop a careers curriculum in the school. Sadly, that is not universally the case and it is patchy. I do not think the problem is geographical per se; there is no particular area of the country that is better or worse than that. I think it happens school by school.

Q146 Mr Havard: If we said that the Ministry of Defence should be more co‑ordinated in the way it makes its offer you would argue we should say to the various educational ministries - however many there are these days - that they should perhaps have an active understanding of receiving people?

Mr Gordon: Absolutely.

Q147 Mr Havard: Or that careers people are there to receive offers being made?

Mr Longson: Yes. Another matter is to allow teachers to go on visits from schools. The implication for the school curriculum of the head releasing somebody to go out on a visit is also an issue.

Q148 Mr Jenkin: Do we know what proportion of schools does receive visits from the Armed Forces?

Mr Gordon: I could not put a figure on it, but it depends on the individual school. I work across six local authority areas and I can tell you that in some cases it is more active just because the schools that collaborate in that area share information and work better with the Armed Forces.

Q149 Mr Jenkin: You referred earlier to the duty on schools to provide impartial career guidance. Do you say that schools that do not admit the Armed Forces into their premises and allow contact with pupils are failing in that duty?

Mr Gordon: I would say so. In some skills it is not just the Armed Forces. There is an inability to bring into the school the world of employment and we need to do more about that. That must have an impact on the level of information and knowledge of young people to be able to make decisions. That does cause a problem.

Q150 Mr Jenkin: Clearly, there is an ideological problem in respect of some schools and teachers. How do you think we ought to deal with it?

Mr Gordon: Part of the problem may lie in the fact that when the Armed Forces do their sales drives, so to speak, they are very good at it. Obviously, they tend to feature the benefits, challenges and opportunities that the forces provide and do not focus quite so much on the conflicts and perhaps more controversial issues. I believe that is counter-productive. There are people who say that they sell all the fine benefits of a life in the forces but they are not so forthcoming about the perils and other issues. That creates a feeling among some people that, therefore, they are less inclined to want to support of the activity.

Q151 Mr Jenkin: The problem does not lie with young people but the preconceptions and views of the teachers, governors or education authorities?

Mr Gordon: Yes, in some cases.

Q152 Mr Jenkin: How do you think we ought to deal with that?

Mr Gordon: I see it as a much wider issue about being more serious as a nation in helping, supporting and equipping young people to make decisions whatever their choice in life might be. I do not think we are very good at that. If we did that on a level playing field for all career prospects and opportunities we would overcome some of the difficulties. Part of the difficulty is that when the Armed Forces can mobilise quite impressive resources to recruit when other employers and career areas cannot people become a little suspicious. Maybe the Army is too prevalent, if you like, and we need to raise the bar for all areas of career preparation for young people in schools. Once we do that I believe that the Armed Forces alongside any other careers in civilian life will benefit.

Q153 Mr Jenkin: Therefore, you are not looking for the Armed Forces to have some special privileged access to the education system or to be part of a special programme?

Mr Gordon: No. We need to raise the game for all career prospects.

Q154 Mr Hamilton: Perhaps I may encourage you to look at the specific Scottish dimension because it has a different educational system in operation; it does not have governors. I would be really surprised if in my area with six secondary schools an individual had the right to decide whether or not somebody came in; it would be the education authority that decided it. I would be really disappointed if they had taken the decision not to allow the Armed Forces to come in because of their own views. After all, when I left school career choices were quite limited. When it was suggested that you go down a coal mine you were not told that 200 people were killed every year in that industry; when they asked you to undertake an apprenticeship on a building site you were not told how many people were killed in the construction industry. It must be across the board. I agree that it must be developed in a far more positive way. As an ex-cadet I agree with you. There is one matter that worries and puzzles me but may simply be my perception. The Armed Forces now undertake a tripartite approach to advertising, which is a good thing. People now have the opportunity to join not only the Army but the Navy and Air Force. In my area when you left school for the vast majority of people below a certain grade the choices were the Army, the collieries or the textile industry. In the past I used to go to galas and events in my constituency; there were about 30-odd every year. You always saw the Armed Forces' vehicles there. Rarely do you see them nowadays. You do not see them in any of the big towns or settlements. They used to provide a degree of encouragement. Is that happening a lot less than it used to?

Mr Gordon: I would share that perception. There is less presence as you describe it at large conventions. At every careers convention you would see the Armed Forces; you still do so. More recently, they rely on PowerPoint presentations and films than bringing a tank through the back door. There is perhaps an impact in doing it that way.

Mr Longson: There is also a shift in culture nationally and locally and in the family in terms of the Armed Forces and people's experience of the Services over the years has changed. There is a real issue about culture and how it is perceived - hence the debate that takes place in some schools.

