SAC0031
Written evidence submitted anonymously
Headline. I am a serving RAF officer (of ‘senior’ rank) in my 27th year of service. I used to be an Army soldier, non-commissioned. I have used Service Families Accommodation (SFA) and Single Living Accommodation (SLA) for the entirety of my time in uniform. There has been a dramatic decrease in the quality of service, maintenance, and supply of SFA for about the past 15-20 years. This reinforces my belief that the organisation does not value me as an individual.
Context. So poor is the treatment of my wife and I (she is also a senior serving officer), in relation to accommodation, that we have discussed at least one of us leaving the Service to avoid having to deal with it and make our lives easier/less stressful.
SLA. When using facilities in the Officers’ Mess, it is typical for heating and hot water to fail for long periods. When visiting units, as a senior officer, I am genuinely appalled at what is offered. A green, plastic mattress, decades old with some threadbare sheets that feel like they are made from cardboard; stained, smelly carpets and stickers everywhere that warn of legionnaires disease. The real insult is not how we are expected to put up with smelly, sub-par accommodation that is below the standard of what my children get on school trips, but that we have to pay for it. Admittedly, it is cheap but, in a way, this makes it worse! It feels like a charge which is so low as there is an acceptance that it shouldn’t be charged for. Why, when travelling for work, should I even have to pay to stay in an Officers’ Mess?
SFA (current). My SFA is currently of a decent standard, newly painted and with relatively new fixtures and fittings. But the entire house has been painted with a thick layer of paint that makes every surface tacky to the touch, weeks after moving in. This will not help the issue of damp and mould as the house cannot ‘breathe’. Every single window in the house is slick with condensation across the entire surface, every morning. This is despite leaving windows open around the house for ventilation 24/7. We leave these windows open to mitigate damp despite a recent spate of attempted burglaries in SFA in this area. This leads to anxiety from my family and children when we balance the reality of puddles of water on every windowsill, every day vs waking to burglars in our house. I purchase damp collectors for every windowsill and the family have a daily task to wipe down every window in the property before leaving in the morning. Despite being in one of the ‘good SFA’, the garage roof leaks, badly. The roof is decades old and so this is not a new problem – why is it still leaking? I have only been in this house for 6 weeks but, despite leaving the bathroom window open all day and night, there is already mould building across the bathroom walls.
SFA (previous). My SFA previous to this was a low point in my career. Mould in every room, a cheap boiler that broke every year, leaving us with no hot water or heating. Wallpaper, carpets, curtains, fixtures and fittings that are the cheapest possible to buy, decades old and broken and, if replaced, replaced with more cheap parts that fail in quick order and are fitted to the lowest possible standard by unskilled and unprofessional fitters.
During one visit to fix my broken boiler and provide hot water/heating, I was told that I would receive a new, integrated water tank and shower/bath. When the work was conducted, I was told that the fitters had direction (from Amey) to only fit the tank, and not the associated shower. I pointed out that this would mean I would be left with a shower and water supply that would not connect – essentially, this would mean I had no working shower. I challenged this and was told that I should phone Amey to complain. No one in Amey picked up phones, answered emails or messages via social media for days. I was told by the fitters that they would return quickly to finish the job and I would only be without a shower for a few days, maximum. I was left with a half-finished job for 6 months, meaning that we had no shower and my family of 4 (2 adults, 2 older teenagers) had to strip-wash in the bath, every day for 6 months. What company would think it reasonable that one of it’s senior managers asks his family to strip-wash for 6 months because his employer can’t manage the fitting of a shower – I do not feel valued.
After 6 months of waiting, the entire system ran for 6 weeks until it catastrophically failed due to a pressurised water supply pipe not being tightened, at all. The fault was due to laziness as the fitter had made no attempt to fit the tightening collar on the supply pipe. The result was that an entire water tank emptied into my house, flooding the upstairs, leaking through the floor, into the kitchen ceiling, through a light fitting and flooded the kitchen floor. I had to isolate the electrics and turn off the main water supply and watch as the entire tank’s contents spilled into my kitchen. With no water or heating (even unable to flush toilets), I called Pinnacle to report the issue. I was told that my flooded house, no heating and no water (weather was -5C outside) “wasn’t an emergency” so they would respond in 48hrs. The appointment provided was 72hrs later and when I challenged their policy and their ability to even meet that, I was asked “well what am I supposed to do about it?” by the Pinnacle telephone operator. The building inspection that followed, to assess the damage, highlighted that there was probably asbestos in my kitchen ceiling, and I was asked if I wanted Vivo to attend and rip out the ceilings and floors across the property to remove asbestos, or whether I would just accept the damage and possibility of asbestos and stay in the house – what a choice! And no responsibility to accept the decision by Pinnacle/Vivo. No rectification work was undertaken.
