Service Accommodation

Luke Pollard Excerpts

Tuesday 19th December 2023 Westminster Hall

[Luke Pollard (Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport) (Lab/Co-op)]

It is a pleasure to serve with you in the Chair, Dame Angela. I am very grateful to my hon. Friend the Member for Mid Bedfordshire (Alistair Strathern) for securing this debate, which is testament to what can happen when an MP who is elected by their constituents turns up to this place. They can raise issues that genuinely concern constituents. The figure that he cited—64% of service accommodation being of the lowest grade—is not just terrible; it is one of the worst in the entire UK. He is absolutely right to bring this matter to the House, and to ask the Minister what he will do about it.

It is important to recognise that poor-quality defence accommodation damages morale, recruitment and retention, and creates an atmosphere in which the families of those who serve fall out of love with military service. It undermines the moral contract between the nation and those who serve and their families. I pay tribute to my hon. Friend for the way that he opened the debate, and for standing up for his constituents.

Our service personnel and their families deserve decent, safe, warm accommodation. That is key to the moral contract between our nation and those who serve in uniform. The armed forces covenant sets out that service accommodation should be of

“good quality, affordable and suitably located”,

but as we have heard today in a series of excellent contributions, the condition of service accommodation and housing is a straight-up scandal; the Conservatives are failing our forces and their families.

Broken boilers, leaky roofs, black mould, vermin and endless waits for basic repairs are all shockingly common. The examples given by the hon. Members for North Shropshire (Helen Morgan), and for Tiverton and Honiton (Richard Foord), highlight that the issue is not isolated. It affects not some bases some of the time, but defence accommodation across our country. It damages the morale of those who serve, wherever they serve, if they are given accommodation for themselves and their families that is sub-par and below the standard that they should expect. The Minister and everyone in this debate knows that people have very different expections for their living conditions when they are deployed towards the frontline, and for where they and their family should live when at home. Things are not working at the moment.

To sum up the Government’s record, one in three personnel lives in the lowest grade single-living accommodation; complaints about damp and mould are up 40% this year; 800 families were without a valid gas safety certificate as of June; fewer than one in five personnel is satisfied with the repair work; there have been faulty heating complaints in the equivalent of half of service family properties since new maintenance contracts were awarded; and more than 1,300 personnel live in accommodation of such poor quality that the MOD does not even bother charging rent on it. Those conditions are not acceptable in civilian life, and they should not be acceptable for anyone who serves our country.

This debate becomes particularly important as temperatures drop and Christmas approaches. Last year, the Government sleepwalked into a winter crisis in service accommodation; even the Minister admitted that performance was not good enough. I am grateful for that honesty. We need that honesty about what can be achieved this winter as well.

One service family told me that they went without a working boiler for three weeks, and were forced to live in a hotel over Christmas and new year. Another posted on social media that he spent five days without heating, and had to wash his seven-month-old son with boiled kettle water. That is simply not acceptable for those who serve. Insultingly, military families were given as little as £1 in compensation for heating and hot water loss. Can the Minister assure me that this Christmas, no family will have to go without heating and hot water, or be forced out of their home because of maintenance issues? I asked the Minister that same question at Defence questions last month. He did not quite give me the reassurance that I was looking for, so I am giving him another opportunity to do so.

Also, how many service properties have experienced total loss of heating and water so far in December? How many of the 1,500 service homes promised boiler and heating upgrades in the Government’s winter planning statement have so far received that work? What other mitigations is the Minister putting in place? Damp and mould have been mentioned a number of times. Those issues affect housing across our country, but they do not have no solution. What is the Minister doing to tackle damp and mould, particularly in homes that are not covered by the work that he has so far announced? What happens to them? How long will they have to wait?

One service spouse wrote on social media recently that despite being six months pregnant and having a four-year-old child, she was still living in a mouldy home months after reporting it. That gets to the nub of the complaints raised by hon. Members. It is not that people who serve are not raising complaints; frequently, those complaints are not acted on, or if someone visits, it is so that they can tick a box on the response time, not so that they can complete the job and ensure that the complaint is dealt with properly.

