Oral evidence: Army 2020, HC 104-i
Oral evidence, 16 June 2014.
Witnesses
Jon Thompson, Permanent Secretary, Ministry of Defence; General Sir Peter Wall, Chief of the General Staff, Ministry of Defence; Dawn Marriott-Sims, Chief Operating Officer, Capita; and Simon Fovargue, Vice President and General Manager, HP Public Sector Defence, ATLAS Consortium, gave evidence.
Chair
Thank you very much. We are a little late starting. Can I just get a quick answer to this, Mr Thompson: I am assuming we have an agreed Report before us this afternoon?
Jon Thompson
Yes.
Chair
Can I also get a quick answer to this, either from you or Sir Peter: what is the number of people who are Regulars in the Army today?
General Sir Peter Wall
It is about 86,000 on the track to 82,500 by the end of next year.
Chair
How many Reserves are there today who have trained to at least level 1 and level 2?
General Sir Peter Wall
There are around 19,400 against an envisaged level of about 600 fewer than that, at this point.
Chair
What is the gap in capability today?
General Sir Peter Wall
I think there is a surfeit of capability over our steady state, and that will be the case until the end of 2015.
Chair
What does “steady state” mean?
General Sir Peter Wall
The steady state will be when we have 82,500 Regular soldiers, which is our target for the end of 2015.
Chair
How many?
General Sir Peter Wall
82,500 by the end of 2015.
Chair
By the end of 2015. You’re cutting back on the Regulars and you are increasing the Reservists. I am assuming there is a relationship between those two numbers, and I am therefore assuming that, as you calculated how you are going to cut your Regulars, you had in mind how you were going to increase your Reservists so that the defence of the nation could be properly guarded.
General Sir Peter Wall
The point at which those two were meant to coincide is the end of 2018. Actually, because of the budget we have been given, we are reducing the Regular Army, as has been widely announced, by the end of 2015 and in fact last week was the announcement of the final tranche of Army redundancies—defence redundancies, but 98% of them were Army people. That gets us on the trajectory of a balanced career pyramid by the end of 2015. The answer to your question about how much resilience we will be lacking is that clearly that will be until such time as we can grow the Reserve to its target figure of 30,000. This is not just about raw numbers; it is about effective capability, and in a sense the difference between effective capability and the raw number of trained Reservists is starkly different. It depends on the quality of the officers and the amount of training they have had. It is also a function of our ability to transition from what the Army has been doing for the last 10 years or so, which is well understood, to being a contingency and deterrence force for an uncertain future. The extent to which these lists—this delta in resilience—will be tested will be driven by the events we get involved in and what is asked of us.
Chair
I understand that. I am asking a more direct question and I would be really grateful if you could help the Committee with this. It sounds to me that if we go down from 94,000 at the beginning of this year, you will be down to 84,000 by April 2015.
General Sir Peter Wall
No—82,500 by the end of 2015.
Chair
2018. Okay, but when you gave me your Reservist figure, that had stayed pretty static. You have gone up 200. I accept entirely that capability is about more than crude numbers, which makes it even more frightening to me, and I want a feeling from you, who are in charge of the Army—of course it all depends on whether we have to get engaged in any other conflict and all those sorts of things like playing any other role in world defence—
General Sir Peter Wall
We don’t have a deficiency of capability against the expectation.
Chair
But the figure I have seen bandied around is that you are probably more than 5,000 short. Would you feel uncomfortable with that figure?
General Sir Peter Wall
I don’t recognise that number.
Chair
What would you say it would be? Rather than not answering the question, give me your answer.
General Sir Peter Wall
I don’t understand the question. Is it about numbers of people or capability? We are required to be able to produce and sustain a brigade on operations on an enduring basis.
Chair
It’s about both, isn’t it? I accept that numbers and capability are not synonymous but they are not unrelated.
General Sir Peter Wall
And you—
Chair
Numbers and capability together. If you are losing one and you are not getting the other, you have a challenge.
General Sir Peter Wall
With a division at best effort we can do both with the numbers we have.
Chair
You say “best effort”, but that is not a real answer.
General Sir Peter Wall
No. We are required to be able to produce a brigade for enduring operations—a steady state deployment of a brigade, which is akin to the sort of thing we have been doing in Afghanistan for the last few years with, obviously, logistic support—and required to be able to produce what is known as a division at best effort. That is the way it was described in the 2010 defence review.
