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

House of COMMONS

MINUTES OF EVIDENCE

TAKEN BEFORE

DEFENCE COMMITTEE

RECRUITMENT AND RETENTION IN THE ARMED FORCES

Tuesday 25 March 2008

PROFESSOR CHRISTOPHER DANDEKER and PROFESSOR HEW STRACHAN

MS LIZ SHELDON, MRS DAWN McCAFFERTY and MS JULIE McCARTHY

Evidence heard in Public Questions 1 - 82

USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT

Oral Evidence

Taken before the Defence Committee

on Tuesday 25 March 2008

Members present

Mr James Arbuthnot, in the Chair

Mr David Crausby

Linda Gilroy

Mr Mike Hancock

Mr Adam Holloway

Mr Bernard Jenkin

Mr Kevan Jones

Robert Key

Richard Younger-Ross

________________

Witnesses: Professor Christopher Dandeker and Professor Hew Strachan gave evidence.

Q1 Chairman: Good morning. Thank you very much indeed for coming. I wonder if I could ask you both to introduce yourselves.

Professor Strachan: I am Hew Strachan. I am Titular Professor of The History of War at Oxford and I direct a programme at Oxford on the changing character of war.

Professor Dandeker: I am Christopher Dandeker. I am from the Department of War Studies at King's College London. I am a Professor of Military Sociology. I am also Head of the School of Social Science and Public Policy and, with Simon Wessely, Co-Director of the King's Centre for Military Health Research.

Q2 Chairman: Thanks very much indeed for coming to start off our inquiry into Recruitment and Retention in the Armed Forces. The purpose of this morning's evidence is that you will be here for about 45 minutes, if that does not insult the value of your evidence to the Committee. It will be helpful in setting the scene and providing an overview of where we are going on this inquiry. I would ask if you could start by giving us that scene-setting context. Is there a long term problem with recruitment and retention in the Armed Forces? Is it a trend which is becoming apparent? Is it a blip? How would you characterise the current difficulties that are generally acknowledged in recruitment and retention in the Armed Forces? Which of you would like to start?

Professor Strachan: It is the historian's question, is it? I do not think there is anything new about problems of recruiting and retention in the Armed Forces. Throughout the 19^th century, throughout the 1930s, since 1945 (with the exception, obviously, of the period of conscription), the Armed Forces have struggled to meet recruitment targets. That is a very general statement because what is much more evident and I think is largely a consequence of the trend in current operations is what reports call pinch points - particular problems in relation to particular specialisations. There is a change there because I think when Christopher and I were doing this eight years or so ago, the last time this Committee looked at this issue, the problem was much more evident in generalised branches of the Armed Forces rather than specialist branches. Specialist branches had much better recruitment and retention partly, I think, because there was a long term prospect of employment whenever they left the Armed Forces. Today there is a problem with particular specialisations, no doubt partly reflecting a buoyant economy. There is another thing I would say though and that is that of course any debate that goes on about the Armed Forces today has to balance what they are doing currently operationally and what that means for the long term health of the Armed Forces. There is a tendency to reflect what the long term future might be in the light of what are immediate pressures and, of course, there is the $64,000 question: how far are those current pressures going to continue into the future? The issue, it seems to me, is that we are still expecting ourselves to produce Armed Forces that have balanced capabilities, that have, in the jargon, the ability to fight a major war at one end of the spectrum and at the same time carry on with counter-insurgency peacekeeping and the practicalities which the Armed Forces are facing at the moment. The fear that is often voiced by chiefs of staff is that in trying to meet the demands of current operations how far are you jeopardising the long term capability to fight a major war should a major war eventuate? We might have reached the point, given the size of the Armed Forces, where there has to be a choice. There has to be an opportunity cost here because to retain balanced capabilities across the full spectrum may be impossible given the current size of the Armed Forces and the current recruitment and retention difficulties. You are going to have to structure the Armed Forces to do particular things. That is going to require an unbalancing if you produce Armed Forces that are well adjusted, for example, to operations in Afghanistan; you are not going to retain all-round capability of the sort that the Armed Forces expect, and I do not think we are fully asking ourselves that question. If we do ask ourselves that question we may be rather clearer about the sort of structure of the Armed Forces that we want and what sort of specialisations we are trying to achieve and where the recruitment and retention issue should be directed, but until we have a sense of the answer to the big strategic questions recruitment and retention are operating in a vacuum. There is a danger of looking at the wrong end of the stick.

Q3 Chairman: So when you say we might have reached the point when we have to make the choice between a balanced and a specialist Armed Forces it sounds as though your answer to the question is that we have reached that point.

Professor Strachan: Given current resourcing, yes, we have. Even if there were not recruiting and retention problems, even if the Armed Forces were not failing to meet current targets, - and, as I say, the mismatch between targets and achievement is not historically enormously significant because this has always been the case except in times of very high unemployment - and if we are not going to have Armed Forces that are adequately resourced, then, yes, we have reached that point.

Q4 Chairman: Professor Dandeker, do you want to add to that, and would you differentiate in any way between recruitment and retention?

Professor Dandeker: What has been a good move by the Ministry of Defence over the last eight to ten years is a much more explicit recognition of the interaction between recruitment, retention and other aspects of personnel policy. If you look at the Armed Forces' overarching personnel strategy that gives a clear indication of that thinking, that is to say (and I know it is a cliché) that one of the worst things that can happen to recruitment is a disaffected veteran. I think that thinking, the need to relate the activities of cultivating the areas where you recruit from, then obtaining the people, retaining them and making them reasonably happy so long as you want them and they want to stay and then looking after them when they have left and remembering them, are all part of, if you like, a spectrum of activity. It is to the credit of MoD and the individual Services that that contextual thinking, that interactive thinking about recruitment and retention and the other activities to which I have referred is good news. The second point I would make is in relation to Professor Strachan's comment about means and ends and the balanced capability point. I think time is pressing because the pressures on means and ends are not, so it seems to me, going to go away any time soon. I think the commitment to Iraq is likely to remain whatever aspirations there are to reduce personnel deployed there in the summer. I do not see a major reduction there. That is just an academic guess. Whatever the outcome of the US presidential election, if I had to bet I would see a continuing (and again we can debate it) serious commitment by the US to Iraq for at least one, possibly more than one, presidential term, so the pressures upon the UK Armed Forces in terms of calibrating means and ends and therefore thinking through this issue of balanced capability or not is something that cannot be ignored.

Q5 Chairman: Do you think media stories, like Deepcut, like mistreatment of prisoners, have had an effect on this, and is the impact of those stories diminishing at all over time?

Professor Dandeker: It depends on the effect on what. If I could start with one issue, I think it is interesting that in and around Government Deepcut is no longer a particular base. It is a wider phenomenon. People talk about the Deepcut issue, and I think even if Deepcut was knocked down, abolished, renamed and so on, the cultural phenomenon of Deepcut, that is to say, straying the wrong side of tough training into the field of illegitimate transgressions of the rights of personnel who have volunteered to serve their country, is there and those responsible for recruiting and training personnel are aware it is there, are aware of the need to balance the requirement to be fit to fight, in other words, train people to be fit to fight, but on the other hand not sanction or permit illegitimate and illegal activities which lead to bullying and harassment. Those damage the recruitment climate, not so much necessarily directly on young people but on what are known as the gatekeepers, those to whom young people turn for advice when they are thinking about their military careers. So far as abuses in theatre are concerned, those affect the reputation of the Armed Forces and clearly affect Military Covenant issues about which you might want to talk later. I think that damages the reputation of the Armed Forces in exactly the same way (and I know it is again a cliché) as one bad doctor can do a huge amount of damage to the medical profession disproportionate to the activities of any single individual. I think the same can be said for abuses in Iraq so far as the recruitment climate is concerned.

Q6 Chairman: Have you anything to add, Professor Strachan?

Professor Strachan: I would not agree with that, actually. I think the Deepcut issue has gone away. I think the Deepcut issue was always bigger in the mind of the Army itself than it was in the minds of the public, for all that it was headline news. It is always striking (and this is comparatively unchanging over time) the very high regard that the British Armed Forces have been held in by the public. You will confront concerns among senior officers about Deepcut, a belief that they are being vilified by the press and having a tough time, which is not reflected in any broad spectrum attitudinal surveys. I think we need to be aware of that because it ties into another question about how the public see the Armed Forces, which is the crucial distinction between a public unhappiness about certain wars and a public perception of the Armed Forces. The two things are not necessarily linked and this is the point about how far you generalise from current circumstances into the future, because if the current wars are unpopular that is a much bigger issue than Deepcut, and if those are unpopular then of course those can affect what Christopher has called the gatekeepers and those who might have an influence on those who wish to enlist. However, if the war were deemed to be popular, deemed to be acceptable, deemed to be necessary, there would be a different relationship.

Q7 Mr Holloway: Professor Dandeker, of course it is unacceptable to lay into recruits, but is not the true Deepcut effect what I have been hearing for the last five or six years, that because we have softened the training a lot of these kids are going out not fit to fight?

Professor Dandeker: It goes back to my point about balance. It is important to have robust training to enable recruits, once they have been trained, to survive in demanding conditions. Indeed, it is a duty of care of the trainers to ensure that people can survive those difficult circumstances and that that which is seen as tough on the day may actually save their life later on in an operation. Going back to Hew's point, I think I agree with him that the dominant mood in the public is an enormous respect for the Armed Services, for their courage, for their resilience, and not least for their competence in being able to deal with things that are very demanding and take place in difficult circumstances and are often politically controversial operations, a point to which I will return. That having been said, those same opinion polls do show that some significant sections of the population find some aspects of the Armed Forces, some of their culture, some of their ways of doing things, anachronistic and that provides an opening for, if you like, the Deepcut effect to erode some of those sectors of the public even though they are strongly in support of the Armed Services.

Chairman: I want to move on, I am afraid, because we have a lot of ground to cover. Is your question absolutely essential, Kevan?

Mr Jones: It is, yes. In the last Parliament three members of the Committee were part of the year-long inquiry into Deepcut and the duty of care which I think one of you were involved in. There is a big difference, is there not, between robust training and some of the appalling cases that we came across (although there was a minority of instances, I have to say), so I have dismissed completely the nonsense that Adam Holloway put forward.

Mr Holloway: I know a bit about it.

Mr Jones: You might do, but from some of the cases we went through and some of the families we spoke to, I am sorry, I do not think you have justified some of the things we discovered, and I reiterate that this is a minority of things. What we found during that inquiry, and is it not part of the general perception, is that society has moved on, it has become more questioning and less deferential, yet possibly the Army, or certain sections of it, is still stuck back in some type of nirvana of the 1950s that thinks that deference and not questioning authority and having other choices in careers is perhaps --- my colleague says public school attitudes are still prevalent.

Mr Hancock: Overweight public school attitudes in the officer corps.

