SAC0063
Written evidence submitted by Lieutenant Colonel Nicholas Foulerton
This is a personal response to the Defence sub-committee service accommodation request for evidence.
My statement is based upon the experience of my 17 years service in the Service Family Accommodation (SFA) in the Army.
SFA has been a wholly positive experience for my family and I, providing accommodation for a family on the move. We have lived in nine SFA houses in four countries. In addition, the ‘patch’ provides the support network during unaccompanied deployments, which is not prevalent in civilian communities to those routinely moving location. SFA has enabled me to remain mobile, supporting career ambitions and professional requirements within the Army for the length of my career, where future postings will continue to be unpredictable by the nature of the job. The FAM’s offer of PRS and MOH continue to prove incompatible with my career and its demands.
My principal concern with the FAM is the proposal to provide mixed ‘patches’ where upon soldiers and officers live together on the same estates. outside the military, it allows separation within the chain of command, in the same way as officers’ and sergeants’ messes do for single soldiers. A mixture of commissioned and non-commissioned soldiers living side by side would be detrimental to discipline for all involved and would not allow for separation between duty and off-duty.
I remain hugely concerned at the lack of evidence for the pilot schemes for FAM and the overwhelmingly disproportional evidence for all three services and would like to see the evidence of the personal experience of those who were living in the mixed ranked patches over the two year period, eg. within the Aldershot pilot site, there was 0 (nought) spouses / partners research sessions contributed. I would also be grateful for the contribution of any RMP data on call outs during the pilot period.
31 October 2023