Chair
Best effort can be anything.
General Sir Peter Wall
That’s the answer.
Chair
Okay. What are you worrying about, Sir Peter? I cannot believe that you are sleeping easy at night when you have seen your Regulars going down and failure to date to recruit Reservists.
General Sir Peter Wall
The mitigating factor is the Regular Reserve—
Chair
I am trying to get you to help the Committee on the implementation of this change.
General Sir Peter Wall
The mitigating factor is what is called the Regular Reserve, which is not really mentioned much in the SDSR or the NAO Report, which is the aggregation of all those people who have a legal liability to serve by dint of them having completed their term of service in the Regular Army—and between 7,000 and 8,000 people leave the Regular Army every year and the liability normally extends to six years.
Chair
But, with respect, they are mentioned in the Report, and the Report says that there have not been sufficient checks there, so that for example 40% have not had the necessary medical checks.
General Sir Peter Wall
I do not accept that. Given the notice that we need we could not—
Chair
I have just been told at the beginning by Mr Thompson that the Report is an agreed Report.
General Sir Peter Wall
I think that what the Report actually says is that we would use those Regular Reservists, as they are called—I do not want to confuse people by the terminology—separate from what was the Territorial Army, which is now going to be called the Army Reserve. The Report suggests that those people only have utility for filling up gaps in niche capabilities. I do not accept that point. I think that they have got far more utility than that. We have got them volunteering to serve in Afghanistan at the moment, and they would be operationally capable enough, given the right mobilisation and training, to fill the gaps in the organisation that we might have as we go in the period between 2015 and 2018-19, when the Reserve will reach its target strength.
Chair
If. I hear what you say. I have to say to you I would have been immensely grateful for more open answers, so it would give us an opportunity really to just understand whether or not the Government’s policy intent, which we do not challenge and clearly you cannot challenge, is actually doable. That is what we are looking at. Is it doable?
General Sir Peter Wall
Yes, it is. I would be encouraged if we had a slightly different profile in our equipment programme.
Chair
You are going on to something else. We will come to the equipment programme.
General Sir Peter Wall
No, you asked me about capability.
Chair
I am talking about capability—
General Sir Peter Wall
Well, I am talking about capability.
Chair
In a situation where your numbers of Regulars are definitely down, because they have been successful in getting people out of the Army, and your number of Reservists, that the Government want to increase, are scarcely up, that must leave you with a problem. You are saying to me, “I can fill some of that with the Regular Reserves,” who the Report says have not been checked. You say that does not matter. I hear that; but what you have not really come clean on—and I am giving you a final opportunity before we move on—is really how big that gap is. You are the guy in charge. You are the guy in whom we put the defence of this nation.
General Sir Peter Wall
I am telling you that, with the numbers of people I have mentioned and you have mentioned, we can sustain those capabilities upwards.
Nick Smith
On the Regular Reserves, you say you have got a pool of experienced talent there, which you can call back. Given that many of them will have been in Afghanistan in recent years and gone perhaps into jobs in civilian life, what is your estimate of the numbers or the percentage that can come back and fill any holes you anticipate, should there be conflict?
General Sir Peter Wall
They all have a liability to do so.
Nick Smith
But liability is different to being able to drop jobs, family, all those things.
General Sir Peter Wall
No, I was going to carry on: of course, if you take a snapshot as at now, when we have been operating in Iraq and Afghanistan for 12 or 13 years, the operational experience of that cohort of people is as high as it would have been at any stage in, probably, my service, in terms of people who have been on operations in more than one theatre multiple times and who have understood what modern, demanding operations involve. So I would be confident that we would be able to draw a proportion of those people, which would probably be—
Nick Smith
But they have left and they have got new lives, so what is your estimate of the likelihood of them coming back?
General Sir Peter Wall
The fact that they have got new lives does not influence their liability. It would require, of course, a political decision to mobilise them.
Chair
And you would have to have the checks. The Report is right.
General Sir Peter Wall
Yes, we are running a programme at the moment to establish contact with all these people. We have had positive responses from over 10,000 of them. We are paying them an annual stipend for—
Nick Smith
Out of how many?
General Sir Peter Wall
Out of about 30,000.
Nick Smith
One third.
General Sir Peter Wall
No, I have just started a programme. That is as far as it has got. That will not be the final outcome. It will go way beyond that. It will be much higher than that. I would expect us to have between two thirds and three quarters of these people on our books, and as we—
Nick Smith
What does “on our books” mean?
