AFC0043

Written evidence submitted by The Armed Forces Covenant Fund Trust.

Who we are:

The Armed Forces Covenant Fund Trust is a charity and non-departmental public body which awards grants across the UK in support of the Armed Forces community. We:

• help to deliver the nation’s promise under the Armed Forces Covenant by distributing the £10m annual Covenant Fund to projects across the UK;
• provide specialist grant-making services to HM Government for other programmes focused on the Armed Forces community; and
• use our project partnerships with charities, CICs, units, bases, schools, local authorities and NHS Trusts across the country to help build the evidence base on enabling everyone with Armed Forces experience to thrive.

Since we started our work in 2018, we’ve committed more than £60m in Covenant Fund grants across England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, as well as funds to projects on behalf of the NAAFI Fund, Armed Forces Families Fund (AF3) and others.

Our approach is founded on evidence, and our in-house research team works with our grant partners, experts from a range of universities and specialist research organisations to ensure our work draws from, is informed by and helps to build the national evidence base on the needs of those serving now, those who’ve served in the past and the people around them. Our Covenant Fund grant programmes are now delivered within a three-year funding framework, and its priorities may offer a useful starting point in considering the potential breadth and depth of the Covenant’s scope.

Why we do it:

Our vision is of a thriving Armed Forces community that is valued and supported in our society. We know there’s still much to do to meet the Covenant’s promise in full: ensuring that nobody is disadvantaged because of their service, and that special consideration is given to those who’ve given the most.

We welcome the opportunity to submit to this inquiry relevant learning points from our research work and from the projects we have funded to date.

In what areas is the Armed Forces Covenant working well?

1. In channeling funding into community projects focused on the Covenant’s aims. 2025 marks ten years of the Armed Forces Covenant Fund’s existence, and in the decade since its inception, it has delivered almost £100m in grants to projects up and down the country which are delivering on the Covenant’s aims of ensuring those who’ve served are not disadvantaged and that those who’ve given the most receive the support they need. The rolling, annual fund committed by Government in perpetuity to deliver the Covenant promise is a significant investor for the community sector, and its mix of grant scale and duration was highlighted as an important factor in recent consultation to inform its three-year grant framework from 2024-27.

The Covenant Fund’s annual investment is a crucial part of the Covenant’s activity beyond that which is delivered through its statutory duties, and its signatory scheme of more than 12,600 organisations. A list of all Covenant Fund grants can be found here, but we are keen to highlight some of the Fund’s most transformative work. This lies in the fund’s ability to pump-prime projects which have been able to prove new concepts; scale them for delivery to even more people in the armed forces community; and to enable those projects to find ways to sustain their work for the long term.

The Fund’s £6.6m in grants to local authority projects between 2017 and 2023 are an excellent example: enabling more than 150 local authorities in 44 separate clusters to further embed delivery of the Armed Forces Covenant in their areas, responding to the recommendations in the Our Community, Our Covenant reports. "In many cases, the funding enabled the employment of a dedicated resource, which grant-holders described as essential to increasing capacity and driving forward the implementation of the Covenant.” A significant majority of initiatives were sustained beyond the grant period, and tailored pathways created for the armed forces community to access local services – paving the way for the Covenant’s application today[1]. 

Similarly, the Covenant Fund programme ‘Former serving personnel in the justice system’ - and other subsequent grant programmes - were the bedrock of work by Walking With The Wounded and the NHS to develop and integrate third sector welfare and NHS mental health services. A two-year pathfinder with the NHS OP Courage High Intensity Service eventually moved into full NHS England coverage.

The Covenant Fund's grants to 18 transformational projects, totalling £6m in awards made in 2023 and in 2024, are another strong example of these enabling powers. These work to create systemic change in responding to uniquely difficult challenges facing the Armed Forces community, such that on completion of the 3-5-year projects, the landscape has changed forever. The Covenant’s investment provides the means for initial concepts to move through their development phases into sustainable new routes to support the community. Young carers in service families and female veterans experiencing addiction are among the cohorts being supported.

Evaluation of the Fund's £4m Tackling Serious Stress in Veterans programme also highlights the impact of investment to take tools and resources from projects to a far wider audience: “The protocol provides a platform for lasting partnerships with governmental agencies, professional bodies, charities, businesses, and appropriate networks.” The University of Chester study of hundreds of questionnaires by participants taking part in the projects concluded that a mixture of different intervention options including psychotherapeutic, social prescribing and practical support produced significantly positive results and reduced depression, anxiety, alcohol misuse and improved health and wellbeing. The programme demonstrated excellent cost effectiveness from both a healthcare and societal perspective, with incremental savings and an increase in quality-adjusted life years for beneficiaries.

2. In helping to foster a thriving ecosystem of community organisations supporting veterans, serving personnel and their families. This has been the ethos underpinning the £10m, HMT-funded Veterans Places, Pathways and People (VPPP) programme and its £10m successor, Thrive Together, which have been catalysts for sector-led models of 'no wrong door' in England’s regions and the devolved nations since 2021 - bringing together over 500 organisations and agencies to reach an estimated 12,000* veterans with mental health and wellbeing support. *Full analysis of figures is underway and will report in 2025. Interim evaluation of VPPP found that:

        The approach made it easier for veterans to access the help they need: All VPPP regions across the UK reported significant progress and developments in ‘pathways’ – the routes to support and referral mechanisms – that lead veterans in need to support services. The aim and impact of these improved pathways within and between regions is that veterans experience ‘no wrong door’.