Q8 Chairman: Would you like to answer that briefly? Be as quick as possible, please, because we have got a lot of work to get through in less than half an hour.

Professor Dandeker: My brief response to that is that I think the Armed Forces are much more aware of that post-deferential climate to which reference has been made and therefore of the need for the Armed Services to be very clear and principled in terms of describing how the Army is rather different from civilian society and why it needs to be so; it is not different because of tradition but because of its operational need and I think for the cohort of officers that have come through over the last ten years that is second nature to them. They recognise the society and how to adjust to it.

Q9 Mr Hancock: I would like to go back to the previous report, particularly the Deepcut one, and the previous retention report we did. One of the things that was brought up time and time again was that the threshold for recruitment had been lowered, the educational requirement and in some cases the fitness requirement had been lowered, so it became a real shock to people when they had been recruited what they were going to go through, and part of the problems experienced not only at Deepcut but throughout the military was the fact that they had recruited people who maybe ten years previously or maybe a little longer than that would not necessarily have got over the threshold of being recruited in the first place and that the military were not equipped to deal with this quality of recruit, and that is why so much of the bullying took place which was identified not just at Deepcut but throughout the Armed Forces although, as Kevan rightly says, a minority of people were involved. That was given to us as one of the real issues that the military had not been able to deal with.

Professor Dandeker: I would just say that on both sides of the Atlantic there is a persistent problem of how to recruit sufficient numbers of people to the Armed Forces and that certain compromises are made in terms of quality and therefore adjustments have to be made in terms of the recruitment and training regimes to allow that decline or dilution of quality to be made up without sacrificing the overall quality of people who come out at the other end of the training.

Q10 Chairman: Professor Strachan?

Professor Strachan: I would make two very quick points. One is that the shift to more active operations in itself takes some of the heat out of this argument, it seems to me. One of the difficulties in peacetime training is that the Army's declared need to be different becomes less self-evidently in need of defending if the need to be different is more robustly in the public's mind, which is the consequence of current operations. The second point I would make is that there is clearly a distinction between the hierarchical change of command and the pressures that that can generate, the patterns of behaviour, which are seen to be central to the management of operations by the Armed Forces, and personnel issues, many of which could be divorced, it seems to me, from the command chain. I know that is not a view that the Armed Forces themselves fully accept. They would see that the management of personnel is essentially good command, and I can see exactly where they are coming from in making that argument, but there are points where these two things could be distinguished and maybe one of the messages that the Armed Forces should take back, when and if the operational tempo declines, is the need only to defend what has to be defended rather than find itself in the position of having to defend things that are indefensible, and it has made the mistake of doing that in the past.

Q11 Robert Key: Historically is there a relationship between the public perception of a popular or an unpopular war and recruitment and retention?

Professor Strachan: Good question. I would say recruitment and retention are probably more directly linked to the employment and unemployment situation, in other words, what the market is doing. This country has actually fought in very few deeply unpopular wars. All our recent experience has been very much in wars of national necessity and I think we probably have to go back to the South African war to find a war that generated as much internal division as these wars have done. Ironically, that particular war did generate great popular enthusiasm for recruitment and voluntary enlistment despite division at home about the legitimacy of the war. I would say one of the reasons for that is that South Africa self-evidently was within the Empire and an area of British colonial settlements, so it was rather different from Iraq and Afghanistan.

Q12 Robert Key: Has it made it significantly harder for the Ministry of Defence and the Services to manage this problem in an age of instant media coverage of everything that is happening, embedded journalists and media, mobile phones and photographs, the internet and websites and all of that?

Professor Strachan: We have been involved in a study at Oxford that has been looking at precisely this issue, the critical moment between breaking news on websites, blogs and all the rest of it and how Government reacts, and, of course, the crucial issue is that the Ministry of Defence is put into a reactive position rather than a proactive position. That in a way has been the Ministry of Defence's natural position anyway pre-mobile telephones and blogs and instantaneous newspaper reporting, and there does seem to be a need to think more proactively about how you manage these issues and how you engage with the public than we currently have within the Armed Forces in particular but more generally within the Ministry of Defence. I do not think it is a uniformed Armed Forces issue. On the whole the uniformed Armed Forces are very good at communicating from operational theatres.

Professor Dandeker: I have two quick comments. There is an argument on your point about recruitment. It may well be merely action and operations that have a positive effect rather than the popularity of a campaign, just the presence of action and deployments. There was a blip after the Falklands War which I think was not so much due to the popularity of a particular operation; it is just that the presence of action can encourage risk-takers amongst the young to join. So far as the breaking news phenomenon is concerned, this connects back to the quality of recruitment and there is a tension there, I think, that on the one hand contemporary operations in the light of Hew's comments about media pressures mean that soldiers are much more under scrutiny, under pressure, not so much from people in the conflict area but about how their actions are going to be judged, pretty instantaneously, and ensuring that one recruits and trains people able to deal with those sorts of operational pressures and media pressures is a telling point for the future.

Q13 Robert Key: So would it help the situation if members of our Armed Forces were to be encouraged to wear their uniforms more in public (except in Peterborough) and is the idea of an Armed Forces Day a sensible approach to the problem?

Professor Strachan: I think it always makes sense for members of the Armed Forces to wear their uniforms in public, although I have to say you do not want to go as far as an American general the other day who came to see me in Oxford, who insisted on turning up in college in uniform and was dissuaded, fortunately, at the last moment. I think it would be helpful, and, of course, again we are in a situation, which the Peterborough example, shows where a minority is taken to represent the views of the majority. I know the majority would be perfectly happy to see members of the Armed Forces wear uniforms in public in exactly the same way as they are in other countries. I am less in favour of an Armed Forces Day, I have to say, because that does seem to me a certain amount of fig-leaf posturing and we do have Remembrance Sunday which is designed to be a day when we commemorate the dead and where the Armed Forces collectively benefit. I am less certain of the value of that which could become yet another day for neglect and abuse (I mean abuse by neglect) rather than proper attention.

Q14 Robert Key: I was very sorry to see that the Ministry of Defence had downgraded visits by the Forces to our schools and the withdrawal of the teams and putting it all on the internet, and now we hear the NUT is debating today whether or not we should allow the military into our schools, which in my constituency will go down like a lump of lead because we are such a military community.

Professor Strachan: I think there are already many areas of the country where it is difficult for the military to get into schools. This is not a new phenomenon. I think though it highlights something that is central to where we should look for responses, and that is at the regional level rather than the national level. There is a tendency to think of the issues we are confronting as somehow coming out from London and being UK-generated, and I am sorry if I am going off at a tangent in relation to where the Chairman necessarily wishes to be, but I think at the moment we have Armed Forces that are regionally located. The Navy is concentrated in the south of England and round Faslane, the Air Force historically has been down the east coast of England and so on, and the result is that the rest of the United Kingdom has a very low awareness of the presence of the Armed Forces, even if they were to wear uniform in public, just because they are not around. The diminution of the Reserve Forces is another reason for that being the case, and yet there is often within local communities (not necessarily within particular schools but there is no reason why it should not be within schools) a readiness to embrace local representation in the Armed Forces if the opportunity is there.

Robert Key: So it is not a postcode problem here in terms of saying that there are some areas where the military are popular in schools and in the community and in other areas not? It is just because they are either there or not there? You are not suggesting that there are deliberate policies by particular local authorities, say, to keep the police and the military out of their schools?

Q15 Chairman: To add to that, you said there were many areas where the Armed Forces could not get in. Which are those areas?

Professor Strachan: When I was Professor of Modern History at Glasgow we certainly had issues in the Reserve Forces Committee of the Reserve Forces Association on which I served where there were schools in the west of Scotland which would not accept visits.

Q16 Mr Jones: That is one example. I have to say you are making this an issue which I do not recognise from my own community.

Professor Strachan: I did not say it was the whole of the United Kingdom. What I said was that there are some areas where there are problems. That is what I am trying to address. I quite recognise that it is different in other areas but we are not talking about a uniform pattern here; that is all I am saying.

Q17 Chairman: Professor Dandeker, would you like to add anything?

Professor Dandeker: I agree with Professor Strachan. I see no reason for a special Armed Forces Day, particularly as it would be like reinventing tradition and we already have well established traditions like Remembrance Day and so on. I think encouraging the wearing of uniforms is fine. I think the devil is in the detail. I think some kind of blanket, mechanical instruction is not the most helpful way of proceeding. I think encouragement is all that would be required. I also agree that even if encouragement led to great success in terms of the wearing of uniforms, the size of the Armed Forces means that you could still get significant numbers of the population who did not see a uniform, let alone what it meant. So far as the schools are concerned, and I think this is very interesting, it is well known now, particularly for the British Army, that they are aware, like other organisations who want the best and brightest of young people to come and join them, that young people get older quicker and earlier and impressions are formed quite early. It is not accident that 11-16 is a significant population. It is a malleable population. That is why there are controversies surrounding the presence of military recruiters in these sorts of environments. It goes back to a point I made earlier: they are not recruiting; they are cultivating the environment from which future recruits may come, which is a very different point.

Chairman: We are moving on to the Military Covenant.

Q18 Mr Hancock: There has been a lot of debate about the Covenant, what it means to the military, what it means to the general public. My question to both of you is how important do you believe it is and what would be the advantage of formalising a Covenant which is recognised by Parliament and the military, not just the Army but the military generally, and what would be the disadvantages of having a formalised Covenant?

Professor Strachan: I am going to leave a large chunk of this because I think it is a future issue. I am going to duck and say that historically one of the things that has struck me is that the Military Covenant is a very new expression. We peddle it as though it has always been there. I was trying to think when actually it entered public discourse and the answer is that it can only have been in the last couple of years. What was there before was the sense of unlimited liability in terms of those who sign to join up, and of course that was often stressed, to say that those who joined the Armed Services had entered into an extraordinary contract which ultimately involved the possible loss of their own lives, unlike any other form of employment, but it was presented as a one-sided contract with no expectations, extraordinarily, of a delivery from the other side of the equation. The Military Covenant is essentially the articulation of the idea that there should be a guarantee from the other side. I suppose in many other forms of employment now there is an expectation that is on both sides in terms of what should be delivered, and clearly there is now an expectation from the point of view of the British Armed Forces, but many of the issues that are raised under the Military Covenant are issues to do with specific under-provision in areas which we should be providing for, even if there were a written and adhered to Military Covenant. The issues of housing, for example, pension rights, proper support to your workforce, are issues that should be addressed whether you have a written Military Covenant or you do not have a Military Covenant. I am not entirely persuaded that there is a need for a written document and I am slightly surprised that it has become assumed that there is such a thing as a Military Covenant.

Q19 Mr Hancock: I would like to hear what Professor Dandeker thinks about the advantages and disadvantages.

Professor Dandeker: I have two or three quick points if I may. One is that when there is a discussion of the need to be explicit about some kind of contract that itself is interesting. It shows that some of the intuitive, unstated assumptions governing the relationship between military and Government and military and community have broken down when people start grasping for explicit statements, and I think that in itself is interesting. That is the first point.