General Sir Peter Wall
We know where they are and we are in a position to draw them into a training programme should we need to.
Chair
Let’s move on to the recruitment shortfall. Sir Peter has told us he has 19,600—it’s getting on for two years since Capita signed the contract. You have managed to increase the number by 200. Those are trained.
General Sir Peter Wall
Shall I just give a little bit of a narrative of what’s going on here? We are completely reorganising the Army into a different structure and we have actually shut down some Reserve units because they are not important to the future structure. Although it might seem counterintuitive to lay people off while there is a quest for numbers, we can’t justify spending money on units, equipment and bases that aren’t needed for the longer-term future, so we are expecting a dip in the strength of the Reserve, below its pre-Reserve announcement number, which was last July—
Chair
Where was that dip articulated in any document from the Department? In what plan of yours, Mr Thompson, was there ever a plan that there would be a dip? We are spending £1.2 billion with the good colleagues on your left and others and we are going to go for a dip. Was that in your plan, Mr Thompson?
General Sir Peter Wall
It was in my plan.
Chair
A dip?
Jon Thompson
The Chief of the General Staff has explained the plan. Just to be clear, we are not spending £1.2 billion with colleagues on my left, and the Report doesn’t say that, either—
Chair
No. Was it in your plan that there would be a dip in the recruitment of Reservists when the whole plan was based on increasing the number? Was there somewhere articulated in any plan that you have in your Department a dip?
General Sir Peter Wall
Yes. It is very clearly stated in all the information we have been working—
Chair
Have you seen that, Lee?
Lee Summerfield
No. There has been no Reserve target for 2013-14. December ’13, I think, was the first time when the Department explained what it was hoping to get by the end of the financial year, and the targets go from that year on. That point in December ’13, I think, is when the 18,800 target—
Chair
This is invented for this session, if I may say so, Sir Peter.
General Sir Peter Wall
I don’t think it is, actually. This is exactly the conversation we have been having internally, and I can explain in detail why—
Chair
All I can say is that, if you have been having it internally, it ought to be reflected in the documents that we have before us and an agreed Report this afternoon, and what we haven’t got is that there was a plan that by the end of this year there would be an extra—give me the figure—
Lee Summerfield
There has never been a target for ’13-14.
Chair
Well, 6,000 were recruited by Capita.
Lee Summerfield
But certainly the Army contracted with Capita to recruit 6,000. In December ’13, I think, the Department projected that you would have around 1,750 new recruits and about 750 ex-Regulars, and I think that against that, the Department recruited 1,300 new recruits. That was from December to the end—
Chair
So for the 6,000 that was in the contract—can we just get a yes or no from Capita on this?—you got paid, because you don’t think you did anything wrong in the contract?
Dawn Marriott-Sims
The target was 6,000, and we were paid the amount of money that was required to deliver the contract for that particular year.
Chair
You were paid as if you had delivered 6,000 new recruits.
Dawn Marriott-Sims
Yes.
Chair
Thank you.
Nick Smith
General, please tell us more about—
Chair
Ridiculous.
General Sir Peter Wall
I’ll explain what happens. We know that from the moment that we enlist and start training a new recruit into the Reserve, it takes us about two years to get them to the point where they are a gain to strength—they’re actually a trained soldier.
Nick Smith
We understand that’s every year.
General Sir Peter Wall
Well, that’s just as long as it takes. We are trying to reduce the length of that process, but inevitably people can go only so fast, because they have to combine it with their civilian jobs, keep their employers sweet and all that sort of thing. That is an accepted condition of the Reservist, but of course when you shut down a Reserve unit, they leave immediately. They either leave immediately or, actually, what we try to do is to incentivise them to join another Reserve unit in the area, but some of them don’t do that. They accept that they have done their bit—
Nick Smith
How many did you lose in that way, after shutting down units?
General Sir Peter Wall
We have actually lost far fewer than we expected, so the reason why we are above our—
Nick Smith
How many?
General Sir Peter Wall
I can’t give you the precise number. I could always give you that advice in writing later. But the reason why we are marginally ahead of where we expected to be is that that reduction has not yet or will not manifest itself.
Amyas Morse
General, isn’t it true that the pipeline for new recruits into the Reserves is down? In other words, am I not right in thinking that the normal level of the pipeline is about 6,000? Is that right? At the moment you have 3,000. I would have expected, in that case, that the pipeline would be sustaining itself. Is that true or not?
