Armed Forces: Housing

Lord Dubs Excerpts

Wednesday 14th December 2011 Lords Chamber

Asked By

[Lord Dubs]

To ask Her Majesty’s Government what is their assessment of the quality and standard of housing for the families of members of the Armed Forces.

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, the majority of service family accommodation is already of a very good standard. In the United Kingdom, some 96 per cent of homes—that is 46,000 out of 49,000 homes—are at the top two standards out of four standards for condition, with more due to be upgraded to the top standards in this financial year. The MoD continues to target funding on the most pressing accommodation issues.

[Lord Dubs]

My Lords, I understand what the Minister says, but does he not agree that to bring all housing for families of servicemen up to the right standard is going to take about 20 years and that this is not good enough when families will come back from Germany and when our troops in Afghanistan are entitled to believe that all their families are adequately housed?

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire]

My Lords, I do not agree with that. Under the previous Government’s programme, the target for 2020 was for all service families’ accommodation to be at standard 1 level. I think they were confident that they would hit that target. As the noble Lord knows, we have now had to put into the advance budget of the MoD a pause in major upgrades for three years from 2013, which may make the 2020 target hard to hit. Minor upgrades, however, will continue. The vast majority of service accommodation will continue to be of a very high level.