Q20 Mr Hancock: Do you think that is happening now?

Professor Dandeker: I think it is. It goes on to my second point, which is that the Military Covenant involves three actors - the Armed Services themselves, the Government of the day and the wider population, each one of which has a set of expectations and, of course, responsibilities. What is interesting from the military side of the Military Covenant is that it is often regarded as a statement, "Here are we making the sacrifices. Where are you with support from the public and where are you with equipment and resources?". Thinking soldiers are very much aware that part of the deal is that military has to deliver its side of the bargain, which is not only unlimited liability, as you suggest, but also care for others, and others are those in their care but also those in their care in the field of operations, which is why, as Brigadier Aitken's report shows so clearly and is a point to which I alluded before, one of the things that can undermine the military side of the Covenant is abuse.

Chairman: We will now move on to Harmony Guidelines.

Q21 Mr Jenkin: We recently found in our report on the annual report and accounts that the failure of the Army and the RAF to achieve their Harmony Guidelines was unacceptable, so what can the Armed Forces do to improve observance of the Harmony Guidelines?

Professor Strachan: They can do very little while they are under the operational pressures they are under. One of the absurdities of the report is the expectation that Harmony Guidelines can be sustained. It is back again to the question of balanced capabilities. How do you meet Harmony Guidelines when you are sustaining two operations concurrently as well as other deployments? It seems to me an extraordinary question to ask at that time. There are other things. Of course there are palliatives that could be produced.

Q22 Mr Jenkin: Recruiting to target, for example.

Professor Strachan: Recruiting to target would certainly help but that is also integrated with the issue of how you see the Armed Forces publicly, whether your gatekeepers are encouraging their offspring to join or not join, so recruiting to target would undoubtedly help but these are palliatives rather than addressing the fundamental problem. There are still going to be pressures, particularly for certain core skills. The Royal Signals are frequently cited as an example where there is enormous pressure generated through operational tours. One of the points here is what do we think we are doing? Do we think we are in a state of war, in which case Harmony Guidelines would seem to be less relevant, or do we think we are not in a state of war but a state of peace, which underpins much of the expectation driven by Harmony Guidelines, in which case, of course, there are real issues to address. The American Armed Forces, which used to be contrasted with our Armed Forces because, of course, they had far fewer pressures in terms of operational deployments, have now gone dramatically the other way, and extraordinarily are dealing with them in a way that we would never have anticipated, partly because there is a greater perception from their point of view and probably domestically that they are at war. I quite take the point about full recruiting but there might be other issues, for example, are you able to ensure when people are at home that they are at home in terms of localisation of battalions? Where do they stay? Are they going to be, when they are not on operational tour, close to their families and so on? In some ways the regimental reorganisation has not yet delivered in terms of what it should have done or what it promised to do as far as bringing people back home is concerned. We have pressures in relation to operational tours actually to increase the length of tours in terms of getting greater expertise in theatre, particularly at senior command levels, which will only further undermine the Harmony Guidelines if you are going to meet operational requirements.

Professor Dandeker: On Harmony Guidelines, I think there is some important contextual information that needs to be remembered, which is that something between 13 and 20 per cent of personnel are in breach of Harmony Guidelines, but you can turn it round the other way, that is to say, the overwhelming majority of personnel are operating within the Harmony Guidelines. That is point one. The second point is that the Harmony Guidelines, so far as our own research is concerned, show that if you keep personnel within them their mental health does not suffer. It does suffer if you go over those guidelines, so I think the point to recall is that the great majority are within the Harmony Guidelines. I think that the Harmony Guidelines have been well constructed because the evidence suggests that if you stay within them they do not suffer; if you go beyond them there is a 20-50 per cent likelihood that they will suffer in terms of PTSD. That is an important piece of context for this inquiry to remember. Lastly, although it is not the only answer to the question, PTSD outcomes are much worse for American forces. One reason, probably one of about five, is the incredibly lengthy tours of service that they have to undergo overseas, particularly in Iraq.

Q23 Mr Crausby: Professor Strachan, you made the point earlier on that things have always been difficult since 1945. There has always been a problem of recruitment and retention, yet things have changed dramatically since 1945. We have a bigger population these days and very much less in the Armed Forces. We have the opportunity to recruit women and yet we are falling behind, so has something fundamentally not changed in society in the sense that in the 1950s, for instance, the option was to go down the coalmine, get a job in the steel mill or the foundry or join the Army? Was that not just a completely different opportunity than what new people face today? In what way are the Armed Forces addressing that?

Professor Strachan: I think that question absolutely goes to the heart of the Armed Forces problems. When you had, let us say, 80 per cent of the workforce in manual occupations, and many of them vulnerable to short term cyclical unemployment, then you could target the sorts of recruits which essentially the Army is still targeting (the Army particularly but the Armed Forces collectively) and still expecting to recruit. It is extraordinary that the growth of higher education in this country is seen as a threat to Armed Forces recruiting rather than an opportunity. That is something which I think has to be tackled much more head on and requires much more fundamental treatment. One issue, of course, is whether you have a common point of entry, which I know the Armed Forces are deeply unhappy about because they look at the police and they see that as a bad model, but somehow you have to get into the position where in loose terms middle England, which is where most people would now put themselves in terms of the aspirations of the workforce, sees it as as reasonable an option to join the Armed Forces as to go into any other walk of life, and that is not the situation at the moment. If there were that shift two things would follow. First of all, I think the issue of ethnic recruiting would be less important, simply because many ambitious ethnic minorities target the professions as appropriate courses for their offspring to follow and do not see the Armed Forces within that spectrum, and, secondly, there would be an opportunity to maximise the extraordinary privilege which the Armed Forces have at the moment compared with other potential employers, which is a direct military presence on almost every single campus throughout the United Kingdom in terms of the OTCs, the naval units and the air squadrons. Those are seen as poor relations instead of being seen as, as I say, an enormous privilege and opportunity.

Q24 Mr Crausby: But does that not just deal with officers rather than other ranks?

Professor Strachan: That is my point, that at the moment it is seen as dealing with officer recruitment, but if we are talking about highly qualified senior warrant officers, senior rates with levels of skill and specialisation in particular branches and particular technical skills, then we need to move away from that expectation. That is exactly picking up the drift of your question, that society has changed and we need to recognise that your WO2 in the Royal Logistic Corps may have a degree and not be an officer. We should be ready to embrace them.

Q25 Mr Crausby: But when you look at the proposals that the MoD give us to improve these things, there are things like "Improving the relationship between the career office network and the RAF Museums at Hendon and Cosford", "Undertaking marketing campaigns ...", "Running research programmes to understand factors affecting recruitment". In the scheme of things with this massive change in society are the MoD addressing this issue in any way realistically when only eight per cent of our Armed Forces are women?

Professor Strachan: I do not think they are addressing the issue realistically because they are still looking to recruit in the traditional pools rather than thinking how they adapt the Armed Forces to fit into where the pool of potential recruits now is. One of the reasons to do that comes back with where we began this discussion this morning, and that is that if you were, let us say, five per cent below your recruitment target, you would think, "If we can just give a little more shove in the existing framework then we will cover the gap". Five per cent is a manageable number of men and women to get to join up, but that does not deal with the underlying problem, which has been there consistently, as I have argued.

Q26 Mr Jones: I totally agree with your analysis there, but when you have a situation in the NAO report where 90 per cent of officers went to public school and three-quarters of scholarships went to public schools rather than state schools, has not the MoD and Army, if it is serious about doing what you are saying (and I do not disagree with you) in your analysis about attracting middle England, really got to get away from that public school mentality?

Professor Strachan: I would be amazed if the figure were 90 per cent but if you say it is I will accept it, but it is not my impression from looking at those who pass out from Sandhurst and comparable military academies, and I taught there myself, and even when I taught there myself 30 years ago it was not the case. There is a shift required but one of the shifts may also be - and this is why it is a chicken and egg problem - that if it were the case is it true that 90 per cent actually reflected the proportion of those applying for those places in the first place? How much success is being achieved in getting people to apply? This is not dissimilar to the argument about Oxbridge entry. One of the key difficulties is to get people to apply in the first place because you can only reflect success from those who apply. I do not know how many from non-public school backgrounds are applying.

Q27 Mr Jones: But if you are skewing all the scholarships to public schools, which is three-quarters of those, surely that is going to affect the type of applicant coming forward for those.

Professor Strachan: It might do but I am still back to the question, who applies to these scholarships?

Q28 Mr Jenkin: Do you think the Ministry of Defence wants to recruit to target and could it do so if it applied sufficient resources, because there are plenty of battalion commanders, for example, who do recruit to target but others who do not and it seems to be about where effort is applied?

Professor Dandeker: I agree with Hew on that particular point. I think the more fundamental question which Hew started off his comments with is the middle England point. What I think is an opportunity that should not be missed is to convert what is going on in the operational area, which is an erosion of any remaining distinctions between officers and senior warrant officers in terms of skill and contribution, and it is about converting that through, if you like, advertising and marketing into the opportunity to recruit from middle England. In other words, that erosion of the distinction between these ranks is already developing and needs to be converted into the market place so far as recruitment is concerned.

Mr Jenkin: Can I have an answer to my question?

Q29 Mr Hancock: Why is it then that the Ministry of Defence have not recognised that point and they are still trying to sell to that bottom end of the market the idea of coming into the Armed Forces to get educated when you have lost out in the education system? Why have they not recognised it? I think all of us have, you have, and the previous report that we did recognised that, so why have they not?

Professor Dandeker: Because I do not think they are necessarily mutually exclusive in the sense that it goes back to the controversy about schools. On the negative side there are those who argue that the military should not be "targeting" schools which include disadvantaged young people who can have their heads turned, if you like, by the "glamour" of a military career. Another way of looking at it is that here are the Armed Forces which provide all sorts of opportunities for those disadvantaged people to have a leg-up in the wider community by their military service. That is a point that could be allied to the middle England point rather than being seen as an alternative to it. We do both messages.

Professor Strachan: Mr Jenkin is waiting for a reply. Of course regiments vary, units vary, because commanding officers vary and have different priorities; you are absolutely right. The question here is how do you generalise best practice? I think there is a great deal of inbuilt pressure in the Armed Forces partly because of current pressures to think, "What am I going to do next week?" (or today) rather than, "How am I going to affect the situation a year or two years hence when I will no longer be in command of this battalion; somebody else will be doing it? I want returns in the period of my command". Secondly, the successor in appointment within the two-year maximum rotation, which is really what we are talking about in most Service jobs, will have a different order of priorities, no doubt in part a reflection of the fact that the unit may be doing something different at that particular moment, so I think there is a failure to develop continuity and develop best practice, but that in itself is part of an institutional framework which says we are running very hard to stay where we are rather than thinking where we might be.