After reporting the extensive mould and damp, I had an inspection conducted by a specialist contractor who reported multiple issues which included: painted over vents, doorways and groundworks not in accordance with building regulations, broken windows, broken roof tiles, broken guttering, improper damp proofing, cracks in walls, broken roofing and general lack of ventilation. Pinnacle’s response (when I chased them for a response weeks later) was to ask if I wanted someone to attend and clean the walls (a weekly task for me) or even paint them? No rectification work was undertaken.
The oven provided was of the lowest quality possible. It routinely broke and was replaced with the same, cheap oven. I ended up with 4 ovens during my 4 years in the property. They rarely cooked food fully and raw meat was a regular occurrence despite leaving food in the oven for twice as long as necessary.
When I moved into the house, there were multiple broken windows in the property. I reported these and chased them. Four years later, when moving out, less than half of the 7 broken windows had been replaced and others had failed in the interim. At one point, my child’s bedroom window frame broke, and the result was a 1 inch gap in the window during a cold spell of -10C outside. I used heavy black tape to seal the window and reported the fault, also moving my child into her sibling’s room for safety and warmth. 3 successive visits of non-window fitters broke the window further until the contractor completely broke it and the window was hanging from it’s hinges. He re-fitted the tape that I had used and said I would need to wait for a few months until the weather was better so that they could fit a new window. The expectation was that we would accept my child’s window being held in with tape, throughout winter, until spring when they would then try to replace the window. Unsurprisingly, I did not accept this but it took weeks to resolve, during which time, I wouldn’t let any of my family into the back garden where the window could fall out at any moment and hit anyone underneath it. My child was also unable to sleep in the room as the temperature plummeted during cold spells. I did not even get a new window. The existing window frame was bent into shape and we were left with a window that never opened or closed properly so we just slammed it shut and never used it, for fear of it falling out.
After living in that cess-pit for 4 years and having multiple complaints in the system, I was offered some vouchers of a negligible amount, but not as compensation, only a ‘good will’ gesture. Those vouchers have never been provided.
To add insult to injury, when we moved out of the property, we spent 4 days scrubbing every single element. It was impeccable and certainly better than when we moved in (we moved in to a greasy kitchen, dirty shelving, dead insects throughout the property, stained carpets, mouldy sealant around all fittings). At the end of the inspection, some tiny particulates of carbon were found on the oven shelves. We were charged £50 for each of the 3 shelves.
Although the issues in this house were particularly bad, we have experienced similar issues in every property we have lived in.
Moving between SFA. The process of moving house is painful. The archaic system in use is not fit for purpose. There is an expectation that when we move house, we are presented a handful of poor resolution photos of 3 homes. We are expected to accept one of these homes within a short deadline, with scant detail of the house and not being allowed to physically view them. There is always an underlying ‘threat’ that if we don’t accept one, a house ‘may be chosen for us’, and this could be below entitlement, ie, ‘choose one of these houses without understanding what you are getting, or we’ll give you a smaller house’. Often, when we make a selection, we are told that it is no longer available anyway and the process starts all over again. If you drive to a site, it is apparent that there are multiple properties vacant which the allocation team don’t know about.
During my last move into the ‘cess-pit house’, I asked for consideration of moving me to a site that was equidistant between my place of work and my wife’s. This would allow us to live together as a family and wouldn’t require one of us to live on site, at work, during the week and then travel home. We had visited the site and noted several apparently empty homes, spoke to neighbours and identified some options. The allocation team said that they didn’t have to consider our personal circumstances and so wouldn’t consider putting us on a site that wasn’t associated to our place of work. Despite providing information that they could use to support my family and allow us to live together, they refused to do it and my family were split up until we managed to find new jobs and live closer together on the same site. During this process, we got very close (1 week) to moving jobs, without a confirmed house. I phoned most days to ask if any decisions had been made. After lying to me about removal of entitlements and misinforming me about what to expect, the allocation team member threatened to submit a formal complaint against me as I was ‘phoning every day and harassing her’ (I was in fact, always calm, respectful and polite but insistent in order to get myself a house). I stopped calling and with one week to go until I was posted but with no house to move into, we were essentially about to be made homeless. But If I called to try and resolve, I risked having a formal complaint put in against me.
For my current role, we knew that housing was tight, so we started the process months in advance. We were told that there was no housing available, and we would have to wait until after our start date at work to find out what was available. When I pointed out the obvious flaw of trying to start a new job without accommodation for my family, the response was “well, what can I do about it?”. The expectation was that I would drive 3hrs to work, each way, every day until the allocation team found accommodation for me.
This last move has resolved in my mind that I want to leave the Service. After 27 years of being treated without any consideration or compassion, I have had enough. We do not ask for luxury. We just want clean, working accommodation with heating and hot water that is fit for purpose and allows us to live together as a family. I have never been provided this. This will likely be my last tour and I will leave because of the housing set up. I do not feel valued so why would I stay.
23 October 2023