Q155 Mr Borrow: I want to move to the question of recruitment standards in the Armed Forces in general but the Army in particular. There is certainly a perception that the standard of fitness of recruits has been going down over the years. Having visited various parts of the Armed Forces it is one of the issues raised with me. There is a significant number of people who start the recruitment process and end up not getting through basic training. There are now proposals to extend basic training in the Army. Is it your perception having been in the recruitment sphere for a fair number of years that more youngsters fail to get through that recruitment programme? If that is the case is it an issue about the effectiveness of Armed Forces recruitment in terms of picking the right people? Are the entry standards for the Armed Forces right or should they be looked at again? If we start a lot of people on basic training and a fair number do not emerge at the other end we must ask ourselves whether we have the initial selection right. Do you have any views on that?

Mr Gordon: One of the things that impressed me in my early time in careers advice was the efficiency of the Services, particularly the Army, in terms of its recruitment. It had a very low tolerance level in terms of people who did not complete training. It was a big investment and it was very mindful of that. There has been perceptibly a slight increase in the numbers of people who do not complete basic training. There may be a number of issues. For example, the basic health of young people nowadays - obesity, etc - is very well publicised. I do not know whether that is an issue. It also depends on the reason the young person makes the choice. In an area like Merseyside, for example, the attraction to join the Army is not the notion of serving abroad in conflict areas but the trade. He can learn motor mechanics, engineering, etc, to a very high level. The trades are very well equipped and young people go in for that reason without seeing the other aspects, namely that it is much more than a job; it is a career. You sign up for more than just basic training or skill training. We need to prepare young people more for the rounded choice they make when they join the Armed Forces. They can train to a very high technical level in particular trades, but there is another aspect to the choice to be made.

Mr Longson: As to physical fitness, there are issues about the general health of the population. It may also be a matter of access to sport, PE in schools and the level of provision there. If that is not available those who are being recruited will not necessarily have the required physical fitness.

Q156 Mr Borrow: One matter highlighted in the MoD report was not simply fitness. It referred to changes to the BMI index for recruits now. It also referred to motivation which ties in with what people regard joining the Armed Forces as being all about. You can get people fit if you keep them in long enough and they go through the fitness programme, but if their motivation is not right they will fall by the wayside.

Mr Longson: I think motivation is linked to the career decision in the first place. If they understand the career decision they have made maybe the motivation will be longer-lasting.

Q157 Mr Borrow: Are you saying that when the recruitment process takes place the focus needs to be not simply on joining the Armed Forces because you can learn a trade and be set up for life, etc; it also has to do with some of the downsides and risks involved?

Mr Longson: When I do my career guidance with people I challenge them on the moral issues of the decisions they are making. I think that must be done as part of the decision mechanism.

Mr Gordon: I believe that is the crux of impartiality. Often people talk of impartial guidance and assume it is rather equivocal; it is not. A good careers adviser will challenge somebody to think through the consequences of the choice they make, whether or not it is the Armed Forces, and investigate fully what it means. Obviously, in a career such as the Armed Forces the choices you make are not simply where you will be between the hours of nine and five. Therefore, you need to do more to encourage and ensure young people make well informed decisions and understand their importance and what they lead to, not just the trades and skills they can get but the wider life for which they are signing up.

Q158 Mr Borrow: Do you suggest that as part of the Committee's inquiry into the whole area and its visits to recruitment centres including basic training it ought to focus somewhat on the extent to which recruits get a rounded picture of what life in the military is all about and the extent to which the Services are giving that picture in the initial few weeks?

Mr Gordon: Yes.

Mr Longson: It is also the next link back; it is the link with the recruit between the liaison officers and the schools. As I said earlier, it is about a partnership.

Q159 Mr Havard: If you were talking to individuals about the need to make rounded decisions what would you say about where they should go and how they should do it? What resources would you have available to you to help them do that and where would you point them?

Mr Longson: In terms of information, we get that delivered on a regular basis and it is updated in terms of the recruitment brochures which are in the curricula in our careers library. In terms of my own professional development, I read and try to be informed. Therefore, when I am doing work with young people I would hope that that professionalism in a sense would come through. The issue of frontline fighting is a matter that I would bring up.

Q160 Mr Havard: Do you feel personally confident that you know enough of the outlets to which you could point someone to do that?

Mr Longson: Yes, but the issue is across the piece.

Q161 Mr Havard: That is why you are the president and there are a lot who are not?

Mr Longson: I could not possibly comment.

Q162 Mr Crausby: The recruiting environment has changed, has it not, in the sense that for some years we have had a growing economy and young people's expectations have completely changed, in that they expect more out of life than going down the coal mine and into the factory; they prefer to go into further education? What more can the MoD do to meet those challenges?