Q30 Mr Jones: I will just correct it - nine out of ten of the top Army officers were educated at independent schools. I was correct in that three-quarters of Army scholarships in 2006/2007 went to independent schools rather than state schools. Can I pick up an issue which you raised, Professor Strachan, during the debate on the Covenant? It was really what members of the Armed Forces expect and how they articulate what they expect. There is evidence that has been put to us that the way of articulating that would be better served if there were some type of federation or organisation within the Armed Forces along the lines of the Police Federation. I wonder what your thoughts are on that.

Professor Strachan: It is what I was referring to when I said that there is resistance in the Armed Forces to having something that is outside the chain of command. My own view is that it could benefit the chain of command if you took some of these issues out of the chain of command and enabled them to be dealt with directly as employment issues. I do not see a problem with an Armed Forces federation.

Q31 Mr Jones: What issues are you talking about particularly?

Professor Strachan: I am talking about issues that are not to do with operational command. That is where much of the argument about the need to be different and so on tends to be enshrined and I think all of us would understand completely that when in a situation that is war or approximates to war something entirely different must operate, but when it comes to issues of housing, when it comes to issues of family support, when it comes to issues --- to be absurdly personal and anecdotal, at the moment I have a daughter who is in the Army and she is unable to get a mortgage because she is not deemed to have a fixed abode. Those sorts of things just seem to me to be issues that could be dealt with outside the chain of command in another form of management structure. Of course there will be issues on the borderline between command and personnel management; I entirely see that, and there will be areas of difficulty. That is not a reason for not doing it.

Professor Dandeker: I agree with that. It is important that people are involved in decision-making and thinking about the issues that affect the Armed Services. Secondly, the generations of young people who are coming into the military expect it and I think the demand for it is perfectly reasonable. If I may go back to the question that was unanswered, your question, Mr Jenkin, I think it is fair to say that regiments differ in terms of how much resource they have to put into recruiting efforts. Some regiments use their own resource and have enough to do so. Others do not and I think that is an important consideration.

Chairman: I would like now to move to the final question, the issue of ethnic minorities.

Q32 Richard Younger-Ross: Professor Dandeker, nearly ten years ago you wrote a report Diversity in the British Armed Forces: the debate over ethnic minority representation. At that time you argued that internal cultural change was required and without it targeting ethnic minorities could be counter-productive. Has the internal cultural change occurred?

Professor Dandeker: I think it has to a considerable degree. It goes back to the points that we have been talking about before, that if the military is to recruit enough people to serve then it needs to broaden its appeal. That is why diversifying the uniform is one of the titles I have used in the various things I have written on the subject. Whether that will be enough to deliver the targets that are being talked about in various publications, namely, a replication of the figure of minority ethnic communities as a percentage of overall population within the military, I think is most unlikely, and I think it is most unlikely because it is based upon a questionable premise that you should both expect and believe in the value of having, if you like, an exact copy of the statistical percentage of a group in wider society within the military. I think (and I have always argued this) that that premise is questionable. I think it is much more defensible to argue that the Armed Services should not so much seek any particular percentage of a population but stand for the values of the wider society, one of which is equal opportunity, and then see what they can do with that particular value so far as involving more and more of our diverse communities into the Armed Services. I think that is the crucial point.

Q33 Richard Younger-Ross: In your report you argue both the business case and the equality case. You now seem to be reliant on the equality case, not the business case.

Professor Dandeker: I think both will apply. Both the business case and the equality case apply. The question is finessing both of them to achieve the result you wish. All I am saying is that I think it is not credible to expect it, particularly when the new census data come out when I think the percentage of minorities in the wider community will be much higher than it is now according to the 2001 census. I think you make a rod for your own back if you ask the military to replicate that figure in its own democratic profile of the military. I think it is most unlikely that will happen and, as your own Committee's data shows us, 60 per cent of ethnic minorities are not from the UK at all; they are from the Commonwealth.

Q34 Richard Younger-Ross: In terms of the figures, the shortfall is quite dramatic. In 1999 your report said it was one per cent of six per cent of the total population. However, in that report it also pointed out that that one per cent should be taken into the recruiting pool where 19 per cent of the population of 16-24 are from an ethnic background. This is not just a matter of getting close to the figure. We are well short of it, are we not?

Professor Dandeker: We are well short of it, and I think the demography is not favouring the military's efforts because the military is running to keep still. That is to say that the democratic profile of the wider population is moving, as it were, in a direction which is more and more difficult for the Armed Services to catch up on if you exclude the ethnic minorities from the Commonwealth from your figures.

Q35 Richard Younger-Ross: Is this still the problem though of the military looking at their old recruiting policies rather than trying to diversify where they seek to recruit from?

Professor Dandeker: I think it is a mixture of supply and demand. It is not only that the Armed Services should be looking at their own culture and how they appear to populations and making sure the door is seen to be open. They also have to look at the attitudes and aspirations of those who are looking for places for work. It goes back to Professor Strachan's point: not every member of a minority ethnic community places the military as high up as certain other populations would do.

Q36 Richard Younger-Ross: Just broadening the question to both of you, the MoD has appointed religious advisers and chaplains from all major faith groups. Are those appointments working?

Professor Strachan: I do not have the knowledge to give the answer to that question but I would simply endorse what Christopher Dandeker has said. My impression is that over ten years there has been a massive change and the Armed Forces have attempted to deal with this in a much more positive and active way than has been the case in the past, and the issue may be much more whether you really can expect Armed Forces of a limited size who are recruiting as professional Armed Forces rather than through conscription fully to reflect society. One of the consequences of setting targets is that the Armed Forces may do better and may increase their numbers from ethnic minorities in absolute terms but they are still failing to meet targets, so it creates a sense of running very hard to remain in the same place.

Q37 Richard Younger-Ross: Finally, of what they have done what works best?

Professor Strachan: In terms of ethnic minority recruitment?

Q38 Richard Younger-Ross: Yes.

Professor Strachan: The most important thing, of course, has been effecting changes of attitude within those who are serving alongside those from ethnic minorities. That has been the key issue. Essentially, once that was addressed as a command issue, coming back to the distinction I was trying to make before, once those responsible for those under their command saw that that was an issue and addressed it, that changed much of the culture quite quickly, it seems to me, just as the same issues were voiced ten years ago when there was the issue of homosexuality in the Armed Forces.

Q39 Chairman: Anything to add, Professor Dandeker?

Professor Dandeker: Two quick points. Whether it is about sexual preference or women in the military, if you want to change culture it has to come from the very top of the leadership of an organisation. The evidence of that is extremely strong, and to overcome points of resistance, and points of resistance come at middle management and other middle management, not least amongst the NCOs. Secondly, I think the biggest challenge for minority recruitment in the military lies outside the military itself. That is to say, if you take my point that the Armed Services should be recruiting not according to demographic statistics, but according to some key values, like equal opportunity, and you then think about the British Armed Services, then the real question is: what does it mean to be in the British Armed Services over the next 20 years, and that is an answer that cannot be provided by the Armed Services themselves, but the wider society and the politicians together.

Q40 Chairman: May we thank you both for a fascinating evidence session. The key characteristic of it, I think, was that we could have spent a day with you and still left a huge amount uncovered and we are most grateful to you both for coming to give evidence.

Professor Strachan: May I make just two very quick observations in passing and I promise to be brief, partly in self-interest. One is that addressing the issue of the Armed Forces and society more broadly and their relationship, let us remember, this is not just an issue of Regular Forces, but Reserve Forces too, and one of the extraordinary things, it seems to me, in terms of regional representation is the very low profile, and increasing low profile, that the Reserve Forces have, partly as a direct consequence of overseas deployments and the way in which they are currently used, and I think a committee such as this needs to think about those as well as the Regular Forces. The second thing that I would say, and we have not talked about at all, is training. It is referred to in relation to Deepcut, but I am talking about pre-deployment training, training at higher levels, because it is training that is most directly affected by the levels of operational tour at the moment and it is training that seems potentially to have some aspect on the retention issue. I am raising the question because I do not know the answer to this, but, because training is a casualty of current high levels of deployment and because at the same time the real challenge is to retain senior NCOs and middle-ranking officers, to retain the sergeants and the captains essentially, then it is training at that level because it is these trained people you are seeking to deploy, it seems to me, and I have not thought through fully in my mind how these things link up, but I am quite sure there is a relationship.

Chairman: This is very powerful, concentrated stuff and we will have to reflect on it. Thank

you very much indeed.

Memoranda submitted by SSAFA, the RAF Families' Association

and the Army Families' Federation

Examination of Witnesses

Witnesses: Ms Liz Sheldon, Project Director, Forces Help, Soldier, Sailors, Airmen and Families' Association (SSAFA); Mrs Dawn McCafferty, Chairman, RAF Families Association; and Ms Julie McCarthy, Chief Executive, Army Families' Federation, gave evidence.

Q41 Chairman: Thank you very much for coming. Now, we have the Families' Federations and SSAFA and I know that the naval representative is unable to be here, but has spoken to you, so you will be able to represent that aspect as well. Could I ask you please to introduce yourselves and to say what your responsibilities are.

Mrs McCafferty: I am Dawn McCafferty. I am Chairman of the RAF Families' Federation which was established in about November last year. Prior to that, I served in the Royal Air Force for 23 years, my husband is currently serving in the Service, and my last job in the RAF was Head of Recruiting, so quite a topical subject for us to come and contribute evidence to. Obviously, my aim today is to represent RAF families and their concerns about issues that impact on retention as the serviceperson.

Ms McCarthy: My name is Julie McCarthy and I am Chief Executive of the Army Families' Federation and I have been an Army wife for 14 years, so can speak again from the heart about how families affect retention.

Ms Sheldon: I am Liz Sheldon, Director of Service Support for SSAFA Forces Help. My remit is to look after, and support, our community volunteers who worldwide support the serving community. My background is that I was married to an infantryman for 25 years and I ran the Army Families' Federation about eight years ago, so I have a lot of experience of what the practicalities are in the serving community.

Q42 Chairman: Can I begin with welfare support. There was a recent report, 1986 I think, that 28 per cent of those leaving the Services said that the quality of welfare support was one of the factors in their decision to leave. Does that reflect your experience as well?

Ms Sheldon: Yes, it is our experience that many people find it difficult sometimes to access welfare support, particularly if it is of a uniformed source. We have a confidential support line which we provide under contracts to the MoD and many of our contacts voice their concerns about actually contacting the system direct; they find it not so easy and they just feel they have more confidence going into an external agency which is independent of the chain of command.

Ms McCarthy: I think there have been improvements recently. The Operational Welfare Package, which came in recently that the three Services all use while a unit is away on deployment, has made a huge impact, especially for the work of the Unit Welfare Officer, and, I think, from a uniformed point of view, that has improved the service that they are able to provide. If we could see that when units are not on deployment and are still under a lot of pressure with training and on courses and doing the stuff in between, I think that would make an enormous amount of difference to families certainly.

