WEDNESDAY 16 JUNE 2004

MR LAWRENCE WATERMAN AND MR JEREMY CORFIELD

  Q148  Rachel Squire: May I wish you good afternoon and assure you that I am not a transformed Bruce George. The Chairman is on his way hotfoot after arriving a short time ago at Heathrow from one of his overseas engagements as President of the OSCE, so he will be here very shortly. I have been asked to stand in as Chairman until he arrives. May I welcome you all and make a brief introductory statement before I invite you to introduce yourselves. This is the second evidence session in our duty of care inquiry and the aim of this inquiry is to examine how the Armed Forces look after their people at the very beginning of their service: recruits in Phase 1 training establishments and trainees in Phase 2 training establishments. We shall be looking at a whole range of welfare issues. Our aim is to see whether the Armed Forces are doing everything which could be reasonably expected of them to ensure that their training regime and culture promote the wellbeing of the people they are training. At today's evidence session we shall be hearing from yourselves, independent experts in the field of occupational safety and risk management, and I should like to thank you for coming to give evidence to us and for your written submissions to the inquiry. I know that you have had the opportunity to look at some of the written evidence we have received as well as some of the background documents and we hope today to hear your views on how well the Armed Forces manage risk to the recruits in their care at initial training establishments and how this might be improved, as well as your views and those of our next witnesses on the application of civilian standards in the military context. We expect the first of this afternoon's evidence sessions to last for up to an hour and a half; I hope that is acceptable. Then at around 4.30, we shall be looking to hear from our second set of witnesses for a further hour and a half. Once more, welcome to you and could I ask, Mr Waterman and Mr Corfield, whether you would like to introduce yourselves before we come in with our first question?

  Mr Waterman: Thank you very much; we are grateful to the Committee for the opportunity to present oral evidence to support the written evidence which we submitted some weeks ago. I am President-Elect of the Institution of Occupational Safety and Health as well as being chairman of a health and safety consultancy with 60 staff. The consultancy has some experience of working with different branches of the Armed Forces on various aspects of safety and health. The Institution is very pleased to have the opportunity to supply some written evidence in connection with the relationship between civilian approaches to operational safety and health and the situation in training in the Armed Forces.

  Mr Corfield: My background with the military as a member of the Army has been as an environmental health technician and I am a member of IOSH and I assisted in the production of the written submission to you. I currently work for the Commission for Social Care Inspection, but I am here as a member of IOSH and not as a member of that particular commission.

  Q149  Rachel Squire: From your experience and from the information you have seen, what appear to you to be the main strengths and weaknesses of how the Armed Forces currently provide for the safety and welfare, both physical and mental, of personnel under training?

  Mr Waterman: We canvassed a number of our members who have recent experience serving within the Armed Forces or are involved in the provision of advice and guidance and assistance. Generally in response to the individual questions which are posed to us, we are seeking to represent the considered opinion of the Institution rather than just giving off-the-cuff personal evidence. We would say that the most significant strength, as far as the Armed Forces are concerned, is simply the degree of discipline, that these are disciplined organisations. In principle, achieving compliance with standards which are set and agreed should be easier. However, we were asked what we thought the weaknesses might be. There is a degree of organisational stoicism; that you put up with that with which you are presented, rather than necessarily questioning it. That may mean that health and safety standards, which are weaker than they might otherwise be, are regarded as acceptable by people who in other walks of life might complain or at least question whether that was appropriate. We think there may be a question about resourcing in terms of health and safety and supervision, for example, and in terms of the welfare facilities. We think that there may be a systematic problem in terms of transparency and independent review and verification of the standards which are being met. We would say that would be the set of weaknesses which we would wish to highlight.

  The Chairman resumed the chair.

  Q150  Chairman: You have looked at the MoD's proposals for further change. How would you evaluate them? Will they be adequate to meet what you believe the problems to be?

  Mr Corfield: The Institution did not have access to the DOC report and some of the other very useful information with which we have now been provided, when we prepared our written submission. I must say that some of the recommendations which the military themselves have pointed out within their various reports are very, very encouraging and especially the recommendations they have made around screening, the possibility of the various evaluations which could be done with recruits and potential recruits and the recommendations about possibly contacting GPs, having greater contact with families as well; all very encouraging steps.

  Q151  Chairman: Have you had time to make an evaluation or did you receive the material too late to make a serious study?

  Mr Corfield: I have had a good read through the DOC report; I have read through it two or three times now. Some of the other information is quite bulky and I have had a look at the record of the previous questioning of Members here but that ran to 60 pages, so I have only had a quick look through that. My evaluation would be that there is a lot that the MoD is already aware of in terms of how to put its house in order. It is just a case of how to get that done. Many of the specific things relating to occupational safety and health are outlined in there and they are very encouraging.