Mr Gordon: We need to look ahead. There is a Bill going through Parliament at the moment to raise the level of participation by ensuring that young people cannot leave learning before the age of 18. It will be interesting to see where the MoD positions itself in that respect. I suppose that the MoD is a provider of learning in that context, much the same as a school sixth form, college or an employer who employs apprentices. The MoD needs to consider where it positions itself. We are seeing higher numbers of young people staying in learning longer and opting for further education. That impacts on their choices. We see more young people make choices later than, say, 10 years ago; they make their career or job choice at the age of 18 and beyond rather than 16 and beyond as it was years ago. The Bill that is now going through will confirm that is the case. The MoD needs to think about its position in the context of a higher level in participation in learning beyond the age of 16 and the fact that it will not be lawful to drop out of learning before 18. It will raise the age at which some critical decisions are made.

Q163 Mr Havard: That will be in England?

Mr Gordon: Yes, of course.

Mr Longson: The new facilities at Welbeck foundation college are important pieces in the jigsaw about which my colleague has been talking.

Q164 Mr Crausby: The MoD has a different strategy for 15 to 18 year-olds and those over 18. Is that not a bit out of date? Should it not pull it all together rather than view them as two separate groups of people?

Mr Gordon: I think they should.

Mr Longson: We talk about lifelong learning and that is what we are in.

Q165 Mr Crausby: The training environment applies also to others. It is not just the MoD that has a problem as far as young people are concerned; the same principles must apply to the Police, Fire and Ambulance Services. What can the MoD learn from those services to attract young people other than to pay them a lot more money - or is that the issue?

Mr Gordon: I am not sure that is the issue. At least anecdotally, I am sure there must be people in the MoD involved in recruitment to the Armed Forces who look very keenly at the civilian uniformed forces and see how they fare, and vice versa. I do not believe that it is a major problem with the Armed Forces, MoD and the resources it has available in their emphasis on recruitment in terms of marketing the forces as a career option. There is probably not much that it would learn from the Police or Ambulance Service in that respect.

Mr Longson: From my experience, students who have looked at civilian services are different from those who have looked at the Armed Forces. I do not believe that it is a simple picture.

Mr Gordon: One can access the Armed Forces earlier than the Police Service, for example.

Q166 Mr Jenkins: Mr Longson, you mentioned Welbeck College. Youngsters join up, go off to do degrees and become officers. We have state school pupils and private school pupils in this country and by far the larger number are those in state schools. What percentage of pupils from state schools do you think manage to achieve the Army sixth-form scholarship?

Mr Longson: Off the top of my head I do not know.

Mr Gordon: I am sure we can find out that figure.

Q167 Mr Jenkins: If I told you that in 2006 and 2007 three-quarters of scholarships were awarded to youngsters from private schools would you be shocked?

Mr Gordon: No.

Q168 Mr Jenkins: Why is it that youngsters from private schools, who are a small percentage of the total, get three-quarters of the scholarships? Is it because it is the best kept secret and nobody in the state system knows about it, or is it because private schools may be the preserve of most of the officer class who send their children to private schools anyway and are supported by the taxpayer? Maybe that is a continuation of the process because military families do tend to produce military families. Why is this not better known or not a secret? Why do we not have youngsters from state schools making applications in larger numbers for this scholarship?

Mr Gordon: I suspect you have answered the question in the illustrations you have given. Military families go down the generations. In my experience in private independent schools you will see very active cadet forces in operation whereas you do not see that so much in the state sector.

Q169 Mr Jenkins: Do you suggest that perhaps we should have a more active cadet force in the state sector?

Mr Gordon: Within schools?

Q170 Mr Jenkins: Yes.

Mr Gordon: I do not know. It depends on whether the schools themselves would wish to operate on that basis. For me, the danger of over-emphasising and making too accessible certain careers over others is that it skews the picture of choices for young people. There are a number of wider benefits than just recruitment, but we see increasing numbers of young people in the state sector enrolling in Duke of Edinburgh Award schemes and doing very well out of it. That is a change. I would not say that that used to be the preserve of independent and public schools but certainly a much higher proportion came from that sector. When you look at the growth of Duke of Edinburgh Award schemes in the state sector and in non-traditional Duke of Edinburgh active areas that has had a great effect on those young people. It can be done because it has happened outside the Armed Forces context in the Duke of Edinburgh Award schemes.

Q171 Mr Jenkins: Do you think that our bright young people should be made aware of this scholarship?

Mr Gordon: I think all young people should be made aware of it.

Q172 Chairman: Mr Gordon, do you agree with what Mr Longson said about the benefits of the cadet forces?

Mr Gordon: I do not have the same experience as Mr Longson.

Q173 Chairman: It sounds as though you do not have the same enthusiasm for the cadet forces that clearly Mr Longson has.

Mr Gordon: If it does it is because I do not have the same experience. I do not mean that I have a different experience but that Mr Longson has a much closer working relationship with cadet forces than I have ever had. I am sure that there is much I can learn in that respect.