Mrs McCafferty: I think the difficulty for families is that there is an awful lot of stuff out there for them to call upon, but it is actually finding access to it, understanding where to go, particularly if you have just joined the military family, say, you have just married and your partner has now been deployed and you are left behind perhaps with a young baby, and knowing where to go to for that welfare support can be quite challenging. Actually, we try through the Federations and through SSAFA to provide routes to signpost people to the best welfare facilities that are available for them. There is a lot there, but it is just making sure that people know how to access it correctly.

Q43 Mr Holloway: Can you give us some examples of the sort of things that happen to these people that are behind this statistic?

Ms McCarthy: Behind them not being able to get the welfare support?

Q44 Mr Holloway: Behind people expressing this as a factor for the reason that people would leave. Could you give some examples of the sort of things that happen?

Ms McCarthy: I think frequently it is where there are marriage difficulties, where there are relationship difficulties, and I think it comes back again to Liz's point; it is getting help, especially if you are overseas, so your access to things like Relate. Actually, having the family support network is a huge thing, I think, which is often underestimated, that the majority of families that are within the Forces and are following the Forces, they are away from the traditional support network of their family, so they will look on the Service that they are with to provide that, and I think in times of difficulty in marriage or when you are having a child, that is all swept up in that and it can be very, very difficult then, I think, to not have it to fall back on. Of course, then it is somebody in uniform, so it is knowing, as we said, and being able to get hold of, somebody and overseas it is very, very difficult. I think there are long waiting lists for things like Relate and there are not the possibilities of going outside of the Service because you are in that community and, unless you speak German or unless you speak Greek, you are in trouble if you are in Germany or Cyprus. I think that would be one of the major points. Also, although things have improved massively with JACCC(?), if you are abroad and a close member of your family is ill, at that time getting the support you feel you may need to get back to see your close family member who is ill or dying can be very, very difficult. I think that is a huge amount and it is often the influence of the external family, the family at home, that is when that welfare support will have let them down.

Mrs McCafferty: I think the welfare umbrella as well covers an awful lot in that people maybe are citing that on their exit surveys, but it actually covers things like the education of their children, support when they are moving house, trying to find a new home, financial problems. There is an awful lot there underneath that term 'welfare' and how they have characterised their reason for leaving as 'lack of welfare provision'.

Ms Sheldon: Picking up on Julie's point about the Operational Welfare Package, yes, I am sure that has made massive improvements, but I have heard professionals and I have had professionals say to me that, once the operations have come to an end and the package also comes to an end, the problems still continue. In fact, very often mental health issues which have started off during an operation deployment may still be simmering way below the surface, so in fact problems are sort of swept up and they do not come to an end when the deployment ends and actually those are still sort of bubbling away and need to be identified and supported. Let me give you an example actually of a situation I came across in Germany last week. I picked up that IV Brigade, which is closing in Osnabruck as the base is closing down at Osnabruck, is moving back to Catterick. The brigade will have been on operational tour in Iraq for six months and they will have three weeks when they get back literally to pack up and move over to Catterick, so they will lose their post-tour leave and, during that time, the families have gone through all sorts of strains and stresses, as will the servicemen, and they have got this on top of all the strains and stresses associated with a really big move to Catterick. That, to me, symptomises where welfare support really is failing, it is failing the families.

Q45 Chairman: So those are some of the problems.

Ms Sheldon: Some of the problems.

Q46 Chairman: What are some of the solutions? How do we improve welfare support and obviously try to avoid a decision like that?

Mrs McCafferty: For example, we have talked about Relate and the Royal Air Force is working at the moment on a trial with the RAF Benevolent Fund to provide Relate at unit level, but it is only a trial and I am sure it is quite restricted. I do not know exactly how much money is being spent on doing this, but it is that sort of resourcing, if that could be delivered to all military units as a given, that it will be on your unit, it will be funded. You could take all sorts of examples of community support projects that actually many of the wives and partners initiate because they recognise the need and they will create self-help groups, but actually providing support to that sort of activity would, I think, help an awful lot.

Ms McCarthy: I think that there is a lot within the Army unit about stability that perhaps things like super-garrisons in the next 20 or 30 years will give, and I think with some of that, if we do see that stability, for those elements of the Armed Forces that are stable, there will be a number of the welfare issues which will resolve themselves, if you like, because people will integrate within the community and it will be a little bit easier and you have not got the moving every two years. For those still moving, I think there needs to be still a very comprehensive welfare package that, whilst units are rarely(?) deployed, there are a number of small units who do not have unit welfare officers, who do not have people who are single-hatted in that role and who are not given the resources that they need and the proper training, more importantly, as well. It is training not just for the unit welfare officers, but for their whole office to know how to deal with the myriad things that they get coming through their door.

Ms Sheldon: I would like to comment on this and actually I would like to pick up on the comment by Hew Strachan which is that actually the MoD do not have the capacity really to handle many of the welfare issues that come to their door, and really what they need is to have a welfare support infrastructure which provides seamless support to families wherever they go and servicemen and which also embraces the wider family. We are getting many, many parents now contacting us because they just feel completely out of the loop and they are parents of many of the younger recruits that people are concerned about. The issue is that at the moment we have got three Services which operate their personal welfare support differently. At the moment, this is accepted by MoD under the Armed Forces' personnel overarching strategy, for good reasons, I am sure, but it means that there is not a continuity, there is not a sort of streamlined approach to handling welfare issues and, when you have got people moving in and out of joint operations, back-filling between different units, it actually can bring an incredible hardship and an inconsistency sometimes in the way in which rules are applied.

Mrs McCafferty: We had an example of that recently where we had an RAF family where the individual was deployed overseas, but on a joint unit, and, therefore, actually the lead for welfare was Army which is a very different system from the way the Royal Air Force do things when people are deployed, and the family were expecting the same provision as an RAF unit and it was not delivered. They felt very isolated, very left out and in fact contacted us for help and advice and we had to then go and investigate and find out. Actually, it was not that the Army were not providing, it is just that they did it in a different way which was not necessarily conducive to what the RAF family felt they needed and were used to because, as Liz said, the three Services have a different welfare support system.

Chairman: We will come on to that later on because it may well be a real issue.

Q47 Robert Key: I specifically wanted to explore this a little bit further. What is your relationship with the Army Welfare Service and the other welfare services because, in my experience, whenever budgets have been tight, the first to go is the Army Welfare Service which puts more of a burden on to you and very often, if you are not in the right place at the right time, there is not an adequate Welfare Service Officer or team to back up problems, crises, families and issues?

Ms McCarthy: I think one of the major issues that particularly the Army Welfare Service have at the moment is recruitment and recruiting the right people at the right time. I think they have seen, especially with the operational commitments of the Army, an increase in their budget to allow them to expand what they are doing. We do have a very good relationship with the Welfare Service and we do signpost them frequently and I think probably a role that the Families' Federations have particularly is that, although people come to us because they are not sure they want somebody outside of the uniformed circle, I think SSAFA are probably the people who then pick up if there are shortfalls.

Ms Sheldon: Yes, we provide secondary personal support and welfare support in the UK to the Army Welfare Service and we provide professional social workers who provide that sort of back-up where the Army Welfare Service does not have that sort of expertise. Our experience is that actually some of the Army welfare support is very good, some of it is quite patchy, and I think it really depends on who they have been able to recruit and also how speedily they are able to put people in place. We saw this actually at Birmingham about a year ago when the welfare support there was very, very tight and I know that the Army Welfare Service was very pushed to get people into the hospital quickly.

Q48 Robert Key: Directly following on from this, Wiltshire County Council Social Services spend about £1/2 million a year supporting Army families in the community. That is the third pillar, is it not? It is yourselves, the welfare services and the county council or local authority social services. How do you interact with the local authority social services?

Mrs McCafferty: In the RAF, we would do it through SSAFA because we have a contract with SSAFA, I say "we", the RAF has a contract with SSAFA to provide that professional expertise and they would be our gateway because, in the Federation, there are only six of us and none of us is qualified in social work and we do not necessarily understand those structures, so we would signpost towards SSAFA and they would then open the doors to find provision. The other route I can take is that, because we are part of the Royal Air Force Association, I can also tap into the RAFA network for support if I need that.

Q49 Robert Key: But your professional social workers whom you employ, how do they interact with the county?

Ms Sheldon: Well, they would link in with, and defer to, the social local authority, as appropriate, and yes, they have links and they work very closely with them.

Mrs McCafferty: The RAF has community development workers and they are professionally qualified and their remit is to go out and liaise with local authorities to talk about provision to a local community.

Q50 Mr Jenkin: It may be easier perhaps if one of you, or jointly, could prepare us a note that explains this because there is quite a large number of Service charities that support Armed Services personnel. How do you all fit together and how do you dovetail with the Government and how does it actually work? I think it would be useful to have your perspective on that.

Ms Sheldon: Well, the Federation of British Service Charities, COBSEO, is supposed to be the co-ordinating mechanism for all 120, I think at last count, Service charities. Within MoD, at the centre, in SPPoL, there is a staff officer whose role it is to co-ordinate charitable activity to link in with MoD priorities, but that is an area which needs a lot of work, and they also tie in with COBSEO. Therefore, we try as best as possible to share it or to share information within that sort of mechanism, but there is a lot of work that needs to be done.

Q51 Mr Jenkin: Do you work better with each other than you do with the Government, bluntly?

Mrs McCafferty: Yes.

Ms McCarthy: Yes.

Ms Sheldon: Yes, we do.

Q52 Mr Jenkin: Are there areas which you are undertaking as charities which you feel the Government should be doing, and can you briefly describe what those areas would be?

Ms McCarthy: From my point of view as a Families' Federation, I think we see ourselves sort of independent and this is not something that the Government could do. We are there to lobby the Government or the MoD and say, "What the MoD are doing is disadvantaging families", and I think we come from that very sort of special point, and I think Kim would say the same for the Naval Families' Federation as well.

Mrs McCafferty: I think we all value the independence. Although I am funded through an RAF budget, we are independent of the chain of command, hence I can send my evidence to you at the push of a button and nobody checks it before it comes. When I was in the RAF, it would have gone through about six layers of staffing before it got anywhere close to you, so it is the independence, and that is what the families feel, that they can come to us about issues of concern to them and they know that we can talk direct on their behalf, so it is not necessarily providing a charity. I think perhaps SSAFA would be different, but the three Families' Federations have a unique role. You talked earlier about an Armed Forces' Federation and we believe we take that role from a families' perspective; we represent the families independently.

Ms McCarthy: There are areas, I believe, that the Government should be stepping up, such as mental health, if you look at what combat stress is doing particularly, and things like that, but perhaps more in our veteran community I think there is much more that they could be doing there. In terms of the Service community, picking up on Robert's point about what Wiltshire County Council do, I think there are a lot of local authorities who very much think, "Well, that's Army families and that's all RAF families, the Forces, so that would be dealt with by the Forces", and they sort of perhaps back away from their responsibilities and what they should be doing.