After scrutiny from Labour, the Ministry of Defence admitted that about 700 forces families who were promised damp and mould mitigation will not benefit from the completed work until April 2024. Why is that taking so long? The MOD’s winter plan to help families through the coldest months will not even be fully delivered until the spring. That beggars belief. What is the Minister doing to speed that up?

People in my constituency live in Stonehouse barracks, the spiritual home of the Royal Marines. I have had to raise repeatedly the issue of their loss of hot water and lack of heating. The Government intended to close that base, but are now delaying its closure from 2027 until 2029. Everyone who serves there should be given reassurance that they will be able to access hot water and heating, especially in buildings that are hundreds of years old. When we talk about “homes fit for heroes”, we mean homes that people can genuinely rely on to be safe and secure.

The right hon. Member for Rayleigh and Wickford (Mr Francois) raised the issue of gas safety certificates. We would rightly call for rogue landlords in the private sector to be prosecuted, and hauled over the coals. What happened to those people in charge of progress in getting gas safety certificates? Was any action taken against the contractors who clearly failed to do that, or was it just marked up as yet another problem in this area?

The hon. Member for North Shropshire, I think, mentioned empty properties. As a Plymouth MP, I have certainly been contacted about the large defence estate just over the boundary from my patch, in Plympton in south-west Devon, which has an enormous number of empty properties. There is real frustration about empty properties in the middle of a housing crisis. We all accept that the MOD must have a certain amount of properties to rotate, so that it can deploy people as and when required, but will the Minister set out how many empty properties the MOD has, and whether the figure is larger than normal? Locally, the number of empty properties seems larger than expected for the anticipated rotation, even in a military city such as Plymouth.

Poor-quality defence accommodation has a direct impact on morale, recruitment and retention. New MOD figures show that the number of troops in the armed forces has fallen to a record low, and satisfaction with service life has plummeted to the lowest level on record. Less than half of personnel are satisfied with their service accommodation, and fewer than one in five is satisfied with repair work. We will not be able to solve the problems of retention and recruitment without fixing defence housing. That is why Labour has said that when we are in government, we will deliver homes fit for heroes—by acting on the Kerslake review, an independent review of service accommodation; by getting tough on failing contractors; and by legislating to establish an armed forces commissioner, a strong independent voice for personnel with the power to investigate issues affecting them and their families. That should include defence housing.

As the son of a submariner, and as the representative of a military city, this is personal to me. When the Royal Marines are about to ship out on deployment, there is a surge of calls to my office from marines worried about whether the repairs that they have been chasing will be delivered before they deploy, and whether their families will be living in a dry, warm home while they are away. That should not happen in a country that values the armed forces as much as ours.

We need to rebuild our moral contract with those who serve. That is what my party has set out to do, and I believe fundamentally that that is what the Minister hopes he is delivering. I have to say, however, that the record discussed in this debate by Members from right across the House is not one of which the Government should be proud; indeed, they should apologise for it. In these more contested times, if we do not see action, how long will it be until we have a real crisis in retention and recruitment at a time when we need to deploy our military forces?

[The Minister for Defence Procurement (James Cartlidge)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Dame Angela. I am shadowed by your twin and chaired by you: as a father of twins, it is a pleasure to experience.

I congratulate the hon. Member for Mid Bedfordshire (Alistair Strathern) on securing his maiden Westminster Hall debate. I recently had an oral question from him about accommodation, so it is a credit to him that he is persisting, and that is true of other colleagues in the Chamber. He raised some very important points, primarily about the two bases in his constituency. On the overall point, which many colleagues made but he did in particular, I absolutely accept that this is a retention issue. Of course it is. It says a lot about the importance we place on the duty of our personnel to serve their country and our efforts to ensure that they have the best. I was quite open during oral questions, in referring to the winter plan, that we did not do well enough last winter. We have been determined to make up for that this year, and I will talk about the detail of that.

Make no mistake, the provision of high-quality subsidised accommodation for service personnel is a key priority for us. Horror stories such as we have heard, with rats, dry rot and so on, are disturbing. I reassure colleagues that, appalling though such instances are, they are unrepresentative of the experience of the vast majority of service people. In the constituency of the hon. Member for Mid Bedfordshire, for example, 96% of service family accommodation meets or exceeds Government decent home standards, which is almost identical to the national figure.

