Service Family Accommodation

Tobias Ellwood Excerpts

Tuesday 20th December 2022 Commons Chamber

[Mr Speaker]

I call the Chair of the Select Committee.

[Mr Tobias Ellwood (Bournemouth East) (Con)]

I welcome the Minister’s tone in wanting to grip this issue. I put in an urgent question for this yesterday, as Mr Speaker knows, and I am really pleased it is being discussed today. It is shocking state of affairs. We talk about having the most professional armed forces in the world, we give them excellent equipment and we train them well, but accommodation has constantly played second fiddle—

[Mr Speaker]

Order. I think it is rather naughty of you to say that. The fact is that if I were to see everybody who put in for urgent questions, I would spend all day doing that. Accept that you have the urgent question; we do not need to go over what you did or did not do, because you put in a lot of urgent questions and you get a lot.

[Mr Ellwood]

I am grateful for that clarification, Mr Speaker; it was not in any way a complaint, but a confirmation. I am delighted that we are able to address this matter today. As I was saying, we have the most professional armed forces in the world, but I am afraid that accommodation plays second fiddle to the equipment and the training that we provide them. I ask the Minister what is going to happen in the integrated review, which is due for an update shortly. Will it identify funding to be put in place to make sure we can improve the accommodation? This problem did not happen in the last few days. Reports of heating and boilers not working, let alone the mould that he speaks about, need to be addressed, or the soldiers, sailors and air personnel will vote with their feet and depart the already overstretched armed forces.

[Alex Chalk]

The right hon. Gentleman is absolutely right that this is an issue about ensuring retention in the armed forces. He asks about money going in: one positive thing, as I indicated, is the £350 million going in over two years, over and above the budget. However, I do not want to let the contractors off the hook. He is right that there is a backlog of work that needs to take place, and I have talked about the £350 million for that, but one of the most shocking things about this to me, as a new Minister coming in, is that it appears to have come as a surprise to Pinnacle, Amey and VIVO that their IT systems were not properly married up. Service personnel would pick up the phone to report a complaint to Pinnacle, but by the time it got VIVO or Amey, it was not necessarily the right contractor who turned up. That is an IT failure. They are grown-ups entering into a contract—caveat emptor and all that—and they should have known what the situation was and have made arrangements accordingly. As I said before, this is not any old contract. It is a contract to provide accommodation. People need to be sure of their ground before they take on one of these deals, and clearly they were not.