Q174 Mr Jenkin: My son was a cadet and he loved it, though he did not join the Army. Referring to the high proportion of officers that the Army in particular draws from the independent school sector, would you agree that the Armed Forces are missing out on a lot of potential in state schools because they tend to go to familiar recruiting grounds for officer material?

Mr Longson: From conversation with liaison officers who have been to my school, which is an independent, they talk about going into the local schools in just the same way as they go into my school. I cannot comment on whether or not nationally the figures demonstrate that. I referred to different family cultures. I do not think it is necessarily about school but about how a family reacts to it, whether it be an independent or state school. Certainly in an independent school I have known families that are not very keen when youngsters say that they want to join.

Q175 Mr Jenkin: Do you think that it is something for the schools or the Armed Forces to address; or is the imbalance something with which we should be comfortable?

Mr Gordon: I do not think we should be comfortable about it given the basic premise that all young people should have an equal opportunity to pursue whatever career opportunities befit their interests and potential. Therefore, I cannot agree with that. It is for schools and the Armed Forces to address it. If we were here talking about the number of young people who go into law and medicine from the respective schools we would be very concerned and say that we need to redress the balance. It is true across the board.

Q176 Mr Jenkin: How should we address that?

Mr Gordon: I go back to what I said before. It is about better careers education and preparation for young people. All too frequently young people leave school not having had the necessary level of input in terms of career education and are not sufficiently equipped to make important decisions at the age of 16, 17 or 18. They are skills that they need throughout life. We know that more and more young people entering the labour market will be faced with many different career change opportunities, forced or otherwise. I do not think we do enough to prepare young people for those decisions.

Q177 Mr Borrow: Is it a reasonable perception that there are many state schools with a long tradition of being a source of recruitment into the Armed Forces, particularly the Army, but that recruitment is not to the officer corps but to the other ranks? The issue is whether or not within those schools where there is that tradition of going into the Armed Forces, in particular the Army, the perception should be raised that there is a possibility of those youngsters not simply joining the other ranks but to get into the officer stream and it is at that level that we need to make a breakthrough?

Mr Longson: In that sense, when we talk about recruiters coming in and a specific thing that needs to be done in terms of the MoD there is a need to make sure those people understand the shape of their education and appreciate that a young person who is doing a certain set of subjects or is heading in a certain direction does indeed have the potential to become an officer.

Chairman: Thank you very much. This has been another extremely helpful bit of evidence.

Witnesses: Mr Chris Sanderson, Director Government Support, Control Risks, and Mr Christopher Beese MBE, Chief Administrative Officer, ArmorGroup, gave evidence.

Q178 Chairman: Thank you very much for coming. You have been listening to the evidence given earlier this morning. Perhaps we could begin by the witnesses introducing themselves.

Mr Beese: I am Christopher Beese, a director and chief administrative officer of ArmorGroup, a risk management company that has 8,000 employees in 27 countries, of whom about 1,700 at any one time are former British servicemen. I have been working with these people now for 20 years.

Mr Sanderson: I am Chris Sanderson, director government support at Control Risks, which is an international risk consultancy and security management company based in London with 28 overseas offices. Historically, we have employed a number of ex-Armed Forces personnel typically from the ranks of corporal to major but also from private to general. I left the Army three years ago after 30 years' service. My service career included a tour as commanding officer and chief of G3 operations in Commitments Branch Headquarters (Land Command) Wilton.

Q179 Chairman: In your opening remarks you have answered my first three questions. How do you recruit from the Armed Forces? What methods do you employ? How do you recruit from beyond the Armed Forces?

Mr Sanderson: Currently, we employ fewer than 500 ex-service personnel. The majority have come to us not directly from the Armed Forces. I suspect that no more than 10 per cent of those have come directly from the Army, which is the majority service, into Control Risks. We advertise in Quest, the Services' resettlement magazine. Very occasionally, we have advertised to meet surge requirements in the regional press but to negligible effect.

Q180 Chairman: What proportion of your employees comes from the Armed Forces and what proportion does not?

Mr Sanderson: Of our permanent staff, we have 685 of whom I suspect no more than 40 are ex-Armed Forces. Of what I would call our non-permanent staff employed to meet specific client contracts, I suspect the number is no more than 500 out of a total of something between 700 and 900, depending on the contracts in place at any one time.

Mr Beese: Our experience is very similar to that of Control Risks. At the moment we attract something in the region of 250 to 300 prospective applications each week by internet or mail. Of our permanent staff some 50 per cent are former military, and of our 8,000 employees the majority will have former paramilitary training either with the police or the Armed Forces.

Q181 Chairman: Of the 250 to 300 applications a week, approximately how many do you need to take on?

Mr Beese: We will probably brief in person some 40 each week and from those we will employ about 20.

