SAC0044
Written evidence submitted anonymously
I am writing to you in my capacity as wife of a serving Officer in the British Army to make you aware of my serious and urgent concerns for a new accommodation model that is forced onto the Armed Forces.
The New Accommodation Offer (NAO), in the simplest terms, removes rank-based entitlement to housing, which is to now be allocated purely on the number of children in a family.
The policy is wholly flawed and I, along with the serving armed forces community, are completely dumbfounded as to how this has been allowed to occur.
I have broken down a few of the key points below to help illustrate the problems that we are facing:
- Announcement of the policy. The NAO has been announced before the policy has even been completed and published. This has resulted in stress, fear and frustration as we have no access to the full detail concerning an implementation that will have a huge impact on our lives.
- Poor communication. There has been an uproar from the serving community since the NAO was announced. We have tried to engage with the policy team to understand where these changes have come from and are met with half answers and deflection. I have included an email to the policy team at annex A, with personal details removed, to give you an understanding. The policy team contradict themselves, do not answer questions and state false facts.
- Lack of research. The policy team constantly refer back to the extensive research that was conducted that supports the NAO. In the very documents that they reference this could not be further from the truth[1]. The policy team keep referring to their research, the research they are referring to states that out of 8474 Future Accommodation Model (FAM) participants, total research contributions were JUST 69 (0.8% of the participants). How are such woefully low numbers used as evidence for such a large policy change? Those statistics are outrageous. I cannot imagine any other walk of life where such poor evidence would be used for such a dramatic change. I have previously worked in the academic field and if I used such tiny data, and argued it was representational, it would fail at peer review. It would also fail at an ethics committee and it certainly wouldn’t be robust enough to become a piece of research good enough for publication. The entire study urgently needs to be re-done, with a much larger data set using sound and robust qualitative and quantitative research methods.
- Skewed study. The data and methodology of the FAM study and research the policy team keep referring to is not available. I have serious and urgent concerns regarding the qualitative and quantitative methods used. From the ‘Understanding Service personnel satisfaction with their lived experience of the Future Accommodation Model pilot: Main Report’ there has been selective use of questions and answers in the ‘evidence’. For example, the question about accommodation. That is the official term but I know many people don’t think of their SFA as accommodation, i.e just a place to sleep and not a home. Additionally, a lot of the questions are limiting and leading. The whole study is skewed by the fact that people could opt out of the trial. Of course, those negatively impacted, would then opt out. Understanding_Service_personnel_satisfaction_with_their_lived_experience_of_the_FAM_pilot_Main_Report.pdf (publishing.service.gov.uk)
- Discrimination. Rank based accommodation has been part of the armed forces since their inception. Moving the basis to the amount of children a family has not only erodes the offer for the officer cohort but it is simply discrimination. What are couples that do not want, or are not able, to have children do? In what other career are you afforded more benefits purely because you have a larger family? In the civilian world, you cannot walk up to the doctor (who has worked their way up through their career from medical school, to junior doctor, to GP) who earns a larger salary and therefore is able to rent a larger and nicer house, and demand you need it because you have more children. Civilian life does not work like that. Society does not work like that. The world does not work like that.
- Officer retention. The policy team have admitted themselves that no research has been done into how this could affect the outflow of Officers. On forums and in private the community have made it clear that for many this is the last straw. This policy will cause many officers to leave the forces, at a time where a strong military is more important than ever. What are the Armed Forces to do when officers leave in droves? How can the military function with depleting officers? Who will lead our soldiers when we go to war?
Hopefully you will agree that this policy is poorly researched and set to be a disaster if implemented.
26 October 2023