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Armed Forces Personnel

As the hon. Gentleman knows, I have enormous respect for his knowledge of the circumstances, but I do not accept that there is a crisis, although I do accept that there are issues in relation to retention. We are operating in an employment market that is very different from the one in which the forces operated 10 years or more ago, when many young men in my constituency had no alternative but to join the armed forces. We are competing now. Another crucially important point is that the added value of an armed forces training makes it a very valuable commodity. The private sector is competing to attract away from the armed forces people whom we have formed, matured and trained to a level which, in my view, would not be reached in any other walk of life. Those are the realities, and they face not just our armed forces but armed forces throughout the developed world. All the Defence Ministers to whom I speak face the same challenges and problems. I recognise that we must develop methods, along with a modern response to the armed forces by society which is such that people will not only volunteer or allow themselves to be recruited but, once trained and effective, will stay in the forces and continue to contribute. We have had considerable success in some areas, although there are issues which I do not seek to avoid. The retention incentives need to be developed—and we have been developing them with some success, as is clear from the examples that I have given. Obviously, a high percentage of personnel are currently deployed on operations and, because of that, harmony levels have been affected. Harmony levels have, however, improved over the past year by 3 per cent. for the Army, and they have remained steady for the Royal Navy, but they have worsened for the RAF, with 6.7 per cent. breaching harmony compared with 2.9 per cent. a year ago. I am grateful to all our personnel for their efforts, but particularly to those whose harmony guidelines have not been met. We have a duty to recognise such commitment; living up to that duty underpins everything I have set out today. In recognition of the Government's commitment to the armed forces, we granted them the best public sector pay deal last year: 3.3 per cent. In particular, we addressed the concerns of the lowest ranks by increasing their pay by more than 9 per cent. In fact, in all but one of the last five years armed forces salary growth has exceeded that of the whole economy. One of the key issues affecting both families and single people in the forces is accommodation. To be frank, when our men and women in uniform return from theatre to their barracks, it is deplorable that some of them return to a very poor standard of accommodation. Progress is being made. In the last financial year, we delivered 5,822 modernised bed spaces; this financial year, we expect to deliver approximately 7,000 modernised bed spaces, and in the next financial year we also plan to deliver 7,000 bed spaces. Overall, it is expected that about 60,000 modernised bed spaces will be delivered by April 2013. For the last year our public position has been that some £5 billion will be spent on housing and other accommodation over the next decade. That figure was an extrapolation of future spend based, in part, on current spending levels, and was made before the outcome of the comprehensive spending review was known. However, the £5 billion figure did not take into account a number of large private finance initiative projects that include living accommodation. The most notable of them is Project Allenby/Connaught, which will provide modern living and working accommodation for some 18,000 military and civilian personnel in the Salisbury plain and Aldershot garrisons. Maintenance and leasing of service families accommodation and single living accommodation worldwide was also excluded. In addition, the amount we plan to spend on maintenance work is now higher than that included in the £5 billion figure. Accordingly, we have reassessed our likely spend on accommodation for the next 10 years to take account of those elements previously excluded. The total amount will in fact be £8.4 billion. Of that, £3.1 billion will be spent on new-build and upgraded accommodation, £2.3 billion on refurbishment and maintenance and £3 billion on routine costs, including rent, other leasing costs and the equivalent of council tax. Over that same period, we also expect to receive £2.4 billion in rental income from service personnel, leaving a net expenditure of £6 billion. We want to help personnel become independent home owners. We already have in place the offer of a personal loan towards a deposit after four years of service, but I think that we can improve on that and, as part of the Command Paper, work is being done to introduce arrangements to make housing more affordable for military families. We have also just extended the key worker status scheme so that all servicemen and women can qualify for the open market homebuy scheme—a scheme that can boost the buying power of a forces family by up to a third. Finally, we have agreed with the Department for Communities and Local Government that those leaving the services will have access to social housing on par with everyone else in the area in which they will settle; they will no longer go to the bottom of the local authority housing lists as they did before.