Armed Forces Covenant Annual Report

Victoria Prentis Excerpts

Thursday 7th January 2016 Westminster Hall

[Mrs Trevelyan]

I thank my hon. Friend, and I absolutely concur. Within the community covenant framework, we also need find ways to join things up more effectively when families move. The nature of the armed forces is such that families are expected to move around the UK, and to and from the UK, so it is important that the system really supports them. We have endless examples of systems that do not.

I was very pleased, literally weeks after being elected, to be able to help a family who were leaving RAF Boulmer, in my constituency. The airman in question was leaving the service. He had been on a British Gas training course while he was still in Northumberland—fantastic—and he and his family wanted to move down south to be near his wife’s family. That was all good, and they were looking forward to it. They had found a school in the right area for their children, one of whom had special needs, but when they came to move, they could not find a house. It was impossible; there was not a house to be found. They could not register their children with the school because they were not in the right area, and the gentleman could not start his job because he was not yet registered in the right area.

The system seemed nonsensical, and the lovely family liaison lady at RAF Boulmer was pulling her hair out. As it turned out, she made the right phone call. I did not know anything about Banbury or Bicester, but I had a new colleague in the area, and between us, we were able to find a solution.

[Victoria Prentis (Banbury) (Con)]

As the recipients of that delightful, hard-working, honourable and brave family, we in Bicester were delighted to welcome them to our area. Does my hon. Friend agree that it would have been much easier—without the intervention of MPs—if some sort of central hotline had been available to the family liaison officer, to enable her to access the line that I, in the end, accessed on the family’s behalf to help them to find a house? My hon. Friend may not be aware of the end of the story: the house that family moved into was an ex-services house.

[Mrs Trevelyan]

I was not aware of that, and I am pleased to hear that we are making the best use of our property portfolio. That is most encouraging. Housing is a big part of the covenant’s challenge. The new forces Help to Buy scheme was introduced last year and has been incredibly successful. This year’s report has some really positive messages about that, both because armed forces families are very aware of it—it has been very well publicised—and because it is being taken up in very large numbers. It enables families to get on to, or stay on, the housing ladder as they resettle into civilian life.