WEDNESDAY 16 JUNE 2004

PROFESSOR GEOFF CHIVERS AND MR TOM MULHALL

  Q220  Mr Blunt: But you are making these allegations—

  Professor Chivers: I am not making any allegations, but there are issues, where bullying has been indicated and there has been a lot of discussion already this afternoon about how a young person is supposed to handle it if they are being bullied.

  Q221  Mr Blunt: I am sorry, the point I have been trying to drive at is whether you are saying you think this practice is across the piece. You painted a picture of someone crawling through mud with someone two inches from their face bellowing at them in a very early stage of their training when they are obviously making a difficult transfer from civilian to military life and the new cultural experience they might be enjoying. You painted a picture at the extreme end. I do not think that would be recognised by many Army trainers, would it? Or are you saying that you have evidence to suggest that it is?

  Professor Chivers: What I would prefer to do is to turn the discussion round to say that there may well be behaviours of staff at every level in the MoD, within the Armed Forces, which are not helpful in resolving the problems this Committee is trying to deal with. In those cases, developing better policies and procedures, formalising things on ever more sheets of paper, is not going to get to the heart of the cultural problems. In many areas where it seemed as though behavioural problems were fundamental, you have to change tack and take an approach which really looks very closely by observing those behaviours and deciding which of those behaviours are beneficial to the task in hand, in this case developing people through training, which are not helpful and which are unhelpful, then take steps to try to eliminate those behaviours which are not really helpful.

  Q222  Mr Blunt: Do you not think the Army is doing that itself anyway? It is the largest and some people would claim the most successful training institution in the United Kingdom.

  Professor Chivers: If 50% of the trainees are failing, it could be argued to be one of the most unsuccessful training organisations in the country. It is successful for those people who succeed; it is very unsatisfactory for those who do not. If 50% of the university students at my university failed at the end of three years we would be absolutely devastated and so would their families.

  Q223  Mr Blunt: If you had almost no choice over the people you got in the front door, you might struggle to pass 50%.

  Professor Chivers: That is where risk management comes into it and it is a question of finding a balance. I am sure we cannot resolve all the issues the Committee is facing, but I would think the documents we have looked at would indicate that there is more that could be done in the area of risk management to reduce this attrition and reduce all the misery which is being generated for those young people coming in and their families and friends, with all the expectations raised, who are not successful.

  Q224  Chairman: We have referred to the study quite frequently and I looked at it again. That study of 500 was derived from a survey in one city. I should have thought methodologically to choose a survey and base so many of its conclusions as evidence of people wanting to get into the Army and not getting into the Army is frankly rather unrepresentative and probably spurious. I should love to ask Mr Mulhall about how the security industry copes when they have a two-day training programme, so they are not going to do very much, are they? You wonder whether the security industry, on the guarding side, is parallel to the infantry. Is it the same pool from which employers would seek to gain recruits?

  Mr Mulhall: Possibly. The only comment I made about the survey was that it was their own survey. All I quoted were the actual figures, that if that is the raw material you have to work with, is it any wonder that you have problems. However, the positive thing is that in my view it is remarkable that so many people come out the other end with a career. That is the only point I am making. You obviously have an industry in the manned guarding industry, yes, a lot of the recruits for that do come from the same socio-economic groups and the SIA are doing something to improve the education and the professionalism.

  Q225  Chairman: Four days training. That is really going to turn out quality people. That is somebody else's problem.

  Professor Chivers: On the issue of research, it does seem to us that this area is hugely under-researched. I could not agree more with your comment about the incredibly biased sample, if the 500 are from one city, but not just in terms of quantitative research of which there is some shown here, but qualitative research. You need far more of that to get an understanding of the holistic aspect of this through the eyes of the trainees, the instructors, other stakeholders in this, their perspective. You really need much more focus on interviews, focus groups, observations, those kinds of research methods and more quantitative research as well. Given the seriousness of the issue, in trying to get it right, it does seem to us that certainly more research is called for.

  Q226  Mike Gapes: May I bring you back to risk assessment? In his evidence General Palmer talked about the fact that the Army had been doing risk assessment, but the definition of risk assessment and how it is done is open to some interpretation. Without going into it now, we have seen a report by the Health and Safety Executive Laboratory on the uneven basis on which these things are done. I should be interested in your views on whether you feel that the Armed Forces collectively and individuals within it, are able to assess risk in a way that is designed to promote a good safety and care culture.