Q182 Chairman: Obviously, you get a lot of applications. How do your pay and conditions compare with the Armed Forces?

Mr Beese: Favourably but more in terms and conditions than in pay. Pay is better than that of the Armed Forces but again 100 per cent of our people volunteer to work in difficult locations. They do not join us with the idea that one day they may enter a difficult zone; they join specifically for the zone of their choice. The conditions are such that not only do they choose the location in which they wish to work but for how long they wish to work there. Our employees may volunteer to work in somewhere like Iraq or Afghanistan for a year, or anything up to four years. If on the other hand it is not to their liking they can resign at almost a moment's notice, so they have tremendous flexibility. They have fixed rotations for leave and can live where they like. Generally, it is the conditions of service rather than remuneration that is attractive.

Q183 Chairman: But the remuneration is attractive as well?

Mr Beese: It is a significant factor.

Mr Sanderson: Most of the recruiting is done via our website and word of mouth, so we have a similar input of cv's at any one time. As to remuneration, historically the obvious factor is that post the end of the Gulf War there was a surge in the pay of personnel operating in the close protection industry, but that surge has now fallen away significantly. I suspect that the majority of personnel are earning upwards of between £40,000 to £60,000 per annum, out of which they make provision for their own pensions clearly and they will not enjoy the same allowance and benefits that service personnel have. Our experience is certainly not that pay is a significant factor in terms of drawing people out of the Armed Forces and into the security and risk industry.

Q184 Chairman: What is the main factor in attracting people to you rather than to the Armed Services?

Mr Sanderson: There is a plethora of factors depending on individuals' personal circumstances. A large number reflect upon the routine and somewhat unsatisfactory nature of life in barracks. Poorly resourced training and accommodation standards for married and single personnel are often quoted. Interestingly, very few if any would cite an excess of operational postings. A large number of both single and married servicemen look forward to operational postings, obviously within reason. It is a different matter when it comes to the views of families and the turbulence and detachment that that causes.

Q185 Chairman: I suppose that is a self-selecting group, is it not? People who apply to you to go and serve in Iraq are not concerned about serving in that country presumably, so that will not be a factor in getting them to leave the Armed Forces?

Mr Sanderson: The majority who come to us seek some form of second career, so it is not that they are looking to serve particularly in areas like Iraq and Afghanistan. Many will have come out of the Services, undertaken different types of work and, in the period 2003 or 2004, will have observed that there is an opportunity to use their few transferable skills in the security industry and will take it. Many of them now reflect that having left the service and worked in the risk and security industry there is a possibility for them to develop full careers, not necessarily working as close protection operators in the likes of Iraq and Afghanistan but more widely and with more extensive management responsibilities throughout the Middle East and Africa, for example.

Q186 Richard Younger-Ross: Would you say that doing CP work is more family-friendly?

Mr Sanderson: I would not say yes or no to that but personnel working in close protection appointments will be operating on one of two rotations, typically something like eight weeks on duty and four weeks off or a permutation of that.

Q187 Richard Younger-Ross: So, every two months they will see their family?

Mr Sanderson: That is correct. That is a very general and much-used basis of rotation.

Q188 Richard Younger-Ross: If there is a family problem in the eight-week shift can you accommodate that?

Mr Sanderson: We can and do. I am sure I speak also for Christopher when I say that large, well-resourced and responsible companies will make proper provision for the welfare of their staff.

Mr Beese: There are other advantages to the family. The opportunity to serve in somewhere like Iraq for two years on improved pay and possibly relief from income tax is a life-changing opportunity. They are able to gain mortgages that they might not otherwise be able to obtain and that provides stability for the family. They know where their long-term home is. That is a less obvious benefit to operating overseas.

Q189 Chairman: The Ministry of Defence has spoken of a number of initiatives designed to improve retention in the UK Armed Forces. Do you think those initiatives will have any impact on the recruitment opportunities of your companies?

Mr Beese: Perhaps one advantage of the company is that whereas a young serviceman leaves after five or 10 years' service in the Armed Forces - perhaps he has had his fill and wishes to transfer - he then has the option to stay in our industry for a further 30 years. Even if Armed Forces retention improves we have enough people out there who are able to fulfil our needs. What we would suffer perhaps is a lack of developing expertise.

Q190 Chairman: On the whole, are your recruits from an older generation?

Mr Beese: They would have been up until the gulf crisis. Traditionally, we have recruited managers who would have been senior NCOs in their mid-thirties to fifties. Following intervention in Afghanistan and Iraq, we increasingly see younger soldiers come out and we take people from the age of 25 to 50 in increasing numbers.

Mr Sanderson: We share that experience. Historically, we recruited perhaps personnel in their late thirties; typically, now they are in their early thirties and late twenties. I suspect that service retention measures will have little impact on our own recruiting. For example, this year we may recruit perhaps a little more than a score of ex-servicemen directly from the Services.

