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Armed Forces Personnel

I pay tribute to members of Her Majesty's armed forces. In particular, I mention 16 Air Assault Brigade from the Colchester garrison, who in the course of this year will be deployed to Afghanistan. We wish them Godspeed and a safe return. I shall confine my remarks to two narrow areas of personnel. I am grateful to the hon. Member for Billericay (Mr. Baron) who, through parliamentary questions has elicited the fact that half of the country's single service personnel accommodation is substandard. I will balance that by saying that the new Merville barracks in Colchester provide the best possible accommodation, and that is the yardstick for which we should strive for all single military accommodation in a much shorter time frame than is currently envisaged, with only 38,000 rooms, apparently, achieving a top rating. I was not so happy to learn that almost 9,000 families remain stuck in grade 4 homes and another 387 are in accommodation so poor that it does not even reach the lowest official grading. I am bound to observe that the sale by the last Conservative Government of the Ministry of Defence housing stock to Annington Homes must have been the biggest privatisation rip-off of the lot. When he sums up, perhaps the Minister will confirm that since that privatisation the Ministry of Defence has paid Annington Homes more in rent than the Government received when the 55,000 dwellings were sold in 1996. What makes the situation even worse is that if those sales of surplus accommodation—there have been many sales of such accommodation and Army land—had been invested into Ministry of Defence housing, all our Army, Navy and Royal Air Force families would now be living in family accommodation that was second to none. I shall cite examples from my constituency of Colchester, and I cannot believe that they are isolated. Annington Homes managed to convince everybody that certain houses were so deplorable that they would have to be pulled down. The site has subsequently been sold off; land prices in Colchester are exceptionally high. Annington Homes made a financial killing, and only a tiny percentage came back to the Government—not even to the Ministry of Defence. I shall give one other example, because the maths involved are easy for me. Some 40 former Ministry of Defence surplus dwellings on a single road had been purchased at an average price of £15,000 at privatisation. They were subsequently sold for £115,000, giving a gross profit of £4 million on just 40 dwellings. That story can be repeated right across the country, wherever Annington Homes has been selling off properties. I turn to education matters, in particular the ““Educating Service Children”” report, which has 33 recommendations. It would be interesting to know how many of them have been adopted by the Ministry of Defence. I shall concentrate on recommendation 5:"““The MoD and local education authorities should begin planning for the impact that the creation of Super Garrisons will have on pupil numbers in schools located near Service bases.””" Clearly, that recommendation has not been followed through in Colchester with the Ministry of Defence and Essex education authority; there is a proposal to close the secondary school to which the children go from age 11. That was the subject of my Adjournment debate of 22 October last year. Alderman Blaxill school is the smallest secondary school in Colchester; between a fifth and a quarter of its pupils come from Army families and its closure has clearly not been discussed with the MOD. I ask the Minister to look at that issue. Will he and his officials also look at my Adjournment debate of 25 October 1999 on the education of Army children? Clearly, issues raised then have not been addressed. Finally in my short contribution I want to mention three primary schools whose pupils come predominantly from services families, in the context of the closure by Essex county council of the hot school meals service in the county. Some 90 per cent. of children at Montgomery infant school are Army children, as are 70 per cent. of Montgomery junior school pupils. No hot meals are provided for them. I suggest that if the Army can provide meals for our service personnel in Afghanistan and Iraq, there should be a system for providing hot school meals to children back in Colchester. About 60 per cent. of children at another school, St. Michael's primary, are also from Army families. I urge the Ministry of Defence to consider seriously the whole question of education provision. It should look at what the Defence Committee said and act accordingly.