General Sir Peter Wall
They’re completely different features of the issue.
Amyas Morse
I know but I am just making the point that if everything is under control, you would expect the pipeline to be where it ought to be.
General Sir Peter Wall
I was answering the previous question about anticipated reduction. You are changing the subject to why the pipeline is not full up. The pipeline is not full up because the combination of our attract marketing—to get people interested in the Reserve—and the way we convert people who are contemplating applying into people who actually enlist and then report for training is not going as well as we would like. There are reasons for that, which we could go into. That is a separate phenomenon.
Amyas Morse
Let’s go into them. I think it is quite an interesting subject.
Chair
Perhaps somebody behind you can give you the number you have lost. I do not like this growing habit.
Lee Summerfield
Some 4,800 have left the Reserve each year for the past two years.
Chair
Each year—but has there been a sudden increase in that?
Lee Summerfield
No. It is pretty flat. I think it was about 4,800 last year and about 4,800 this year.
Chair
So what about this assertion that more have left because they have closed Reserve bases?
General Sir Peter Wall
I am agreeing with you. I am saying that we had expected more to and they didn’t.
Chair
The 19,600—
General Sir Peter Wall
We agree. We agree with most of the Report.
Chair
I hope you do agree with the Report; it is an agreed Report. The 19,600 is actually hardly an increase. That is what we are trying to understand—underneath that.
General Sir Peter Wall
I’m just giving you a reason why I am not worried about that number at the moment.
Jon Thompson
Is it possible to just go back and explain a bit of strategic context? I think it is relevant. If you go back to the SDSR, the policy that the Government inherited at that point was to run down the Reserve. The Reserves commission, in 2010, said there would be three phases for such a fundamental change. We agree that this is a change of significant risk. We do not disagree with that. I would have answered Sir Peter’s question—about what risks we are worrying about—slightly differently than he did. The Reserves commission said there would be three phases. You had to stabilise what was a reduction—in 2004 there were 33,000 and in 2010 there were 29,000. It suggested you had to stop the reduction, stabilise the numbers and then grow the numbers. It seems to me that we are somewhere towards the end of that phase two and then trying to build. It is important to understand that is what the reserves commission said, in a strategic context, before we get too far into the—
Chair
We’re not really asking about the SDSR. We are doing Army 2020 but I hear what you say. Nick, I interrupted you.
Nick Smith
I was still trying to understand the anticipated reduction, so be clear what the Army’s number of Reservists was supposed to be this year and next year because I just want to get to the bottom of exactly what the position is.
General Sir Peter Wall
Let’s be absolutely clear: we would love to have a full recruiting hopper and training pipeline. No doubt you will want to inquire as to why that is not the case. I am not suggesting that things are ideal by any means, but if you were to study the spot size of the Reserve, compared with what we might have expected, bear in mind we are in the middle of a very complicated transformation where we are reducing the size of some units that we no longer need and shutting some units that we no longer need because we cannot justify the expense of keeping them going just for raw numbers. We are transitioning gradually, over a period of six or seven years, to a new structure. As we transition to the new structure, we shall populate it with the new recruits that Amyas talked about earlier.
Chair
Sir Peter, I just have to stop you on this. We are paying Capita to recruit 6,000. We are paying them. Our taxpayers’ money is paying them. They got that money—I think that this is a situation which was not Capita’s fault—and they actually recruited just fewer than 2,000. I am right on that?
Dawn Marriott-Sims
Correct.
Chair
But we are paying them for 6,000. Do not sit here and tell us, “Actually, we knew we weren’t going to get so many this year.” If between you, you and Jon Thompson knew that, you should never have signed the contract with Capita saying we were going to get 6,000, which we are using our taxpayers’ money for.
General Sir Peter Wall
I have not said that we accept that Capita are not meeting the requirements. I didn’t say that.
Chair
You said you knew that it was going to be difficult. Why did you, as part of the board that agreed the contract with Capita, give them a contract that doles out public money when you knew you were not going to recruit them? That is not good evidence.
General Sir Peter Wall
At no stage am I saying that I am content with the performance you’re describing. Money from my budget is paying for this so I absolutely understand the importance of letting contracts that are being honoured. I wasn’t talking about that; I was talking about the answer to the question from your colleague here who is asking me about the dip, which was the previous issue we were discussing.
Nick Smith
General, if you don’t build the Reserves up to the right level over time, what will the consequences be?