Q191 Mr Crausby: Have you observed any increase or decrease in the number of applications made to you in recent years? Have Afghanistan and Iraq had an impact on the number of applications that come to you?

Mr Beese: In our case the number of applications has risen considerably. More people are aware of the opportunity. We ourselves have greater opportunity even if it is perhaps a shorter-term one. If we employ people with a different profile - younger infantrymen rather than older senior NCOs - at the moment there is a boom in recruitment; there are many more applicants.

Q192 Mr Crausby: How long do people stay with you? Do you have a retention problem?

Mr Beese: We have a natural turnover. Many will have fulfilled their financial or "excitement" ambitions over a couple of years; some who are older will stay for anything up to four to five years in theatre.

Q193 Mr Crausby: Can you give some of the reasons why your employees come to you? You must have some anecdotal reasons why they leave the Armed Services and come to you.

Mr Sanderson: I am just reflecting on your former question on turnover. Obviously, there is a much more direct correlation between rates of pay and turnover in this industry than there is in the Services. People have entered a career and then make a break from it. Once they are out in this labour market clearly they can observe what market rates are and switch quite easily between companies. Having said that, there is not a direct correlation between pay and ease of recruitment. Individuals very quickly become savvy to what different companies offer by way of duty of care and operational practice, so there are some inflexibilities also in that market.

Mr Beese: We offer an ideal opportunity for many to transfer from the Armed Forces to civilian employment. With us they will be working with people they understand and who understand them; they will learn new skills in dealing with civilian clients and working on budgets; they will gain greater confidence to move on from us to full-time civilian employment. Some of them are concerned about their longer-term prospects in the military which have shrunk significantly in recent years. By no means are all of our people coming from the military; the majority have had another job and have been bored with it or seek a return to more lucrative work consistent with their basic trade. But many people have left the Armed Forces through a degree of redundancy. The large number of people who left the Royal Irish two years ago and the Northern Ireland Police Service mean there are people sitting on sofas in Northern Ireland without the sort of work they might have enjoyed.

Q194 Mr Crausby: Do you see differences between those who come from the military and those who do not, for example in the length of time they stay? Is the turnover the same for ex‑military and non-military?

Mr Beese: The majority of ours, some 95 per cent, are military.

Mr Sanderson: There are small differences. I know that armed security is perhaps the particular focus here, but those who are not ex-UK Armed Services are typically ex‑Commonwealth armed services or ex-Police Service of Northern Ireland. There is much of a muchness in terms of retention there. For civilian consultancy staff, though they might have different professional backgrounds and aspirations overall there is not much difference in terms of how long people stay with a particular company.

Q195 Mr Jenkin: Our inquiry is into why the Armed Forces are losing so many key people. Do you say that circumstances are different or have got worse for any reason now as opposed to, say, five, 10 or 15 years ago?

Mr Sanderson: Looking back to my time as a commanding officer 10 years ago at Headquarters (Land Command) when we were concerned about levels of operational commitment, the harmony guidelines and the impact on specific trades and units, it all looks much the same as it did then. I am not aware of today's statistics and details in that regard, but we seem to be wrestling with the same questions. At that time there were no instant short-term solutions and it may be equally problematic this time round to find the same.

Mr Beese: In addition there is perhaps a change in culture. We live in an age of communications. While it is now possible for many commercial staff to work from home it is also possible for people in the Armed Forces to gain information faster. Everybody is on the email. If there is a new opportunity out there for a change in pay and conditions or something more appropriate emails rattle round at great speed. Therefore, people's awareness of other opportunities is much greater than it might have been.

Q196 Mr Jenkin: Therefore, if we wanted to make some points in our conclusions about how the Armed Forces should retain more of the people you want to recruit what advice would you give us? What do you believe are the top three priorities that the Armed Forces should pursue in order to retain more of these people, because the statistics are worse than 10 years ago?

Mr Sanderson: To my mind, it should improve accommodation, be it single or married; it should be more consistent and perhaps slightly more generous in the delivery of allowances; and probably predominantly it should improve the quality of military life for personnel as they prepare for operations and when they return from them.

Mr Beese: I agree with all that. I suppose that culturally I am stuck with a need for us to find heroes to fight unpopular wars on the cheap. Whatever one can do to redress the balance, on the one hand society looks to the soldier as someone who is good and whose crusades are treasured values and on the other many of the engagements at the moment are not universally popular, which does not help the hero to decide whether or not he is doing a good job. Finally, his equipment and access to resources are perhaps not what they should be to do the job he is doing. I do not believe that breeds confidence.

Q197 Mr Hamilton: Mr Beese, a few moments ago you referred to the availability of mortgages and relief from income tax. That has always been the subject of continuing discussion among troops. Do you think that if the MoD wants to talk seriously about retention and additional flexibility those discussions should include income tax relief?

