20 APRIL 2004

GENERAL SIR MICHAEL WALKER, ADMIRAL SIR ALAN WEST, GENERAL SIR MIKE JACKSON AND AIR CHIEF MARSHAL SIR JOCK STIRRUP

  Q280 Mr Havard: There is a huge gap between you and the army.

  Admiral Sir Alan West: We try and focus them, we try to make them go into the base port areas, either Faslane, Devonport or Portsmouth, and those are our prime focuses, apart from the two air bases at Culdrose, and that ties in a little bit with Devonport, and Yeovilton. We try to say to them "Get yourself into one of those base port areas and our whole concept of manning, Top Mast, will enable you to spend more time in that base port area and be with your family when you are not deployed away at sea." Because when you are not in that base port area and your husband or your wife is deployed away at sea, it is much better if you own your own house and there are benefits there as well because they are using all of the systems we have in this country anyway in terms of the National Health Service, the education system, all those sorts of things as well.

  Q281 Chairman: The last question—and we can be quite brief—it has been a rather turbulent period for the military, fighting wars, the perception in some newspapers of bullying and soldiers being killed or committing suicide and the possibilities of cuts in the defence budget. I know the Ministry of Defence does a pretty regular survey of attitudes. Do you have an opinion you would like to offer and would you like to back this up by sending us details on those surveys on how all this is affecting morale, whether it has an affect on recruitment, retention, general morale?

  General Sir Michael Walker: I will let the single service chiefs answer, because they have this responsibility for morale. What I would say is that so much is now written, so much of it is speculation, even if some of it has a grain of truth, and so badly informed is it that I think our workforce has stopped believing anything it reads in the newspapers. We rather hope that is the case so that we say to them "Right, just wait until we tell you what the truth of this matter is". Now how effective that is as a broad strategy towards communications achievement, we will let you know. You have just been to Afghanistan, you have been to Basra and you have seen the state of people's morale there for yourself, I would not say it was much different from what you see in other parts of the world at other times.

  Admiral Sir Alan West: We do have continuous attitude surveys, and we have the Second Sea Lord's Personal Liaison Team who go out and assess this. Without a doubt, the morale of people in the front line is superb. I know you regularly go and visit and you have seen that but when one gets constant things appearing in the paper saying "The Navy is now a quarter of the size of the French, and all the aircraft carriers are being paid off" these things do chip away. Even though there is an element of not maybe believing everything that is there, they do have an effect and we have to be aware of that. It is important we keep monitoring this. Similarly with the huge amount of change there has been I think amongst some of the middle ranking people, particularly those who are not in what one might call the absolute front line but more in the staff room, I think it does have an impact on these constant changes and it is something we have to monitor and keep a very close eye on.

  Air Chief Marshal Sir Jock Stirrup: Morale is good but the important thing is the next time you check it not the last.

  General Sir Mike Jackson: I would echo that. Our own continuous surveys which I read with some care are not ringing any warning bells, in fact in some ways on the contrary. From my visits—and as has been said, Chairman, you and your Members would I suspect be very rapid to detect that things were not well when you went round speaking to servicemen—certainly I have little cause for worry on that score. These things, of course, are quite judgmental and it is quite hard to measure morale but you get it from your own experience. What is easy to measure, of course, is manning, and you touched on that. Our retention rates are good. They have not gone down, after this time last year or subsequent times. Our recruiting is particularly buoyant. We are quite successful, and it is very encouraging. The retention rate is a real yardstick here because if people feel let down or mucked about, they will go, they will vote with their feet and that is not what is happening.

  Q282 Chairman: Thank you. We observe you command some priceless assets, the quality of men and women in the armed forces and we tinker with that at our peril. Thank you very much for your double header and we will leave you alone for a little while now before we summon you back.

  General Sir Michael Walker: Thank you, Chairman.