General Sir Peter Wall
First, there will be reputational damage for us, which we would be very unhappy about. Secondly, we will fail to achieve the ambition that we, the Government and the Houghton commission have articulated. Thirdly, we will suffer lack of resilience in our capability, which we will rely on the Regular Reserve to backfill in the way I described earlier.
Mrs McGuire
Could I ask Mr Thompson what efforts the Department made to try to assess whether you could get to a position of increasing the Reserves to 30,000 within the time scale? Or was this just a figure plucked out of the air?
Jon Thompson
No, there was an independent commission, the chair of which was the vice-chief of the defence staff, General Houghton, supported by Julian Brazier—an MP and a member of the House of Commons Defence Committee—and retired General Lamb, previously the commander of land forces. They undertook an eight-month study and came forward with recommendations. The Government accepted those recommendations in 2011—
Amyas Morse
Is this it?
Jon Thompson
Indeed it is—“Future Reserves 2020”. The Government response wasn’t announced until July 2012. In the end, the targets that Mr Summerfield refers to were set in December 2013. There is a question about to what degree you test an eight-month independent commission, led by, it seems to me, two fairly significant generals—one latterly of the Army and one the vice-chief of the defence staff—who went into it in some considerable depth. The question in this Report is should we then have taken that and significantly changed it. I think there is a strategic case that that 30,000 is completely deliverable. It was 30,000 not so many years ago and it was 70,000 in 1990, so I think there is a strategic case that 30,000 is deliverable. The question is whether we can do the necessary detail that the Report points out, some of which is significant and involves significant risk, to build up the Reserve by 2018.
Mrs McGuire
I certainly wouldn’t call into question the integrity of the people who sat on the commission, but what efforts did they make to test the feasibility of their figures to you?
Jon Thompson
I’m afraid I simply can’t answer that question. I wasn’t involved in the independent commission.
Mrs McGuire
Could I then ask whether it was incumbent on you collectively to thank the individuals concerned for their report but also to test out whether their recommendations were based on some objective assessment about whether they were deliverable? Have you not put General Sir Peter Wall in a really difficult position here? We have a target, which, certainly at the moment, is looking quite difficult to deliver. At the same time, we have a run-down in the Regular forces. I would have thought that the strategic plan would have been to try to keep those two elements of it—the run-down and the recruitment of the Reservists—in some sort of equilibrium. Not exact, but some sort of equilibrium. Were the assertions or the recommendations tested in terms of feasibility?
General Sir Peter Wall
No.
Mrs McGuire
No. Thank you.
Jon Thompson
It is not possible, as per the National Audit Office’s Report—if you use historical data to try and predict the future, the prediction of the future would have been a further run-down. That is why I tried to explain the strategic context of the policy in the first place, which was to run the Reserve down. We are now trying to stabilise and reverse that.
Mrs McGuire
I don’t want to miss what General Sir Peter Wall said, in case it was not picked up. He said, “No.”
General Sir Peter Wall
But I was about to explain, because what actually the Houghton Commission did say—and it was independent, it was done in the context of the SDSR. Quite a lot of the judgment was done deliberately separately from single service aspiration—was that we ought to implement its findings towards a 30,000 target in the case of the Army over a three-phase programme. The other two services are affected by a less significant extent. The programme would stem the outflow-cum-decline of the previous model and then expose the offer of the new Reserve and then gradually start to build it, taking a check at the 2015 defence review to see whether that looked as if it was a feasible proposition and then rebalancing the design for the Reserve accordingly. The first two phases were conflated with the third and we were told to design an Army that was going to have a Reserve component of 30,000 by 2018, as you know. That is the situation that we are working on now and we are stretching every sinew with our partner, Capita, to grow those numbers. I think it is worth understanding the backdrop to some of this. In fairness to the Reserve organisation, it did not have an awful lot of encouragement, either from the Regular Army or from Defence in the four or five years leading up to the Secretary of State’s announcement last July. If we had been able to announce what we wanted of the Reserve a couple of years earlier than that, we would be in a better place now, but we could not do that because we had not redesigned the Army and we did not know what the proposition was going to be. We are now in the position where, on the back of several years of doubt in the country’s mind, coupled with the overall message of reducing forces—which never helps recruitment, as we all know and we have got plenty of history on that—we are now trying to turn on the fire hydrant and it has not quite gone up to full flow rate. However, we are working very hard to improve all our systems, in concert with our commercial partner to get this thing moving in the right direction. We have got quite a lot of Reserve units that are overmanned and we have got quite a lot of others that are growing from a low base.
