Armed Forces: Remuneration, Housing and Family Support

Lord Lancaster of Kimbolton Excerpts

Monday 18th September 2023 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Goldie (Con)]

It depends upon which glass we look through; clearly, the noble Lord is looking through a rather half-empty glass, and the facts rather refute his gloomy assessment. In fact, the recent pay award was the biggest percentage uplift in 20 years for service personnel, and this year’s pay award goes way beyond that level—rightly recognising the vital contribution to which the noble Lord refers. As he will be aware, spend for the MoD is likely to be above £50 billion this year, and it is interesting just to look at the detail of where that money is going. It includes significant improvements to accommodation and, as I have already described, to the conditions that surround our service personnel. Interestingly, there is anecdotal evidence from across the department that the 2023 pay award has been well received by service personnel.

[Lord Lancaster of Kimbolton (Con)]

My Lords, there is undoubtedly substandard accommodation within the MoD but, for balance, there is also fantastic new accommodation. I encourage any Member of this House to go to visit the new service family accommodation at Larkhill and Ludgershall, which has been built recently, to see just that. The challenge seems to be that we spend two-thirds of our budget on one-third of our infrastructure. The answer to that was published in the Government’s A Better Defence Estate strategy about six years ago, where the intent was to sell off excess estate and use the capital receipts from that selling off of the estate to invest in our defence infrastructure. It is a grand idea, but it seems to be going a bit slowly. Can my noble friend perhaps encourage the department to get on with it?

[Baroness Goldie (Con)]

Yes, I can confirm to my noble friend that that initiative is under way. I do not have specific information about the extent to which sales have taken place, but I undertake to get that and I shall write to him. We are working on updating our accommodation offer to deliver the commitments made in the defence accommodation strategy. The Minister for Defence People and Veterans will be making a further announcement with more detail about the new accommodation offer later this month.