In the time available, I want to set out some of the key measures we have taken to rectify the situation to ensure that we improve our armed forces accommodation. I will start with single living accommodation. The Department provides a total of around 171,000 permanent, temporary and training bed spaces worldwide. As of 16 October, 92,000 service personnel were living in SLA. There have been longstanding concerns, rightly, among frontline commands that SLA is not up to scratch, which is why we are now implementing plans across the Navy, Army and Air Force to eliminate the worst accommodation. A Defence minimum standard has been established, which all SLA is expected to meet. As of 13 November, some 84% of rooms met the standard. That means that 13,347 did not, which falls well short of where we need to be. However, the intent is that, by April 2024, a further 30% of those will be upgraded. In the longer term, the Department will invest around £5.3 billion in SLA over the next 10 years to get homes up to standard. That will see us deliver approximately 40,000 new or refurbished bed spaces.

As Minister for Defence Procurement, I am well aware that day-to-day maintenance issues are unavoidable. They are the cause of considerable correspondence that I receive from colleagues from all parties. So it has proved in the past year, with several thousand issues relating to heating and hot water being reported. Any reports of vermin in SLA or service family accommodation —which I will come on to shortly—should be made to the national service centre, which will arrange for appropriate action including pest control if required, although I was interested to hear from the hon. Member for Tiverton and Honiton (Richard Foord) about his experience with multiple contractors and so on.

Turning to SFA, the Government continue to invest significant sums to improve the quality of UK service family accommodation. Our Defence Infrastructure Organisation received an investment of £400 million over this financial year and the next as part of the defence Command Paper refresh. The £380.2 million forecast for this year is more than double last year’s investment in maintenance and improvements. As we have heard today, hon. Members are well aware of some of the issues, but it is investment that ultimately will lead to the change.

I want to set out some of the mitigations we have undertaken this year. We have established a dedicated hotline to address specific concerns with damp and mould, and we have improved the initial triage process to prioritise cases. That includes an onsite visit to apply initial treatment, to assess the need for follow-up and to decide whether a professional survey is required. We have also been working hard with our contractors to deliver around 4,000 standardised damp mitigation packages—I will come to the point about the remaining homes shortly—which include measures to increase insulation, replace guttering, upgrade extractor fans, replace radiators and reseal windows and doors. To date, more than 1,360 have been completed, and around 700 further packages are planned to be delivered early in the next financial year. The remaining homes with less severe instances of damp and mould are being dealt with through simple maintenance visits, so the vast majority of these tasks have already been completed.

Furthermore, our plan for this winter includes boiler and heating upgrades for about 1,500 homes. As the hon. Member for Plymouth, Sutton and Devonport (Luke Pollard) said, we are now entering wintertime, and I recognise colleagues’ concerns and how anxious they will be for reassurance that there will be no repeat of the slow response times during last year’s cold snap. The hon. Member for Mid Bedfordshire rightly spoke about telephone waiting times. We cannot have people left hanging on the phone in freezing homes waiting to speak to an engineer. On that front, it is worth pointing out that Pinnacle’s national service centre continues to maintain a strong performance. The average speed to answer rates in November were, for the ninth consecutive month, well within the 120 second average. The hon. Gentleman asked how many extra call handlers Pinnacle has taken on. The answer is 65, which means that most calls are now answered within 29 seconds—a very significant improvement.

I have another very important point to make to the hon. Gentleman. Before I respond to some of the other contributions, I want to update him on the status of Chicksands military base in his constituency of Mid Bedfordshire. Like me, he will be aware that rumours have been flying around about its future. I can confirm that, from 2030 onwards, it will be disposed of, but that will happen only when everybody has been relocated as part of a significant commitment to defence intelligence. The schedule will be refined as construction gets under way, and we will keep him informed as it progresses. Of course, I will write to him with full details, because I know how important it is for him. That will enable him to engage with his constituents and the service personnel based there.

[Luke Pollard]

I am sure my hon. Friend the Member for Mid Bedfordshire will be grateful for the information about his local base. Is that a change just for that one base, or is it part of a wider changing of closure times that will affect other bases around the country and that the Minister may wish to update the House about?