Oral question asked in the House of Lords, by Lord Bramall (Crossbench). It was answered on Wednesday, 7 February 2007.

Armed Forces: Accommodation

Question: My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness for that helpful and fairly positive reply, albeit invoking some concern over what has happened hitherto. Does she agree that the root of the problem lay 10 years ago when the Ministry of Defence, under excessive Treasury pressure, forced through a daft plan to sell off and lease back a large part of the defence estate and hand over its upkeep to an impersonal and progressively underfunded agency, which, as a result, manifestly performed less effectively than the chain of command used to do? As this has not been corrected, can the Minister assure the House that when sufficient funds are produced to carry out the improvements and modernisations, which she has more or less promised as necessary, these will be ring-fenced? Otherwise, they will be vulnerable to the inevitable cash squeezes that invariably hit first the administrative tail, and the present lamentable and totally unacceptable state of affairs will merely linger on.

Answer: My Lords, I say to the noble and gallant Lord, Lord Bramall, that we are concerned. We ask a great deal of our service men and women. It is right that they should expect the very highest standard of accommodation when they come back from various theatres and, of course, while their families remain in that accommodation. We have spent and are spending more than £1.3 billion on modern, en-suite, single-bed spaces for our service personnel, which is just part of the £5 billion that we plan to spend on service accommodation in the next decade. The noble and gallant Lord talked about the sale to Annington Homes 10 years ago. He is right that that was, in effect, a privatisation measure. It meant that we were tied into a contract that perhaps if we had been in power we might not have made, but we are where we are. We must now make sure that we do our very best by our service personnel.

Secondary information

Type: Oral question
Reference: 689 c701-2
Session: 2006-07
Oral question type: 1st Supplementary
Chamber / Committee: House of Lords chamber
Subjects: Armed forces Housing Finance Standards Sales Repairs and maintenance Annington Homes
Link: View this Oral question on www.publications.parliament.uk