  Professor Chivers: I have to say to you that at every point where risk assessment was mentioned there was no further information in these documents and I kept underlining it and saying "What was the nature of the risk assessment?" it could mean anything really. "How extensive was it? Who did it? What competencies did they have to carry out this risk assessment?" I fully agree that much more needs to be understood about that area, because in any field risk assessment could mean 100 different things and it has become a buzz word now to the extent that it has almost lost its meaning. I get the impression to a certain extent that we are talking about meetings where we name an individual trainee and we talk about where they are up to and what risks they are facing. However, there are many other forms of risk assessment which could be about technology, about  systems of work, the people within those technological systems and structures and so on. I could not really say much more without a much better understanding. I should love to see the paperwork, talk to the people who are doing the risk assessments, how much resource is going into this, how extensive they are and so on.

  Q227  Mike Gapes: You would not feel able to suggest how the Armed Forces could assess whether they are making changes and improvements in the way this is done in a timely and effective way.

  Professor Chivers: Frankly I did not think from the documentation and the witness statements from the senior officers that they really understood risk management at all actually in the terms in which we are talking about it and my colleagues as well. I did not get that sense. For example, we are talking about young people, perhaps not in a good psychological condition, with weapons in their hands. All these documents just talk about the fact that they might harm themselves. There is no thought they might go back to the barracks and machine-gun everybody in the barracks. We have seen many young people in a somewhat similar situation in civilian life in America with powerful weapons who have done exactly that.

  Q228  Mike Gapes: Yes, but they do not do it in the British Armed Forces, do they?

  Professor Chivers: Yet. That is what risk assessment is. We have not had a bomb falling on the House of Commons yet; al-Qaeda did not get here yet, but it might do. That is what risk assessment is about.

  Q229  Mike Gapes: We have had Hungerford, we have had Dunblane and we have had various other incidents where people have carried out terrible crimes in civilian society. They were not carried out by soldiers in our Armed Forces. I think therefore we should not get into a discussion based entirely on worst case hypotheses like something out of Terminator.

  Professor Chivers: I do not think that is an absurd example of the kind of risk assessment which would be done in industry. People do actually sit down and work out what would happen if a chemical plant exploded in the middle of a big city and they try to elaborate upon their precautions and be as sure as they can be that will not happen except once in one million years. That kind of risk assessment is done up and down the country by expert teams daily against very, very bleak scenarios, because it tests out the control measures in place and if those control measures are capable of standing up to that kind of extreme example, they are probably pretty robust for lesser cases as well.

  Q230  Mike Gapes: What would be the best way of the Armed Forces, in your opinion, changing the way they deal with assessments of risk and also managing information that they get from that in order that they could look to trends and addressing potential problems?

  Professor Chivers: There is an education job to be done from top to bottom. My impression, looking at the paperwork, is that the Armed Forces are very strong in understanding action in the military field, but less so in the more mundane environment around training and that a good deal of education will be valuable from top to bottom, including the MoD staff in this area. It may not be very extensive, but it does have to be quite deep in grasping the fundamental issues. This failure to close that circle of identifying all these problems and really not progressing to deal with them by introducing risk control measures is a classic example of not really comprehending what risk management is. I would say training and follow-through on that and a much more open culture to reveal what is really going on. The documents suggest and the Surrey police suggest that quite serious things like self-harm are either being reported at a low level or not being reported at all. We know from the health and safety field that our so-called near misses and minor accidents need to be reported and need a strong culture which encourages people to report because if they are going on for a certain length of time, then serious accidents and ultimately fatalities will follow. From those lower level incidents we can learn a lot about what is going wrong and bring in risk control measures to reduce the risks which are there. I cannot really run through a Master's course in risk management in five minutes, but a lot is missing in the way of thinking which is going on here, which is really bread and butter in quite small firms today.

  Q231  Rachel Squire: Obviously recruits in the Armed Forces do not have trade union representation and there has been some talk about whether they should have a federation similar to the police. How do you think the views of recruits could be better represented on health and safety matters?

  Professor Chivers: As other colleagues were talking I was reflecting on that. My own wife has been a UNISON representative at a university, not my own, for many years and I would say the phone rang nightly and somebody would be on the other end of the phone very distressed about their circumstances at work. Quite often that was bullying and harassment by quite senior staff, at least as they perceived it. She would always ask whether the person had reported that to the head of department; maybe they had, maybe they had not, maybe they were fearful to, in some cases the head of department was the bully. It does seem to me that an organised other option, rather than just going through the line management in regard to worries about being bullied, is extremely valuable and trade unions have played a very important part in that; much neglected in the media but in actual fact most trade union work down at the ground level is about those kinds of things.

