The strategic defence and security review and the national security strategy

Written evidence from the Public and Commercial Services Union (PCS)

and Prospect

We are writing to you on behalf of the MOD Groups of PCS and Prospect – the trades unions representing the majority of civilian staff in the Ministry of Defence.

We welcome your recently announced inquiry into the Strategic Defence and Security Review (SDSR). Before that announcement, we had been planning on writing to you to suggest that you hold an inquiry into Civilians in Defence. We believe this topic continues to justify examination in its own right, but we suggest that, as a minimum, you address it in your SDSR inquiry.

The MOD unions will, no doubt, be presenting evidence to you on the range of issues associated with the SDSR and will address the specific questions you are considering. However, we were keen to let you have an early submission on the specific issues raised by the government’s plans for its civil service announced in the SDSR.

Background

1 The SDSR was timed to coincide with the government’s Comprehensive Spending Review (CSR) and was announced the day before. It is clear to any knowledgeable reader that the SDSR has been framed to meet spending objectives set by the CSR: an 8% cut in real terms in the defence budget. The SDSR promised a cut of 25,000 in the MOD’s 85,000-strong civil service. There was no rationale provided for what is a 30% cut, nor is it clear where this reduction will be found, or how; nor is there a risk assessment.

2 When the unions asked the MOD whether we could identify alternative savings measures so as to reduce the number of jobs losses, we were told that this would not change the 25,000 target, which is a ‘political imperative’. The MOD has refused to implement its own Managing Staff Surpluses Agreement (which was only written in 2009) and there has been no formal consultation on the cuts or the measures the department should be taking to avoid compulsory redundancies.

3 It is worth remembering that the public esteem of MOD civilians fell to an all-time low in the Summer of 2009, when they were the subject of vilification in the media and a bidding war between the political parties which culminated in the figure of 25,000 entering the currency. It was clear to those inside the MOD that this debate was being stoked by Service Chiefs briefing their predecessors in the House of Lords and the media, in an effort to protect military numbers and to deflect criticism for the MOD’s failings onto civil servants. The MOD did little to protect itself during this debate and did little to challenge the media’s caricature of its staff as ‘desk-bound pen-pushers with gold-plated pensions’. In the Civil Service-wide staff survey in late 2010, the MOD was, not surprisingly, rated very poorly in terms of leadership and managing change.

4 The MOD is a perpetual motion machine. A major saving that could be delivered at little cost is to refocus the MOD’s change programmes and to stop subjecting every activity to repeated reviews. The department spends a fortune on change – be it on the real costs of consultants, the real costs of its own staff time, the real costs of implementation (relocation, infrastructure, etc) as well as the opportunity costs associated with the diversion, complication and confusion delivered by many of the changes. And the MOD never learns from change – it does not run post-project evaluations as a matter of course and it deliberately avoids learning the lessons from changes which fail. The product of this is that morale of staff - who just want to be left alone to do a good job for defence - has plummeted. And what is the government’s recipe for that? More of the same, of course!

5 In short, the MOD had already ‘lost’ its staff by the time the SDSR was announced. The SDSR was the coup de grace. The big question raised by all of this is who does the government see as implementing its ambitions for defence?

The SDSR

6 The MOD unions received regular briefings on the SDSR over the summer, including what we were told was a comprehensive briefing on the White Paper on 3 October. It is fair to say that we were shocked to see that the strategy had changed dramatically by the time of the actual announcement. In particular, the headline reductions in military and civilian numbers were much more imbalanced than had been suggested on the 3rd. We can only speculate as to what happened in the last three weeks of the Review.

7 The SDSR actually says very little about the civilian role in defence – other than announcing the 25,000 cut. RUSI commentator Professor Trevor Taylor and Brigadier Jim Campbell have remarked:

the SDSR has been published with no clear sense of what is to change in MOD in order to make these staff reductions possible. It is not clear if the government believes that major staff reductions can be made because many people have too little to do, or because it sees too many people being occupied in tasks that add little value, or because it plans to replace civil servants in some posts with military personnel. Nor does the SDSR provide any guide to the government’s idea of which defence tasks should be done by uniformed personnel, which by civil servants and which by the private sector under contract. These sorts of issues have been left to the Defence Reform Unit under Lord Levene which is to scrutinise all aspects of the delivery of capability, and to individual defence managers under pressure to show that they can deliver their work with fewer people. (Challenges in the generation and support of front line forces, Prospect, January 2011.)