Ms Sheldon: SSAFA comes from a very different angle because our remit is to relieve need, suffering and distress where the public funding is not able to do so and to move quickly. As an example, we have set up Norton House in Ashtead so that families can stay when wounded patients are having treatment at Headley Court.

Q53 Mr Jenkin: Is that not an example of something that, in an ideal world, the Government would be paying for?

Ms Sheldon: I think we would all agree that ideally that would be the case, but you then hope that by what you do in showing where there is a need and where perhaps people should think about changing policy, then hopefully that will bring about change, but it is not our job in SSAFA to bring about the change in policy. We can only hope that the Families' Federations can raise those issues and, in the meantime, until policy can be changed, which can take ages, then we will help the Service community.

Q54 Mr Jenkin: But the very fact of your being there, does that not actually discourage the Government from taking on these additional responsibilities because, "Oh, we can put that on to the charities; they'll do that"?

Mrs McCafferty: I think the charities are becoming quite robust in terms of drawing a line and actually saying, "No, that isn't our business". They have to be because they have got limited resources as well and the charities themselves have got to raise funds.

Ms Sheldon: This is a very, very low-key example. One of our volunteer networks was approached in the south of England for funding to help repaint accommodation, servicemen's accommodation. Now, that is where we definitely drew the line and said, "No, this is a public funding issue. Sure, it is not very nice when you come back from deployment and your barrack block looks pretty ropy, but I'm afraid that is not what our charitable funding is all about", so we were pretty clear.

Q55 Mr Crausby: You make quite an important point about lobbying. Do you see yourselves as lobbying organisations in the absence of your partners not being able to lobby? Do you see that as a substitute or do you see yourselves as organisations that should provide support to Service personnel?

Mrs McCafferty: I think both. Yes, we have been established to represent the families' perspective, and that includes the Service person who is a part of the family, which is quite a cultural change for the RAF. It used to just be the dependants and the partners, but, since the set-up of our new Federation, we represent the serving family member too, as long as what we are representing is a family-related issue, and that is quite broad. If you think, most things have a tenuous link to family if they are to do with parents or siblings or children and dependants, so yes, we are there to represent their concerns, and that is one of the reasons that we are here today, but also to support them. When the families come to us and they have a problem, they have an issue, not only do we capture the evidence and put that into a report, but actually we then try and find a way to help them resolve that issue, and that might be turning to the Royal Air Force, in my regard, talking to the community support staff, to the policy staff, or it might be going externally to SSAFA or to the Royal Air Force Association, and it is for us to determine how best to support that individual and that family, so we do both. We are not just a lobby group and I would not want to characterise us as that because we are doing an awful lot of fairly low-level, but very important, welfare support.

Q56 Mr Holloway: Just to go back to Liz's comment about the accommodation at Headley Court, surely it is not a big deal that the charities are doing these things because they probably do it better than anybody else could, but surely it is a question of, when they do it, whether or not they get cash from the Government for things that the Government ought to be funding. In the Headley Court case, has there been a struggle to get cash?

Ms Sheldon: Well, we would hope very much that MoD might, in time, assist us with some funding towards running costs, but, in the meantime, we are raising funds to cover these through fund-raising and other charitable expenditure.

Q57 Mr Holloway: But most people would probably think that that was a pretty reasonable thing for taxpayers' money to be spent on.

Ms Sheldon: Yes, I would agree with that.

Chairman: We are now moving on to Reserves because you heard either Professor Strachan or Professor Dandeker say that Reserves were very important to the Armed Forces.

Q58 Richard Younger-Ross: The National Audit Office found that many Reservists cite personal, family and employment pressures as well as inadequate support as reasons for leaving the Armed Forces, and I think SSAFA's own submission notes that the families of the Territorial Army and Reservists have similar welfare concerns. What more can be done and what more needs to be done to support Reservists?

Ms Sheldon: I think it is very difficult to reach people within the communities where they are based. I gave the reasons before that, from SSAFA's perspective, we have a network of volunteers across the UK who could be deployed to provide low-level befriending support for families because very often people are coming to terms with an experience which is supportive within the serving community and they do not have a network of people going through a similar experience of anxiety and loneliness which they will be doing on their own, so sometimes all it needs is actually a friendly face to call upon and say, "Hey, I'm feeling really lonely. Can you pop round? I am really anxious and I haven't heard from my son for a few weeks and I just hope he's okay". It is sometimes just helpful to have that reassuring contact and it is really, I think, having a mechanism to put these people in touch, not just with us, but also with other organisations that provide support as well which can just help to sustain people through a very difficult period.

Ms McCarthy: The biggest problem is the footprint of the units at this sort of level because you may have for a TA unit families all over England and Scotland and that is their biggest issue, that the ROSO, the Regional Operational Support Officer, does not have the resources probably - we are back again to resources - to be able to contact. Certainly we have found when we speak to some of the TA families, we have a specialist who works with TA Reserve Forces, and one of the biggest things actually is communication from the soldiers themselves as well. The Regular Forces have a lot more influence on their soldiers, shall we say, to be able to get them to take information home which I do not think the TA have. Something that we are working on is the Family Support Groups which we are presenting on Saturday to the Future Reservists Conference which is actually trying to empower the units themselves to start collecting this information and, as Liz said, just to put people in touch. I do not think it is something particularly that the chain of command can do; it is a wife wanting to talk to a wife or a sister to talk to somebody who knows what they are going through. It is very much having somebody that you can just pick up the phone to, and the hope that they will have somebody close is not necessarily a realistic one for TA families, but at least, if we can put somebody at the end of a phone, at the end of an email, I think that is one of the key things. I think what we need from the MoD side is the facilitation of that and help with that to make things like Army.net much more accessible to our TA families. It is quite difficult for the Regular families to access, so the TA families probably find it very, very difficult.

Mrs McCafferty: I would echo what has been said. I think there is a very small percentage with the RAF, but they are a uniquely difficult group to reach and you have to assume that the partners and the families do not actually understand anything about the military lifestyle because they have not chosen to volunteer at the weekends and become a Royal Auxiliary Air Force Officer and disappear off and do exciting things, but they are just carrying on with their normal lives. It is only when their partner is deployed or there is an issue where they need support, suddenly they do not know who to turn to and, as I say, it is facilitating information to them, a welfare package that they can tap into when they need it, but also respecting the fact that they do not necessarily want it forced down their throats. There has to be a respect for the fact that they are in their own community and we need to be there when they need us, but not necessarily be constantly inviting them or sending them lots of information. If you are in the Regular cadre and you are on the patch, you can have families' briefings, you can have pre-deployment briefings, the families are brought together, you can tell them what is going on and it is far more effective than relying on the soldier or the airman to take that information home because they just do not, they just do not tell them what is going on. The Reservists are another layer away from us and, as Julie said, they could be at the other end of the country from the parent unit to which that Service person has been deployed.

Chairman: Talking about the patch, let us move on to the role of families in general.

Q59 Mr Holloway: It seems that a lot of the dissatisfaction is as a result of disruption. Could you give us a flavour of the sort of disruption that families suffer, maybe some specific examples?

Mrs McCafferty: Every 18 months to two years in the RAF, you are going to be posted on, not necessarily to an area of choice. When you move, you have to make a decision whether to leave your family behind and then live unaccompanied, living in a mess or a barrack block, or you take the family with you. Depending on that family dynamic, you have possibly got a wife or partner who wants to follow her own career and now cannot find work, you have got access to dentists, access to doctors, access to accommodation, you may find that the quarters are not in very good condition where you are going, you may want to buy your own home and find that that is very difficult, you may have special needs for your children and getting access to that can be very problematic if, every two years or so, you are changing location. It goes right the way across a whole raft of things that we touched on in the written evidence that we sent, that mobility and lack of stability that Julie mentioned earlier, it pervades everything in your family lifestyle.

Q60 Mr Holloway: Can you give some specific examples?

Ms McCarthy: Some of the quotes that we have had from the research that we did when we knew we were coming to do this is one where they said it was better to start with, but, when faced with a late posting and all the uncertainty that goes with moving to somewhere where there is no Army housing and all the nonsense that that brings with it or, much worse, also being posted to a TA unit, there is no support, so it is the out-of-normal ones. My son is eight years old and he is on his fourth school and that is a major issue that most families find.

Mrs McCafferty: My daughter did three schools in three terms when she was four and five and all she wanted to know was, "What colour's the uniform, mum?" She just could not understand that it was a new school and a completely new location. It is just timing, but the disruption to children's schooling is massive. Most people do try and take their primary schoolchildren with them and it is only really when it gets to the 11-year-olds that the big decisions are made about buy a house and stabilise or the boarding school option potentially, if you can afford that. You have got lots of primary school-kids who are literally being picked up mid-term and moved for a couple of years and then on. My little boy is in a primary school at RAF Cranwell at the moment which is about 80 per cent RAF children based there and he is consistently coming home and telling me that his best friend is posted, "But he'll be back next year, mum", and they are going off, doing a training course for a year and then they are coming back, and the disruption is massive to children.

Q61 Mr Holloway: So what sort of things could we be doing in order to aid retention in these extraordinary circumstances?

Mrs McCafferty: Extend tours, I think. Tour lengths could be longer certainly for the officer cadre.

Q62 Mr Holloway: What else?

Ms McCarthy: I think looking at the Work of Service Personnel Command Paper, in terms of education, some of the changes that are made sort of applying for children to school. For most people, you need to apply in the March for your child to enter school in September. It is not a realistic expectation. Most Army families do not know where they are going until about six weeks before, by which point the school that you may want your child to go to - we moved recently and my nearest school was five miles away and I was very, very lucky that a child dropped out at the last minute, another Army family dropped out because of a late posting and I got my child into the nearest school, but potentially I was driving five miles.

Q63 Chairman: We covered a lot of this extremely important issue in our Educating Service Children Report last year and we had some wonderful evidence from some of the children themselves. What are some of the non-education issues that you would highlight?

Mrs McCafferty: Moved-on careers or jobs for partners and spouses. Again, if they want to stay co-located with their partner, they are faced with giving up that job. In the old days, say, ten or 15 years ago, if you were perhaps a nurse, a midwife or a teacher, you were perhaps expected to be able to transfer jobs reasonably easily, or with a big bank you might be able to transfer, but these do not happen so easily nowadays and there are a lot of partners coming to us, saying, "For his career, I have sacrificed mine". That is one of the quotes that came out of our AFPRB work, "I cannot have my own career". We are also finding evidence now of senior officers and senior NCOs who are effectively leaving the RAF to say, "It is now my partner's turn to have her career because she's followed me for 20 years and it's now her turn", and the wives, many of them, are earning more than their partners anyway and it is time for them to stabilise and let them have a career.