Mr Beese: It provides a significant opportunity. Whilst people who have tax relief will miss out on other benefits like pensions that are provided by the Armed Forces, it is an opportunity for them to convert essentially most of their remuneration and benefit into cash to deliver a material gain at a particular stage in their lives. I think that is useful for them. It is not necessarily the best long-term solution.

Q198 Mr Hamilton: Would I be right in thinking that that would apply only to those above a certain level of income, so the officer class would directly benefit from that?

Mr Beese: The differences in pay in our companies are very small as are the distinctions between people. We have very flat command structures. The possibility of promotion through merit is considerable and we see a great levelling of people based on ability and merit in the system. Therefore, I do not think that is necessarily applicable. Everyone working in the industry has a reasonably equal opportunity and, therefore, the benefit is the same across the board.

Q199 Chairman: I have never really discovered how this works. Is it right that you do not operate military command structures within your companies?

Mr Beese: If you take our company, which I believe is typical of most, a country like Iraq will have a country manager and below that there will be a raft of operation managers and then team leaders and operators. Therefore, essentially there are four levels in a complex environment like Iraq and the pay difference between them is not significant.

Q200 Mr Borrow: I gained the impression earlier in the discussion that the majority of ex‑military people you recruited had gone into civilian life before joining your companies. They did not leave the Armed Forces because they were not happy and go directly to one of your companies which could offer better pay and conditions than, say, the Army. They left the Armed Forces for reasons A, B and C, worked in civilian life for a bit and then saw the opportunity to use their skills by working for your companies and, by the way, the pay and conditions would give them a chance to take a leap forward in a short period of time to set themselves up to do something else later in life. Is that the correct dynamic?

Mr Sanderson: That is correct. There is also the historical dimension that although there was always an industry of security and risk-associated activities which drew on ex‑service personnel, it became greatly larger in the aftermath of the second Gulf War. Interestingly, when I interrogated the statistics the proportion of personnel we took direct from the Services even in 2003 and 2004 when hundreds of people were being recruited was still between 10 and 15 per cent. If that proportion of direct recruitment from the Services has risen it is only because the numbers are much smaller.

Q201 Mr Borrow: Would it be wrong for the Committee to draw the conclusion that there is a direct link between retention problems within the Armed Forces and your existence as private companies in the security industry recruiting ex-servicemen?

Mr Sanderson: That would be a wrong assumption in my view. Perhaps I may observe that probably the majority of the work we do provides security services to government and government-funded activities in hazardous areas, so some would argue that if the work were not done by private companies it would be done by the military.

Q202 Mr Jenkins: Are all of your employees British?

Mr Sanderson: No, and it depends on the nature of the client. If we are working for the British Government, for example, there may well be nationality requirements. They may have to be British or Commonwealth citizens, and there may also be security vetting requirements. Clearly, we can work for a range of other clients who may be non-UK Government and commercial.

Q203 Mr Jenkins: When you employ non-British personnel I take it you are quite happy with them. Do you have a chance to compare them? If they are ex-military from abroad are they as well trained as British ex-service personnel?

Mr Sanderson: For control risks we employ UK and Commonwealth ex-servicemen, UK and typically ex-Police Service of Northern Ireland policemen. We employ what is known in the industry as third country nationals who typically will be ex-British Army Gurkhas. The third category of employment is local nationals drawn from the indigenous populations of the countries in which we are working.

Mr Beese: We have a similar experience. Of our 1,600 employees in Iraq nearly 800 are Iraqi trained by us who perform very reliably. There are a large number of Nepalese and Fijians who perform admirably. The remainder, some 500, are British Commonwealth personnel and there is no apparent difference between them in performance.

Q204 Mr Jenkin: You said that poorly resourced training was one of the prime reasons for people leaving the Armed Forces. Could you enlarge on that?

Mr Sanderson: That is a reason they cite. I cannot observe directly what the frustration is, but the factors raised - I did a straw poll a few days ago - were lack of training and ammunition and, in a very general sense, availability of equipment, but I am unable to comment authoritatively on the detail.

Q205 Mr Jenkin: Do you think that is reflected in the quality of personnel or professional competence that people leaving the Armed Forces display today, or is it as good as ever because of their combat experience? To put it bluntly, they do more training on the job.

Mr Beese: In our experience, they consistently improve; they are better today than they have ever been.

Mr Sanderson: Obviously, we are in a position where we have a lot of applications to work for our companies. We can select the best of those who apply.

Q206 Mr Jenkin: But you do not find the high operational tempo a reason for people to leave the Armed Forces?

Mr Sanderson: That is not cited as a reason, interestingly.

Q207 Mr Jenkin: But you may have a self-selecting sample in that respect?