  Q232  Rachel Squire: Do you think it certainly contributes to the ability and the assessment of managing to assess risk effectively in advance of a major incident?

  Professor Chivers: Yes. Clearly there are malicious cases of people accusing other colleagues of bullying when they have not been, to get back at them for some reason. It was mentioned by the senior officers and we do need to be careful about that. However, I would say from long experience, if we have a culture of playing down significant risk, such that it does not really get into the statistics, it does not get reported up, then people quite high up can really live in a fool's paradise. As Tom and I were sitting outside, we were saying to each other that we are sitting in this room because four young people died. God knows how long the self-harming would have gone on, if they had not got to the point of being dead. Their knowledge of that in industry is that the worst kinds of companies actually try to cover up evidence of quite serious injury at work not reported to the HSE under the regulations, but you cannot cover it up when they are dead. To that extent, the more we can encourage an openness in the no-blame culture which in the first instance says "Nobody is wanting to allocate blame; we are just trying to find out why these things are perceived by these young people as bullying and harassing" when in practice the instructors, with the best will in the world, think that is the normal way of doing it, the way to toughen them up and that it is good for them, the more we can get that out into the open and discussed, the more we can control the risk. While it is going on in a covert way with fear of consequences, of reporting and getting this information forward, then we do live in a fool's paradise and we do not really control the risk properly.

  Mr Mulhall: On your question about representation, my understanding is that the Army in the Irish Republic do have representation. It is not a trade union as such, because for obvious reasons you cannot have a trade union in the Army. You cannot have a vote for a strike ballot, can you? They do have representations for all of the ranks and liaison with the Ministry of Defence on issues which affect the families, affect recruitment and training and affect issues concerning Armed Forces.

  Professor Chivers: I should add that there is good practice across the higher education system and in further education too when student committees are formed, elected from the student body to act for the students and they have the right then through their chair or other members of the student representative group to go to a very high level in the institution, in our case straight to the Vice-Chancellor, if they have any concerns about their programme or the welfare of an individual whatsoever, whether to do with their learning or any other aspect of the way the university is looking after them.

  Q233  Chairman: Seeing this analogy between the infantry and the private security industry, about which we are both deeply interested, there is a parallel in one way. Night watchmen, as they were, security guards, low educational attainment in some cases, appalling training in most cases, sent out at night as a matter of routine on their own unarmed. If they have no arms at their disposal to harm themselves or anybody else, what manifestations would there be in your view in the private security industry of anger or frustration or whatever the psychological condition of an in some cases pretty uneducated person might be who is thinking of setting fire to the establishment? Is there a parallel? I know you are not a psychiatrist or psychologist, but is there a parallel with violent acts committed by frightened, bored, angry, difficult, psychologically disoriented security guards? How would they manifest their condition? It is a good research project for one of your students.

  Mr Mulhall: You are right, frustrations do come to the fore and from my experience it can end up with criminal damage to equipment. Computing equipment is the favourite, from my experience. Security guards lock themselves in a building and will not let you in. The other favourite is obscene telephone calls, because they are there all night with nothing else to do and they start making calls or go onto the premium rate chatlines. That is how it tends to manifest itself very often.

  Q234  Chairman: But not self-harm.

  Mr Mulhall: I have never known a case of self-harm. I have known a case of a security guard actually murdering a member of staff, but that was an exception. You cannot cater for the exceptions. You have to draw an economic balance there in reality, otherwise you become paranoid. That is how they manifest it: they set fire to buildings, they set fires in store rooms, they steal equipment, they sabotage the food, the tills, that is how it usually manifests itself, or they just walk out and leave the building insecure. God forbid.

  Q235  Mike Gapes: May I talk a bit about instructors and the training they need? Your own document refers to issues of risk and talks about the importance of the training and the strategies for dealing with an understanding of the behaviour of young people. I am interested to know what you feel could be done to equip instructors and trainers with a better understanding of the emotional maturity or the attitudes of this particular group of quite young people going through the transition in the early stages. What do they need to know? What training should they have to ensure they are able to provide a safe environment for the people who are in their care at that time?

  Mr Mulhall: There are two aspects to training in my view. One is a good understanding of the technicalities of the job. If you are training someone to shoot with a weapon, you understand the weaponry. The other part of it, which is the important bit, is people understanding people, getting on with people and most important of all, liking people. If I had my way I would say that most instructors should be sent out with a group of boy scouts or girl guides and get to understand young people, get involved in youth clubs and what actually happens there so they can build up that rapport with people and trust. Trust is vital and understanding what makes people tick. That is what I personally would do.