        The approach improved wellbeing support for veterans, and their experiences of accessing help: Almost all (91%) of the VPPP partners using Cobseo’s Veterans Mental Health Awareness Standard self-assessment tool reported that their regional VPPP network had positively impacted how they approached and supported veterans with mental health needs.

        There are clear impacts for wellbeing outcomes of veterans: The interim evaluation of VPPP found that regional partners expected to see an increase in referrals from GPs to mental health services, a measurable decrease in the number of veteran suicides or incidences of self-harm, and an overall improvement in their confidence and ability to seek help. Evidence and testimony suggest significant improvements in these areas, which will be fully explored in the final VPPP evaluation to publish in 2025.

Covenant Fund projects are required to demonstrate robust governance, an ethos of collaborative working with other organisations, a strategic approach to sustainability, commitment to equity and inclusion and strong safeguarding – tenets of strong and capable delivery in the community sector.

3. In delivering evidence on what works to support the armed forces community beyond the Covenant’s statutory duties: the fund’s work is a rich source of evidence on activities which have improved all sorts of outcomes for veterans, serving personnel and their families, and on the underlying issues to which projects are responding. This learning ensures that the fund’s work is focused on those areas of the Covenant where progress is not as speedy or likely without additional funding, partnership and focus. The Covenant Fund’s three-year programme of planned investment in projects to understand complex problems facing those in the armed forces community is just one example: a commissioned exploration of the landscape of non-statutory support for those who’ve been bereaved is due to be published in the coming weeks, and will make recommendations on addressing challenges and gaps. 

4. In creating a shared vision of the Covenant’s aims (the world we want to see), bringing non-statutory and statutory projects together to deliver those outcomes. Collaboration around the Covenant leads to genuine partnership, learning and longevity, and the cross-sector nature of the Covenant commitments engenders understanding. The opportunity for the Covenant Fund to team up with NHS England to fund Armed Forces Advocate roles in acute hospitals across the UK clearly demonstrated this, as a £2m model which continues to evolve as best practice at many acute sites and is also informing wider work by the NHS to support veteran patients ever more effectively and seek to improve their health outcomes. Basing an Armed Forces Advocate for veterans across 16 NHS Trusts raised awareness of the needs of veterans among hospital teams, and improved their experiences.

Similarly, the Reducing Veterans’ Homelessness programme – funded by the Office for Veterans’ Affairs and managed by the Trust – works at the intersection of statutory and non-statutory support to help veterans experiencing homelessness. As interim evaluation shows, the programme’s delivery of accommodation through the Op Fortitude service and grant-funded projects providing help to access accommodation through specialised support and activities to foster community integration. Grant-funded work so far has seen improved outcomes for veterans across accessing and retaining housing, their mental and physical health, employment, healthy relationships, financial management and likelihood of reoffending. 
 

Where is the Armed Forces Covenant failing?

As a grantmaking and learning organisation, we don’t offer a view on the Covenant duty itself, but have listed some of the areas which may be useful to consider here, drawing on learnings from projects funded by the Covenant Fund:

• There remains huge opportunity to further embed collaboration around the Covenant. The VPPP programme was viewed by participants as a “catalyst for greater connections and collaboration with the public sector, most notably with NHS providers (just under half non-funded partners were from the public or private sectors). However, several regional leads observe that connecting with the NHS is usually the most challenging and takes the longest to establish, so the programme has helped to facilitate this (almost every region stated at least one NHS agency as being in their network).”
• An ‘Identify – Connect – Engage’ approach should be at the core of support to veterans with PTSD who are experiencing loneliness and isolation. Veterans would value a cohesive and collective assessment process to avoid having to retell their stories – from our Tackling Loneliness programme.
• Funding for case workers, and investment in their training, is consistently highlighted as a critical component of support, and in improving cross-sector support for vulnerable veterans in delivering the Covenant.
• The needs of Armed Forces families are highly complex, and some are constantly changing – from DSC’s evaluation of the Families in Stress and Removing Barriers to Family Life programmes. Our work for MOD to distribute funding under the Armed Forces Families Fund (AF3) further reinforces this, responding to the unique impacts for service children’s wellbeing and educational experiences. The needs of service children evidenced in grant applications to these programmes offer insights into remaining potential to ensure that families are not adversely disadvantaged by service.
• Needs of veterans in the justice system are particularly complex, and under-researched. Covenant Fund investment in grants supporting this community can offer data and insights to inform policy and develop pathways to more effective support.

Are there areas which the Armed Forces Covenant ought to be extended to, and why?

Across programmes funded by the Covenant – informed by literature review and our consultation with those in and supporting the armed forces community – we observe that there are many under-represented groups and hidden voices within the wider armed forces community, who continue to need support which is specifically targeted to reach them and engage them. We are undertaking ongoing work to uncover needs and opportunities for these groups under our work to explore complex issues, but further work to build understanding of the Covenant among wider specialist charities providing expertise in areas such as domestic violence,  bereavement, military sexual trauma and the pressures of being a carer will be crucial in expanding access to the right support to more of those in need. The role of the Covenant in the charitable objects of charities outside the armed forces sector may be an area of interest for the Committee.

The Fund already supports projects to help armed forces families dealing with the multiple, complex impacts of separation and overseas deployment, but we are exploring the potential for place-based investment and its role in creating greater impact for these families through the lens of specific locations, ensuring that the right ecosystem of non-statutory support is there to meet the needs of those in that place, and to ensure a seamless pathway through from the support they already receive through the Forces. This work will offer new opportunities to learn about the potential impact of the Covenant at place level, and whilst we are not yet in a position to evaluate outcomes, this may be another area of fertile ground for the Covenant’s potential future application. 

24th January 2025