  Chairman: If, in the course of the next few months, you see other things which might cause you to make an additional judgment or different judgment, please feel free to come and talk to us or write to us.

  Q152  Mike Gapes: You mentioned resources and the MoD has repeatedly said that the main cause of problems at the initial training establishments, the problems in the care of recruits, has been lack of supervising staff caused by lack of funds. They identified supervision ratios and the number of supervisors available for a given number of trainees as one of the main issues needing to be addressed in order to bring care at those initial training establishments up to the appropriate standard. In your opinion, to what extent can an increase in the number of supervisors help to improve the standard of the safety and care regime or are there other factors which are more important than the actual number of supervisors, for example how those who are there are trained and monitored?

  Mr Waterman: In general we do recognise that in some circumstances numbers matter. If you have a completely inadequate ratio, then even well-equipped, well-motivated high quality supervisors would be run ragged trying to do what you are asking them to do. But we do not feel that the emphasis on increasing the ratio is really hitting the spot. We think there is an issue to do with quality of supervision and the training of supervisors and the motivation. It also raises questions about culture, because part of what you do with supervision is that you identify a particular layer of people with a particular set of responsibilities for monitoring what is going on, whereas if you develop a broader culture of commitment to high health and safety standards, you can end up effectively dragooning everyone into sharing the responsibility for monitoring what is going on and reporting it. We think that the emphasis solely on numbers is not appropriate, but we do accept that there is a resource issue, because we recognised—and we made this point in our initial submission—that the much higher level and more closely focused supervision during Phase 1 training achieves a much more satisfactory outcome than the much more diminished and less specific and focused supervision which occurs during Phase 2. We do recognise that there is a numerical and resource issue, but it is not just that.

  Q153  Mr Blunt: Mr Corfield, can you just give me some background as to your military experience?

  Mr Corfield: Absolutely. I joined the Army as a private soldier in 1990. I joined the Royal Army Medical Corps and I trained as an environmental health technician. That was a job which naturally erred on the side of health and safety, carrying out inspections of various Army establishments. It also involved investigating incidents in training when they occurred. That happened at a very low level for me, as a private, lance corporal, ultimately a sergeant and I would not have been involved in investigating a fatality; that would have been left to one of the commissioned officers.

  Q154  Mr Blunt: How long was your service?

  Mr Corfield: I was in the military for seven and a half years; I left in 1998.

  Q155  Mr Blunt: What did you observe about the culture of health and safety in the Army during your service and the changes to it?

  Mr Corfield: The Army is very good at following rules and at making rules, but the question of culture is more important. We had a discussion today in that you can go and do a health and safety inspection of a military establishment and the health and safety policy may not be that good, the commitment by some of the senior personnel may not appear to be that good. However, when you actually go down to the vehicle workshops, when you get down to the armoury, the standards on the ground are very, very high, because the troops operating in those areas operate to very specific and very set standards and they are held accountable for those standards.

  Q156  Mr Blunt: What would therefore be the consequences in practice of imposing a civilian health and safety regime on units like that, where the health and safety is actually required and it is working quite well in practice at the sharp end at the moment?

  Mr Corfield: The military is already subject to civilian occupational health and safety standards; it is not exempt in any way from those standards.

  Q157  Mr Blunt: It does not have a legal liability though, as the Crown is exempt from that.

  Mr Waterman: That is a fair point.

  Q158  Mr Blunt: Is your position that the Crown should accept that legal liability?

  Mr Waterman: We think it probably makes sense, but, to be honest, in terms of that sort of formality, we are less concerned about that than the way in which the outcomes translate and if we talk about the way in which it can be developed, to a certain extent the culture within the Army seems to us to be a little bit like focusing on trying to improve road safety by making sure that everyone has a driving licence who is driving a vehicle, that the vehicles are properly maintained, that the crash barriers are properly looked after and well designed, etcetera. You sort out all of the hardware, but you leave out of account the behaviour, the inter-personal relationships, the softer side of things. That is why to a certain extent we keep harping on about this issue of culture. In civilian life there is much more of a recognition that you do not just have a command and control economy which focuses on the formalities, but you actually have much more of a hearts and minds approach to people accepting individual and personal commitment and personal responsibility for the way they behave in terms of not just following the rules as they are written down, but thinking along the sorts of lines which mean that they report untoward incidents, they take responsibility for things which are directly outside their immediate personal responsibility. Within the Armed Forces, because there is such a strict disciplinary code and a formal line management structure, people often feel comfortable where everything is being addressed in that way, when it is in fact in the gaps between that formality and the hardware and the cultural side where we feel that some of these problems are arising.

  Q159  Mr Blunt: Have you noticed differences between the services?

  Mr Waterman: Yes.