  Professor Chivers: I certainly think a very open discussion with instructors about the nature of these young people, especially as the reserves come forward, is very important. By definition, if these senior NCOs, particularly those who choose to go into the training environment, can be seen as Army successes, they have to understand that a lot of the young people they are now working with are seen in outside society as failures; they are not at all like they were when they were young. If they go in with preconceived ideas of what these young people should be like, what they should be able to achieve at the outset, it will not work, will it? The ones who have come through, by and large, are people who, even at a young age, were probably already on track to succeed. We are seeing 50% at the moment who are not going to make it. A very open discussion about what it means to come from a broken home, from a very deprived neighbourhood and that if you are told you are not in the Army any more you may not have any home to go to at all or anybody outside who cares about you any more or be going back to where both the parents are drug addicts. These kinds of things need to be very much in the training programme for instructors, so that they can start to develop empathy and understanding of what the real situation is of these young people, not just what is going through their mind when they are in a training environment, but what is going through their mind when they are lying in bed late at night thinking about the outside world, what they have been through, what is happening to their friends back at home. It is not just people from those circumstances who find it quite traumatic to be away from home in a very stressful environment. We see it in the first term at university with a large number of university students and the staff do have to be very alert and close to those students during that period, indeed for the whole of the first year, to cope with the inevitable emotional trauma that they will go through. We do spend a lot of time talking with staff and training staff to look out for the signs and symptoms, things Tom was talking about earlier, offhand attitude to turning up on time in class, course work starting to come in late, general jokes about the fact that the person is in the bar every night and so on, all the indicators to staff over time that this person needs more attention. The training environment does have to deal with those issues and these are not soppy things which are outside the main regime, but one of the big areas for instructors to move forward on.

  Q236  Rachel Squire: You recently attended a conference to hear presentations by all three Armed Forces which focused on their roles and especially on the challenges they face around recruitment, selection and induction of young people. I should be interested to hear what impression you gained from that conference on how the Armed Forces are managing changing expectations about the rigours and challenges of life in the Armed Forces, particularly in relation to their duty of care in the recruitment and selection stages.

  Professor Chivers: I attended three major presentations in different places during the short period by the three Armed Forces about their recruitment. It was open and there were people there who were thinking of joining up, or parents of youngsters who had given some thought to doing that after school. What came through very strongly was that the concern expressed by Army presenters about this issue of suitability of young people recruited was expressed much more strongly than by the other Armed Forces. There was a lot of angst coming from them to the audience. When questions were asked, they were extremely frank and open in saying how extremely worried they were about the calibre of young people they had to take. There were older members of the audience who had spent most of their life in the Army and were now retired who were aghast at some of the things which were being said to them by the Army staff about the nature of young people they would now take into the Army, who would not even have been on the agenda years ago. They were saying that if they take drugs, maybe they are not hard drugs but soft drugs, if they have been in prison, it depends what they went to prison for as to whether they would be taken. Some people said "My God, I didn't know you took people who were ex-offenders". It did seem to me that on both sides of the table in those presentations, in the Army case particularly, quite a lot of anxiety was expressed and diffidence by the Army recruiters present about whether the approach they were currently taking was in any way satisfactory.

  Q237  Rachel Squire: The other thing I should like to ask you relates to the validity and outcomes of screening for self-harm in the Armed Forces. Medical and professional opinion appears to be divided on the effectiveness of screening for potential mental health problems or risk of self-harm. Yet they are a starting point for assessing vulnerability. I should be interested to know what CHaRM's opinion is on the usefulness of screening for these types of risk.

  Professor Chivers: You are dealing with a deep, deep psychological problem in regard to the potential trainees' regard for themselves and there are pointers, indicators, which will come out about that based on track record, not just on getting them to fill out a form. The ones who have been down this track before, because they have been involved in self-harm before, can answer those questions in such a way that they will come out without any problems and be accepted; they are clever enough to do that. Really it is a question of track record and if the track record is previous self-harm or other behavioural adverse actions, a short time in Phase 1 Army training is not going to change that. In my view it will not change that very much at all. I have students of my own, not on CHaRM courses, but on other courses I have taken, who deal with those kinds of folk as part of their normal work and they will counsel these youngsters for years to try to get them to change their self-harming behaviour. It is not a question of waving a magic wand through any programme and getting them to change their ways when it is so deep-seated. Serious self-harm is a serious psychological problem. Again, risk management would do that: trying to look at other issues which are indicative, behaviour patterns of the past which mean that when they are put into this rather more emotionally traumatic situation of being away from home with total strangers in a stressful learning environment their worst type of behaviour is likely to re-occur. Frankly, given their access at some stage, it may be after full training, to weapons it is not desirable that those people at that time are recruited into any of the Armed Forces.