Mr Sanderson: That is true, but we also take a lot of personnel into non-deployed appointments, so people will be working in managerial positions in our offices in London, for example. They cite a batch of reasons for leaving similar to the ones I raised before and operational tempo is not one of them.

Q208 Mr Jenkin: Do they get more predictable training from an employer like you? Servicemen often complain about their training and personnel development being interrupted by too many operational requirements. Do you think that is so?

Mr Sanderson: Companies will differ. I can speak only for my company which offers a reasonably predictable and well-resourced training programme for those who join us.

Mr Beese: Training itself does not appear to be an issue, but still time away from families is. Social trends change and husbands are now expected to spend more time with family and children and take a greater hand in their upbringing. That will be reflected also in military personnel. Quality time at home and reasonably regular communication are important. All of our employees in Iraq have the ability to community by email with their families. Webcams help and they can keep in reasonable touch. It helps to have regular rotations and to know that you will go back not simply to see the family but take them on holidays that you can now afford. Quality of life is improved.

Q209 Mr Hamilton: Mr Beese, I think the last point you make is extremely important. I was in Basra three weeks ago and one of the issues that came up was retention and turnover. They were over there for so long and personal circumstances changed. For example, single people join up and then get married. Mr Sanderson, surely when personnel complain about the Armed Forces and say they want to leave for these reasons they are not likely to tell you that the reason they are doing it is because they are being nagged by their wives.

Mr Sanderson: I would not dispute that at all. That is why one always makes a distinction between the reasons offered by the serviceman himself and the impact of family pressures.

Q210 Chairman: Do you suggest that your experience is something on which the Ministry of Defence could draw in any respect in terms of length of tours, quality of training, flat command structures or pay?

Mr Beese: We come from an industry that provides defensive protective services and therefore at any one time our operational tempo should be less than that of the Armed Forces. If I were a commanding officer who required my men to travel up the foothills of the Hindu Kush and stay there for a month I would need a mechanism and environment that allowed me to do that. We do not have to do that and therefore can afford to take a different approach. We can afford to be flexible with staff. If they need to take a month off to resolve a family problem we can change their rotations and accommodate their needs. That helps our own retention because that person will come back and continue to perform for us and we shall be seen by a wider market to be an employer of choice. But I suggest that we have more luxury in our ability to provide these benefits than the Ministry of Defence. At the end of the day I can instruct no one to go anywhere; they are all volunteers. The military has to be able to send people; we do not.

Mr Sanderson: There are significant differences between the way private companies and the Armed Services operate particularly in the duration of operations. We employ personnel on contract to meet specific client requirements. Those contracts might last a matter of weeks, months or years. The individuals will be employed for as long or short a time as they want to be which could be a matter of months or years. We have personnel who have been with us since the Gulf War and the start of private security operations in 2003. A second important distinction is that typically our training cycle has two components: individual training and collective training. The individual training component has some similarities with that of the Armed Services, but the collective training component really looks at individuals who work as part of small teams typically of no more than six or eight personnel, whereas the Armed Forces must generate a training and operational cycle which supports the operations of sub‑units and formations which is a much lengthier process.

Q211 Mr Jenkin: One of the debilitating factors in our operations in Afghanistan and Iraq is the six-month rule which means that all the skills learnt by the outgoing brigades hardly if at all transfer to the incoming brigades. Would it be possible for you to construct a package for the Ministry of Defence so it could have long-term military staff attached to brigade headquarters and GOCs in theatre to provide the continuity which at the moment does not exist and career opportunities for people who want longer-term commitments than are currently provided? Is that idea completely off the wall?

Mr Beese: No, it is not. Certainly, we are asked to brief rotating brigades before they go out to ensure that their staff and senior NCOs understand what the private sector is and what it can offer by way of advantage and what it cannot offer. If a new brigade command team arrives in Lashkargar in Helmand province it will find our same people sitting at operational desks alongside the staff working with the Foreign Office, DFID and other government groups and providing a degree of continuity. Typically, also in peace-keeping operations - we do not simply support the British Government - where we support United Nations staffs and operations the same is true. In the Balkans we had people deployed for four years in all parts of the former Yugoslavia and they provided a huge degree of continuity which was essential in logistics operations. People were not scrabbling for route maps and an understanding of the relative risks on a road. Our drivers and logisticians understood every metre of every road and the problems they presented.

Mr Sanderson: I agree. I add that probably the problem of continuity for formation headquarters in the field is exacerbated by what is historically a very high level of augmentation required to make them operational - I have no reason to believe that has changed - by individuals from outside the parent headquarters to give it full manning to be able to perform on operations. The flip side to that is that when we drew individuals from elsewhere to support deployed headquarters they obviously came from their parent headquarters or units and therefore there was some degree of turbulence and disruption as a result.

Chairman: Thank you both very much indeed. We have no further questions. We are extremely grateful to you for a fascinating end to the morning.