Future Accommodation Model

Anne-Marie Trevelyan Excerpts

Tuesday 18th April 2017 Westminster Hall

[Mrs Anne-Marie Trevelyan (Berwick-upon-Tweed) (Con)]

It is an honour to follow the hon. Members who have spoken. In particular, I thank the hon. Member for Manchester, Withington (Jeff Smith) for bringing the debate to the House. As colleagues know, this issue is very close to my heart. It has become, unwittingly, something of a passion for me, because military families have regarded me as the person to come to with their issues. It is lovely to hear filtering through to the national consciousness all the work that we did last year through the Public Accounts Committee and the National Audit Office about the problem of accommodation that just is not good enough for those families’ needs.

Looking specifically at the future accommodation model, I come back to the question that I raised with my hon. Friend the Minister before Christmas: is the survey good enough to work up a policy from it? My hon. Friend the Member for Canterbury (Sir Julian Brazier) made the point—we raised this issue at the time—that it was a leading survey. It was predicated on driving answers that could only say, “I like one of the four new options.” It did not offer those who are not yet married, those who are married and do not have children and those who are married with children and have served for 20 years plus, who have been through the gamut of the CarillionAmey experience—good and bad, as it often is—the opportunity to say, within the set of four options, “Actually, what we have now is the best option. Although the house is rubbish, the plumbing is rubbish and the windows don’t shut properly, it is still the best option.” That was not in the survey and therefore the Ministry lost the confidence of all the armed forces at that point.

Those who completed the survey did so with a heavy heart. They filled in that blank box, but the Minister has not released the information from that. I will continue to press the Department to release all those data. The excuse given is that that might identify people. Well, we have seen every Department ever remove, with a black pen, things that might identify people. Families who filled in that box would like to see the data published, so that they know that the Department has read and is taking seriously the endless comments—I have seen many of them, because people sent them to me—that said, “But we don’t like any of those four. We would like to stay in service family accommodation, however rubbish it is, on patch, in the community where it is provided.” I will therefore continue to press the Minister to think about how that information could be published in a way that does not put any individual at risk, and to question whether that survey, in its extremely biased and leading form, was a good enough basis on which to set policy.

There are certain key concerns that families continually raise with me. For instance, will the allowance be taxable? Perhaps it will not be initially, but does not the Treasury always end up finding its way around allowances? There is a real sense of anxiety about the lack of clarity. Will the allowance be adequate? As my hon. Friend the Member for Canterbury said, the cost of housing changes dramatically depending on where people are posted. I understand that the Department is moving towards looking at FAM in two streams, in terms of both mobility and stability. I am very pleased if that is the case. I hope that the Minister can explain to us whether we are now looking at two different types of FAM package for those who have different needs. Those who are in the RAF and will always be based in one part of the country, where their families like to be, will have a different perspective on how this might work for them.

The deepest anxiety, which families raise continually, is: “If we are expected to rent a house or buy a house”—it will be probably be to rent a house—“what if we then move?” As so many Army wives in particular say to me, “Is it so wrong to want to actually live with my husband? Sorry, but am I supposed to be dumped somewhere in Birmingham while he goes off and does stuff? I want to live with my husband. My kids want to see their dad at the end of the day.”

This is particularly relevant to Army families. Unless those personnel are deployed abroad on long postings, they go off on exercise for a few days or a few weeks at a time. They are fundamentally living on patch and taking part in family life. The situation is not the same for the Royal Navy, whose personnel deploy for six to nine months at a time. There is a real concern, particularly among Army families, that it is not understood that this scheme will not support the family unit, but that is vital. As the hon. Member for Dunfermline and West Fife (Douglas Chapman) said, family life is what keeps soldiers, sailors and airmen fighting abroad for their country. They do so knowing that their family is back here; there is a real purpose to their efforts on our behalf.

Another area of real concern that I would like to raise with the Minister is how the children will cope—or not cope. My hon. Friend the Member for Canterbury has already raised the question of nursery provision and of schooling. We battle on, and the Minister is very supportive in relation to individual cases in which children cannot find a school place when their parents are moved at short notice. That is difficult. Let us say that children are placed, for the purpose of stability, with their non-serving parent somewhere away from where the families are, in a non-military environment. We are seeing already too many cases in which the schools do not know how to support adequately those children whose parents are serving in the military. Quite a few, and I imagine there will be more, now have two serving parents. Those schools need resources, support and understanding.

In my constituency, in the village of Longhoughton, which is next door to RAF Boulmer, we have a primary school that is 80% military children. The headteacher is extraordinary in the way that she adapts the teaching to the children’s needs. She has a direct relationship with the commanding officer of RAF Boulmer so that she knows what is going on. Those children can be well supported, their education can be maintained and stability can be provided even though their parents are doing really difficult jobs. An awful lot of them are coming and going to the Falkland Islands, which is not round the corner—they are off on a long old journey. Teachers who are within the military framework and have lots of military children can provide the stability that those children really need, but if a single child is in a school nowhere near a military establishment we have real problems and see cases of the inability of school teachers to really understand how best to support such children. That is a key area.

Again, our boys and girls will serve our nation and protect us—they love their jobs, are extraordinary people and take incredible risks—but if they feel that their families are not being looked after while they are away serving, they will leave the service earlier than we would wish them to or need them to. We have also invested heavily in their training and, as my hon. Friend the Member for Canterbury said, our numbers are still low. It leads to the question of retention risk and whether the Department has actually done the value-for-money assessment of whether this policy will have a serious impact on retention. All the evidence I see—anecdotal and in more detail from the survey results that have been published—indicates that this is just not robust enough.

We cannot afford the risk of greater loss from that cohort in the middle in particular. They may have filled in the survey and, at the moment, have no kids and quite like the idea of being able to buy their own home—it all sounds relatively rosy in the garden—but if in two or three years’ time they have children and suddenly find that it is really difficult and the framework the Department offers through FAM is not robust enough to support them, we will lose them and that investment. I really challenge the Minister to make sure that we have done the proper value-for-money analysis of whether this is the best way forward in terms of the housing investment we make for those families and future families, so that we do not get this wrong.

On the positive side, because I am hugely supportive of what the Minister does in a very difficult environment, we have seen a move forwards. I was at RAF Boulmer last week catching up with my local team. The move to put into the local rented market houses within service family accommodation that are not presently lived in by service families is interesting. It is starting to happen at RAF Boulmer—the Minister might want to come and talk to them—and is working well and gives flexibility.

The key is to remember that families move. Interestingly, at the moment Boulmer has quite a lot of single young men and two single young women—they are in the mess in the barracks—but if two or three of them were to move and two or three new families to arrive, family housing will suddenly be needed. That continuing fluidity will always be needed. The concern is that if we rent out too much service family accommodation, we will not have the fluidity that we need as individuals move around the country as they are posted. I ask the Minister to bear that in mind, although I support the idea that those houses should have someone in them. That is a good idea because, as all the work we have done with CarillionAmey and its efforts have shown, if a house is left empty, it deteriorates. We need to invest in them, either by putting people in them and making sure that the kitchen functions and the plumbing works, or by making sure that they are lived in and supported with a CarillionAmey contract, which works. It is getting better—I definitely have less casework than I used to have, so that is good news—but we need to continue to watch over that.

I will leave two questions for the Minister. The conversation suggests that three pilots for FAM will start next year. I think we would have greater confidence that the Department is listening and making progress if we were to know early on where those are likely to be—which military groups are likely to be asked to test this out—and how long those pilots are likely to run before anyone else is asked to move under this unknown and anxiety-causing part of the Ministry of Defence’s proposals.