8 We mentioned earlier the MOD’s refusal to implement its own redundancy procedure – the Managing Staff Surpluses Agreement. This refusal is significant, not just because it marks an indifference to the plight of its own staff who are to lose their jobs, but because it suggests that the MOD does not want to engage in a debate about the rationale for the cuts and to defend them against the charge that they will both increase the cost of defence and increase the risks (to finance, programmes and human life) inherent in the MOD’s activities. The unions wrote to the Secretary of State in mid November last year seeking an urgent meeting to discuss his proposals. We have not even received an acknowledgment and have been promised just 30 minutes of his time at the beginning of March. We are consulting members on whether we should take industrial action just to open a dialogue.

Civilians in defence

9 There is a huge amount of ignorance about the jobs that the MOD’s 85,000 civil servants do. They are certainly not safely caricatured by the image of the Whitehall bureaucrat (in fact, they are outnumbered in ‘mandarin’ roles by military officers!) Our members’ jobs range from clerical staff to nuclear physicists. Who teaches forces’ children in the schools in Germany and Cyprus? Who provides welfare and medical services to troops and their families? Who repairs military equipment and delivers it to the front line at less than half the cost of REME and the Logistics Corps? Who trains troops in trades from driving tanks through driving the reactors on nuclear submarines to maintenance of fast jets? Who manages the estate? Who guards the bases? Crucially, if these civilians are dispensed with, but the work is still required, who is going to do it? Military personnel or contractors will generally be a more expensive option.

10 The Committee is urged to seek a breakdown of the jobs and locations of the MOD’s civilian staff, so that you have a full picture of the impact of a 1 in 3 cut. This is information that the MOD claims it cannot provide to the unions.

11 Crucially, the MOD has nothing to say on the future for those civilians who are retained by the MOD. It does not have a credible civilian workforce strategy and it cannot afford to implement the inadequate strategy it agreed in 2009 (another example of a review which resulted in nothing.) It does not know what in-house capabilities it currently has, nor what its future skills requirements are. We say it cannot, therefore, sensibly decide which jobs it can dispense with.

12 In September, the unions put a proposal to the MOD for a Civilian Covenant – a short set of principles we saw as structuring employee relations in what we knew would be a difficult period. The covenant did not presume to deal with substantive issues in the way of the Military Covenant, but included commitments to dignity and respect, investment in skills, logical and fair management, full consultation, etc. This proposal was rejected out of hand by the Permanent Secretary – she did not even ask to discuss it with us. But this does leave the question: what is the deal for those staying?

13 The unions are deeply concerned about the risks attendant with the proposed cuts. A succession of external reports (including from the Defence Committee) has highlighted key skills shortages within the department. How will a cut of 1 in 3 staff improve this situation? Lessons have not been learned from previous rounds of indiscriminate cuts which have resulted in the loss of intelligent customer capability. When the risks materialise, these capabilities will have to be rebuilt – an expensive and lengthy process, if possible at all. In his 2009 report on the equipment programme, the new Chief of Defence Materiel Bernard Gray recommended rebuilding and expanding the in-house costing capability that had been decimated just a couple of years earlier. And, of course, the MOD is now struggling to rebuild an airworthiness engineering capability, the loss of which was highlighted in Charles Haddon-Cave QC’s report into the loss of life on Nimrod XV230.

14 The wider lessons from these major, independent, reviews have not been absorbed by the MOD. The Grimstone review into civilians in defence – commissioned by the previous government and absorbed into the SDSR and subsequently the Defence Reform Review - showed early signs that it would address the fundamental questions posed by Trevor Taylor and Jim Campbell (highlighted above) before it was hijacked and turned into a plan for the establishment of a common services organisation, ripe for privatisation. A parallel, internal review on making the best use of service personnel, by Admiral Al Richards, never saw the light of day because of some uncomfortable truths about the numbers and costs of non-front-line service personnel occupying posts which should be done cheaper and more effectively by civilians.

15 We believe there is an urgent need for a rational public debate about the role of civilians in defence. The 25,000 cuts should be halted until this debate has reached a conclusion and the MOD has a plan for its civilian workforce which is based on a proper analysis of its future purpose, shape, budget and size and a proper analysis of the appropriate balance of civilian and military personnel.

We urge the Committee to examine these issues.

January 2011