Q64 Mr Holloway: Going forward from here then, do you think that these sorts of minor horror stories, although very big for the families in question, will have an effect on recruiting?

Mrs McCafferty: I think, as I said in my evidence, anything that is bad news in the media in terms of families, whether it is accommodation or it is Deepcut or it is alleged bullying, anything like that is going to have an impact, not necessarily on the youngsters who are thinking about joining up, but on the gatekeepers. When I was in the Service, heading recruiting, it was about three years ago, 40-odd per cent of parents would not encourage their children to join the Armed Forces. That is a massive percentage. That cuts out an awful lot of potential children who might come to join the Armed Forces.

Ms Sheldon: I think parents are playing an increasingly major part and the wider extended family are playing a major part in whether or not they encourage their children to stay or even join the Services. If you think about some of the parents of people who are being seriously injured on operations and their reactions to how well they have been supported or not which have hit the headlines, I think those will have a knock-on effect on other members of the community. I would also just like to pick up again on the previous discussion about the profile of the military in terms of recruiting, our presence in the schools and universities. I think the issue that all the Service community has is actually increasingly now seen as very sort of completely separate and almost divorced from the rest of society, so access to education and to healthcare for them is not really recognised because actually most people think, "Well, yes, we've got this access", and the very mobile, highly transient population, many of whom are under a lot of pressure, is very small and almost sort of hidden in a way, and I think that is a real danger if the community is seen to be separate and not actually fully accepted within the wider society.

Mrs McCafferty: Certainly we have had evidence from families who say that, if they live out in the community, and about 45 per cent of the RAF live in quarters and the other sort of percentage live out in their own homes, they do not necessarily feel able to speak out openly about what their partners do because of that sense of pride. They have a huge sense of pride in what their partners are up to, but they do not necessarily feel that that community around them may share that, so you find that a lot of them do not actually talk a great deal about the fact that their partner is deployed in Iraq or is currently a pilot in the Royal Air Force or an engineer or whatever. I think that is very sad, that they do not feel able to be proud of what their partners are doing, but there is a certainly a sense that it is not something that they would go and shout about to their neighbours and, therefore, they are very isolated. If things do go wrong and the partner is injured, they do not feel that in that network, that community, there is going to be a lot of understanding and sympathy for them because people just do not understand what they are going through.

Q65 Mr Holloway: That takes me on slightly. To what extent do you think the attitudes of people's partners have on people staying? I remember coming back on a Tri-Star and one of the crew telling me at the reception of the families of the Tri-Star fleet that "these knackered, old aircraft are dangerous". The fact that someone's husband or wife, whatever, might get killed or they felt a particular military involvement was somehow unjust or illegal, to what extent does that have an effect on people staying in?

Ms McCarthy: I think it has an enormous effect, not perhaps so much for our younger soldiers, but I think definitely for the middle management that we talked about before, for sergeants, captains and majors. I know that with most of my peers, the spouse has said, "Do you know, I've had enough. This is not going forward". There are very few that would last a separated tour. Most will then try settling the family and commuting to wherever their posting is and very few that I know that have done that have actually lasted more than a couple of tours. Either the family has disintegrated and they have ended up being divorced or the husband or wife has said, "This isn't working. I'm leaving the Service", and I think there is a massive influence on the families.

Mrs McCafferty: I think especially where the harmony guidelines are being breached routinely, it is the partners and spouses who are the ones who are saying, "Enough's enough". The individual very often, the serviceman, is quite happy to deploy. He is enjoying it, he is putting his training to good use and he is getting a great deal of job satisfaction out of area, but the family are then faced with him coming home, unpacking his bags and, guess what, he is off again in another six months or so. I have certainly had senior NCOs come to me and say, "If you give me that deployment order again, ma'am, I'm going to have to go home and face divorce" because it gets to the stage where the families say, "Let's do this. Enough is enough". The families are very supportive when they go, they are very proud of what the guys are doing, but, if you push it too far, then I think the families break down and then you are left with all of the baggage that that creates and all of the welfare support that SSAFA have to pull in to support that, or they leave, they get told to leave, an ultimatum from the partners.

Ms Sheldon: Certainly our statistics show that there has been a massive increase in marital breakdown, relationship problems and emotional issues that people are bringing to us, possibly exacerbated by operational tours, but that is not to get away from the fact that the constant sorts of stresses and pressures of Service life on families put those relationships under enormous stress.

Q66 Linda Gilroy: I think you were listening to Professor Dandeker and he contrasted the situation in the UK with the US where he said he felt that more probably for communities the country was at war in the US than it is here. How does it feel to you? Are we at war?

Ms McCarthy: That is probably very difficult for us to answer as we are within the communities most of the time. I think our reply would probably be yes, but whether the general public feel that, no, I do not think they do see that. I think it is something that happens on another continent.

Mrs McCafferty: "It is nothing to do with us" almost, "just to do with them, those Armed Forces people".

Chairman: Can we move on to remuneration.

Q67 Mr Crausby: In the face of all of those issues about welfare and families, it makes me wonder why anyone stays in at all really, so I suppose the question I am going to ask is: is it just for the money? It cannot be just for the money because that is not the feeling that I get when I talk to members of the Armed Forces and that, whilst the money is important, it is not just for the money. What impact does the remuneration package have on someone's decision to stay, or leave, the Forces?

Ms McCarthy: We have surveyed 468 spouses and not one of them cited money as the reason for their spouse leaving the Army. It may be a small factor, but I do not think it would ever be the factor. Similarly, we had a quote that, "Bad housing may not be the one factor that drives us out of the Army, but good housing would go a long way to keeping us in", and I think the same could probably be said for money, that people do not join the Forces for the fantastic remuneration, but I think they deserve, and should have, a good remuneration package and it is not just the basic salary, it is the whole thing as well, it is the allowances and the housing that goes in with it.

Mrs McCafferty: We find as well that the remuneration package has a pull-through factor. If you are on a pension-earning engagement, that will actually be a retention-positive factor until you reach the point where you have earned the pension and then you can walk, so there is an issue about the structure of the remuneration package as well. I have heard talk as well amongst many of my colleagues of the golden handcuffs of the boarding school allowance because, if you actually commit to that, then you are in it for the long haul really because you cannot afford to do it on your own if you decide to leave, so I have many friends who have actually stayed in the Services, not just because that is helping them to afford it, but it is certainly a factor. As Julie said, finances do not really feature on our issues database very much at all. There is the odd comment here or there about the odd allowance, so the boarding school allowance or the children's education allowance continuity, which it is now called, is an issue because there is a view that those who are claiming it, the cost has gone beyond what the allowance is now compensating for, but the actual pay and allowances do not really feature very highly at all. If you look at the retention-positive factors in the RAF's report, there is lots of job satisfaction, responsibility training, adventurous training, lots of reasons to stay. I stayed for 23 years and there were no reasons why I would have gone any earlier.

Q68 Mr Crausby: Whilst money might not be important, housing must be an enormously important issue, especially with the price of housing these days and the way it is escalating, so the worries that must accompany that as far as the future is concerned. I see that the Government, in recent weeks, introduced a sort of shared equity scheme. Now, my experience of shared equity schemes is that they are usually very complicated, not very attractive and, quite frankly, not much use, but what do you feel about them?

Mrs McCafferty: I think the recent announcement is a very small trial and, as you say, it has a limited effect. The fact is that the families need to have choice. They need to have the opportunity to buy into these shared equity and key worker living programmes where they can, and the more that the Government can deliver, the better, of those sorts of options. I think housing is a big issue for serving personnel in terms of, "When can we afford to buy? Can we afford to buy and when?" because, when you are trying to determine when you buy a house, when you stabilise the family, are you going to try and sell a house every two or three years and keep moving or are you going to try and stabilise the family and can you afford to do it.

Ms McCarthy: If you look at the numbers who have already taken up the share equity scheme, your answer is in there. I think it is not even 100 in the last few years. I do not believe that the shared equity solutions answer the mobility that the Forces still have and I do not think it is the encouragement that the Forces need to buy their own houses. We need to be looking more at younger soldiers buying, ready for when they come out in ten or 20 years' time, which some of our more sensible element do, whereas others, if you look at the Service's Cotswold Centre, the number of soldiers, sergeants as well, some very responsible posts coming out, being there and having nowhere to go, it is quite scary really.

Mrs McCafferty: Gone are the days when the gratuity that you got at the end of your service would actually pay for a house. It will not even cover a deposit now, so there is a massive difference there and in the last 25 years it has changed dramatically.

Q69 Mr Crausby: I remember some announcement being made about extending the right-to-buy to Armed Forces personnel. It obviously seemed to be a very unfair situation where people lived in council houses and had the right-to-buy, whereas people in Army accommodation did not have the right-to-buy. To what extent has that been developed and how useful would that be?

Mrs McCafferty: We do not own them, so I do not think that is an option.

Ms McCarthy: Our husbands own all of the houses, so really I do not think that was an option for us at all.

Mrs McCafferty: We lease them from Addington Homes and we cannot buy them. When we do not need them, we hand them back to Addington.

Ms McCarthy: With the first issues that Addington did, that a percentage should be offered to Service personnel, I believe that has now faded. Because Addington have their percentage back that they were promised by the MoD, there is no obligation on them to offer any discounts or any priority to Service families.

Q70 Mr Crausby: So it is effectively dead in the water then?

Ms McCarthy: Yes.

Q71 Mr Crausby: All of these arguments about welfare and pay do not matter, but financial incentives must have some importance. What do you think should be the right financial incentives to keep people in? I get the impression that sometimes the Government just stumbles along and puts in money, but does not really know what will attract people.

Ms Sheldon: I would suggest that it would be better for the Government to invest in obviously robust and much better housing, much better accommodation, but also in their welfare infrastructure, in their personal support, because the Service is struggling. As both Dawn and Julie have said, particularly for the Army Welfare Service, they struggle. Once budgets are tight, they struggle and then they have to turn to charities for support. We need to have much more cohesive support for all the families and Service people than we already have and I think that is where the MoD should be putting its money.

Q72 Linda Gilroy: There are probably lots of ways in which money could go into Army welfare services, but, if there was a pot of money, which part of the Service would you put it into? What would you want to see it spent on?

Ms McCarthy: We have a particular set-up for unit welfare officers and I know there was a recent survey done by a serving officer into the training and recruitment of unit welfare officers and it was not pursued because there was not the money for the investment into what he was recommending, and I would like to see, where they have identified things such as that, that that is developed and that the unit welfare officers are given the correct amount of funding and resourcing that they need.