  Mr Mulhall: The dilemma you have is whether you can spot these people. It has to be an historical thing. On day one, when somebody joins the Army, it is going to be very difficult to get access to their medical records the previous day. So you have to start on day one and it is a question really of people keeping accurate records. When is an accident not an accident? If you have too many accidents, is it a manifestation of self-harm or is it genuinely an accident and the person is clumsy? These are just indicators which people ought to be aware of. If you do not have the infrastructure to deal with keeping the records and somebody analysing those records, then you are back to square one.

  Q238  Chairman: I asked the previous witnesses a question about external scrutiny of what the MoD are going to be up to in training recruits. Would you argue that there should be some form of external scrutiny? I mentioned the Adult Learning Inspectorate or an Armed Forces Ombudsman? Would that provide the right mechanism for oversight?

  Professor Chivers: I do think that is desirable and that was stated by the previous witnesses. I would certainly say some kind of external scrutiny, be it annual or ad hoc, at different times of the year, perhaps unexpected; if you know they are coming, it is easier to sharpen up and not give the game away. I should stress that it seems to us that there is a lot of good will towards getting this right. We are not talking about an inspection body which just comes to tell you off. It must be done in a very supportive way, in the sense that eventually, when people have got over the shock of external scrutiny, they welcome it because those people are pointing to oversights, things which have now become custom and practice, which really in the cold light of day are not the way things should be done. Quite often people nod immediately and say "Yes, we've been worried about that. You're quite right. We shouldn't be doing that. If you're saying that is not appropriate, we'll stop doing it". That is the way it needs to be looked at, but there needs to be far more emphasis really, it seems to me, on internal scrutiny, where people are trained what to look out for, what to observe, what is going to be indicative of problems inside the Armed Forces, especially the Army, to back that up. The line management has to take the major responsibility here and any external scrutiny can only be limited; it can only observe things at certain times and hopefully pick up on any gross discrepancies. A culture needs to be developed of much more internal investigation, research, scrutiny, challenging of self without blame. If you bring blame back into it, you get cover-up straight away and you can make it look very good when it is not. You really need a culture where people's first thought, in criticising themselves and their performance, in criticising others, subordinates, peers, trainees, whoever, is not going to be "Yes, this is wrong. Who can we blame for it?", but they take a view that this is something which has grown up inside the organisation, "It tends to be the way we do things around here. We can see it is not really acceptable. What can we do to cause that to change?" rather than waiting for an outside agency to keep telling them off because they are naughty boys.

  Mr Mulhall: I have been scrutinising and scrutinising. To me the big thing about it was that they have to assess you against a set standard. You have to know what the rules of the game are; the rules have to be very clearly laid out and documented. You have to have a benchmark laid down. Then the inspectorate have to come along when it suits them, not when it suits you. It has to be impromptu and then when they find deficiencies and issue a non-compliance report against you, you have to be given an opportunity to rectify the situation before they come back on another surveillance visit. That calls for a complete change in culture, a very complete change in openness and trust and not blaming each other "It's not my problem. He didn't do it, he did. He should have done X, Y and Z. It's down to him". That is the big situation for me. It is all to do with trust and openness and not being frightened to say you have got it wrong. I know that is rare for politicians, but sometimes you do get it wrong. The Army are no different; they get it wrong, so why not say "We've got it wrong. We're sorry, but we'll do something about it"? It is trust. There was mention in earlier evidence about weapons testing and psychological training for weapon use. The Singaporean Armed Services do that on a regular basis. They psychologically test members of their own services and members of their police force on a regular basis to see whether they are still suitable to carry firearms. I do know that the Hong Kong police are starting to do it as well now. They have spent about five million dollars on an interactive computer simulation exercise and they found that about 30% of their people who have gone through firearms training cannot fire at a human target. That was brought home to them when somebody examined coroners' reports and found, for example, in one report that somebody fired a rifle at a target. I am not a weapons expert but he fired at a target with a rifle from 10 feet away, he hit a passer-by who was 180 metres away on the other side of a road and he claimed it was a valid hit. They found that he had closed his eyes and fired a weapon. How successful it is I really do not know, because the dilemma is what to do with the 30% of failures. Do you sack them? Do you have other employment for them? Perhaps you put them to monitor the systems? I do not know. It is a real problem.

  Chairman: Thank you very much for your very interesting presentations. Thank you.