Mrs McCafferty: Similarly, the RAF have reintroduced what used to be called the 'Families Officer', which I did as a low-level welfare support for those who lived on the patch and I liaised with Defence Estates, et cetera. They have reintroduced service community officers, but only for a limited period, funded by the centre, and there is going to be a need for more money for those sorts of posts. If they are successful, we would like to see that sort of money, actually people on the ground who can actually talk to the families and talk to the serving personnel about the issues that matter to them, and, as Liz said, broader investment right across the piece would be far better than trying perhaps to look at individual remuneration packages or financial retention incentives. I think they work where they are targeted at particular needs. For example, for shortages in a certain branch or trade, they work for that particular purpose, but they should not be seen as a long-term fix. I think the long-term fix is broader investment into the whole support for the community.

Ms Sheldon: If we are going to do that, it is actually to look at the needs of the individual rather than the current emphasis at the moment on what the command instructor requires. This is not to get away from the fact that this is a duty of care and commanders want to know about the welfare of their families and their Service people, but I have not actually ever seen a questionnaire asking people what they feel about the response they have had from the Unit Welfare Officer or from their SSAFA social worker, whether their response has been timely, confidential, whether they felt properly supported. I have not actually seen it yet, and I might be wrong, but I feel that at the moment, with the way in which people tend to talk about support welfare, it is very much command-led rather than thinking about what the individuals themselves need, and we need to be very much more focused on the person.

Q73 Chairman: Is that something that you could be doing yourselves?

Ms Sheldon: As an organisation, this is something we think about all the time, but, thinking in terms of the MoD, if they are looking at the way in which they are going to provide personal support for their community, they need to be looking at it very much in that way, much more holistically, rather than sort of top-down.

Q74 Mr Crausby: The RAF Families' Federation, in their submission, noted that the introduction of the JPA had removed staff who knew the rules and regulations, and that was supported by a report commissioned by the MoD, saying that the JPA had removed many clerks from the front-line who could help them understand rules and regulations pertaining to RAF service. The JPA was designed to provide personnel with a simpler system. Has it and, if not, why not?

Mrs McCafferty: It was designed to allow a greater self-service so that individuals could actually access computers and actually update their own leave entitlement to submit their travel claims without having to go through layers of bureaucracy. The assumption was that that would then remove the need for clerks at the front-line who used to do that work. It has removed a lot of the routine, and very dull, administrative work that needed to be done by clerks, but what it has removed as well is the experienced levels of the people who understood the more specialist requirements for things like allowances, so you now no longer have a specialist in allowances working in a general office that you could go to, either as a partner or as a serving person, and ask them to explain what their entitlements were and how to apply for things. When I was serving, I had a general office of 30/40 people working for me with a chief clerk and we were constantly being visited by serving people and their partners looking for advice on things about postings, things about promotion, and you go in there now and the general offices are denuded of staff and there is hardly anyone there. It is quite frightening, only 20 years on, to see how few people are there and, instead, you supposedly have these terminals where people go and do a lot of the research themselves, but not all of them have access to JPA terminals. I have certainly heard evidence of serving personnel not now claiming the stuff that they are entitled to because either they do not know how to do it because the training package was delivered on the system with very limited actual proper training for people to use it, or they are frightened about being audited on it and making genuine mistakes and getting caught out for being dishonest because the system is so complicated apparently. I have not used JPA, I left just before it launched, thank goodness, but we are certainly hearing tales of JPA being a very complicated system. I think there are lots of fixes being done. I think there is lots and lots of work going on to try and make JPA the slick system it was, but, because the RAF bought it off the shelf, well, the Army, Air Force and Navy, we had to adapt our personnel processes to fit this off-the-shelf system instead of having something designed to reflect our existing processes. My comment in the actual evidence was as well about removing people, for example, from the postings process where in the past you would have had several people working in an office, looking at postings for people, or assignments, as they are now called, and basically having that human interface with somebody and, before you actually pressed the button to say you are posted from A to B, there would be somebody perhaps talking to the warrant officer or the sergeant to find out what the impact might be on that individual, "Has anything changed recently?" They do not have the manpower to do that now, so, more and more, people feel they are being posted and promoted by computer. They are not. There are still people there doing the work, but there are so fewer of them that it is very difficult for people to feel there is a human being actually managing their careers anymore.

Q75 Mr Holloway: Is it fair to say that this is putting a huge burden on particularly young officers in actually doing the work of the clerks?

Mrs McCafferty: Not only that because you are not only line-managing the Service personnel, but you are line-managing the civil servants because, at the same time, the Civil Service moved to, I think it is called, HRMS which is their equivalent to JPA and you are having to do an awful lot more management at a junior officer level and senior officer level of your civil servant staff, whereas in the past you had on your base a civil servant specialist and, if there were any Civil Service employment policy issues, you went to the CSVDO(?) and the CSVDO was your expert and she had behind her regional support staff. They have all been sucked off the units now, they do not exist, so the line managers are having to carry that burden. When you talk about capacity, in the strategic context, capacity to run operations consecutively, but actually at the tactical level, at unit level, the capacity for people to do all this stuff means that welfare and community support for families gets squeezed out. We do not blame the line managers for that because we recognise that they are busy, but we do feel that the resources need to go in to put back what they have already taken out.

Q76 Linda Gilroy: Could that be done through a helpline, or is there a helpline?

Mrs McCafferty: There is a helpline.

Q77 Linda Gilroy: Is it effective?

Mrs McCafferty: I would not like to comment; I have never used it.

Ms McCarthy: Phoning up and asking for a bit of advice is different from somebody knowing someone's personal circumstances within the unit and being able to say, "Actually have you thought about, or did you know about ...?" and I think that is the difference. It is that personal touch which I think is where families come in as well. It is where families really need the attention personally and I think that is what soldiers are now finding with JPA.

Ms Sheldon: We have experienced a large number of calls actually all related to JPA coming through to the confidential support line because, at first, people just did not know where to turn to.

Q78 Linda Gilroy: Is that ongoing? Is that still a feature?

Ms Sheldon: I think that has started to drop off, but yes, last year we had a lot of calls initially.

Chairman: Now, terms and conditions of service.

Q79 Linda Gilroy: In your submission, Dawn, on Service terms and conditions, you say that, although the evidence is patchy, there is certainly an emerging theme that the differences in entitlements between the three Services, exacerbated in the joint arena, can cause feelings of resentment. I wonder if you could tell us a bit more about what that is based on.

Mrs McCafferty: For example, when I was serving before, I was working in the MoD on a project to harmonise, and simplify, the allowances policy, and we basically brought together the Army, Air Force and Navy policies and banged them together to simplify them ready for JPA. I spent a year and a bit doing that and there were obviously an awful lot of allowances that have evolved in the individual three Services, and evolved differently, and they had different entitlements. We bashed them together and tried to get rid of as much of the differences as possible, but there was some tolerable variation allowed between the Services. Each Service had to fight its own corner, but it ended up with some allowances being different between the Services. Now, that is fine if you are all serving on individual uniformed stations, but, when you serve together or you are deployed out of area, those differences can come to the fore and then it does cause resentment if you happen to be in the cadre that has got the least entitlements. As I say, it is only very patchy evidence because we have only been running since November, but we have had a couple of comments now about where entitlements are different, where perhaps the Army has, for example, a greater entitlement to leave between relocation, which they do not get anyway by the sound of it, but there is an entitlement there of which the RAF has less, on paper the RAF has less. Now, whether it is down to local management to deliver a better provision, I do not know, but it is those sorts of things that niggle away. The issue about rank between the Armed Forces as well comes to the fore in joint arenas where, for example, you would serve longer to reach warrant officer in the Royal Air Force than you would in the Army, so you can end up having a very young Army warrant officer in charge of perhaps a more senior, and more experienced, sergeant or chief technician in the Air Force, and that can cause a lot of friction as well in the joint arena. That is purely because the three Services have long agreed to have different terms and conditions of service. They have harmonised, where possible, but they have not yet brought them into line, so there are differences and, as I say, it just grates when you are the one, and it is not always the RAF, I am sure there are examples of where the RAF have a better entitlement than the Army or the Navy and we have put our feet up and said, "That's fine by us", but I am sure things could be done to try and soften the edges of that to take away an irritant, as perhaps the RAF would call it.

Q80 Linda Gilroy: Do you feel that there is any satisfactory way of gathering information about that because clearly small niggles like that can become very big ones?

Mrs McCafferty: We are one of the ways. The Families' Federation can do that, but I think the different Services themselves could certainly do some more research into that to identify the differences. They know the policies, they are written down, so they should be able to identify them fairly easily.

Q81 Chairman: You heard what Professor Strachan and Professor Dandeker said about the ethnic minorities and recruitment and retention there. Is there anything you would like to add in respect of ethnic minorities? Do you feel your organisations represent ethnic minorities well? Is there anything you would like to add?

Ms McCarthy: I think we try. Very much like when we were talking about the Reserve and Territorial Army families, it is actually contacting the families and providing them with information in a format that is suitable for the audience as well, and I think the welfare support is there. To some degree, especially for the Ghurkas with the Ghurka liaison officers, actually where there are identified and large groups of communities, there is very good welfare support and in some of the Army regiments where there are a large number of foreign and Commonwealth troops, there is very good welfare support, much of it internally from their own support networks. I think that we need to look more in terms of the welfare provision at how we standardise it and provide it in suitable formats for whomever is the audience, so, whether it is on the Internet so that people can look it up, whether it is having a Unit Welfare Officer with his door open, whether it is having liaison officers for each of the nationalities or for the ethnic origins who are within that regiment or that unit, I think it is a very difficult answer to have, and to get it right to suit everybody, it is very difficult, but I do not think at the moment we have come across any barriers where people are particularly disadvantaged.

Ms Sheldon: I would agree with that.

Q82 Chairman: We all know that hugely important to recruitment and retention in the Armed Forces is the support that is given by the patch, but, with the rise of house prices in recent decades and the desire for Armed Forces people to own their own houses obviously, does the patch still exist and is there anything that we can do to preserve it?

Mrs McCafferty: It does still exist. It is being eroded though by policies in terms of, for example, selling off or handing back to Addington Homes part of the patch so that it is then sold on for social housing, so you have actually got mixed estates. The one at Wittering that I am based at is a mixed estate and it is nowhere near the estate it was when I was serving. It has just gone downhill so fast and you can actually see the differences between the different streets, those that are owned by the social housing landlords and those that are run by Defence Estates. The communities still exist. We are putting resources into things like help and information centres in the Royal Air Force, Army and Navy where there is a community focus for those families, and it must continue to exist because there is always going to be a percentage of people where, when they first join the Air Force, the Army or Navy and they actually want to have a home provided by the Service, perhaps while they are saving up for that first home themselves or they just want to enjoy the social life of being in the military, there is going to be a need for houses for them, so I would ask the MoD to protect the patches that it has and to try and invest in them, to put money into the playgrounds, put money into the community centres and support the communities that they have because they are, as I say, degrading over the years. We talked about Addington Homes possibly giving up homes, just one or two in a street in the middle of a military street, and selling off one privately in the middle of a street and we believe that that will very badly erode that feeling of community that the military does need.

Ms McCarthy: I think there is something else happening as well with the