Nick Smith
General, did you sign off the recruitment target of 6,000 with Capita? Was it your idea? Did you sign it off?
General Sir Peter Wall
It was our target.
Nick Smith
And you signed that off as a target?
General Sir Peter Wall
Not personally, but the Army effectively did, yes.
Q59Amyas Morse
I wanted to remind you, General, because I know that you testified in front of the Defence Committee in a report which was published in January this year. It made reference to the plans to go ahead with the implementation of Army 2020. If I may very quickly read a couple of conclusions from the Committee’s report. First, on the decision to go with the reduction in the Regular Army first and then go to building up Reserves more gradually, “We note, but remain to be convinced by….the explanation as to why the reduction in the Regular Army should not be dependent on the recruitment of the necessary number of Reservists.” Indeed, that was what the independent commission, the Houghton Commission, recommended as well. Secondly, the report said, “While the level of 30,000 trained Reservists in the Army might not appear a large number based on historic levels, that current recruitment drive takes place against a backdrop of falling recruitment levels over several years. We note the scepticism of some of our witnesses.” That discussion took place very recently.
General Sir Peter Wall
It did.
Amyas Morse
It is not unreasonable, is it, for us to test whether this is on track or not? It is concerning stuff.
General Sir Peter Wall
No. On your first point, reading from there, about why the Army was reduced faster than we could expect to regenerate or increase the Reserve, the country had to save the money. Anyway, the increase in the Reserve does not seek to compensate for the reduction in the Regular Army. Ten thousand more Reservists doing 40 days a year is never going to replicate the output of 20,000 Regulars working full-time who can be deployed anywhere at the drop of a hat without mobilisation or concern for employers. So we are not comparing apples with apples here. This is a completely different proposition, which has been designed into the new Army structure. I absolutely recognise your point. There is plenty of scepticism about whether we can do this. We are stretching every sinew and getting better at this. I think it is a bit early to understand whether some of the measures we have been implementing over the last few months are actually gaining traction or not—incentive schemes, enhancement of the recruiting pipeline, the new marketing programmes which Capita have done as part of the programme. Are we happy about the reduced inflow? Certainly not. We are working very hard to improve it. It is not absolutely clear, though, when we have done everything possible—we have done significant aggregation of the marginal gains in each of the programme lines; we have 60 change programmes of various sizes running at the moment through this Reserve proposition—whether the country is going to respond.
Chair
Whether the country?
General Sir Peter Wall
Is going to respond in terms of people’s preparedness to be twice a citizen. It is a big ask.
Chair
But Sir Peter, what I hear from you is that you would have been more comfortable in terms of the integrity of our defences if you had been given more time.
General Sir Peter Wall
Yes.
Chair
You would have been more comfortable?
General Sir Peter Wall
I would have been more comfortable still if we had not had to reduce the Regular Army in the first place.
Chair
Yes, but how much more time do you feel would have made it a doable proposition?
General Sir Peter Wall
I think that the original plan for the reduction of the Army was to get to 82,500 by 2018, but the degree of austerity in the defence budget forced us to accelerate that run-down, and it has created the potential for a gap in resilience that you identified early on.
Mr Bacon
Sir Peter, this Future Army 2020 report from the Defence Committee, from which Sir Amyas just quoted, refers to the fact that you were told about the future size of the Army by the permanent secretary.
General Sir Peter Wall
By Mr Thompson’s predecessor, just to be clear.
Mr Bacon
Right. Could you say, then, what role you had in the decision to reduce the size of the Army, if the number was given to you in that way?
General Sir Peter Wall
We gave very clear advice in the first round of the defence review, which preceded the White Paper that talked about an Army of 94,000, about the things you would not be able to do if you reduced the Army to 82,000. The first cut of the defence review took heed of that, evidently, because we had an Army of 94,000, which was about 8,000 smaller than the pre-SDSR Army. It was when the defence budget was reduced further in the three-month exercise that work was being done that we were not privy to.
Mr Bacon
Done by whom?
General Sir Peter Wall
It was being done in the Department.
Mr Bacon
By the MOD?
General Sir Peter Wall
Yes. That led to me being told by the permanent secretary of the day that the Army would be reduced to around 82,000.
Mr Bacon
This was in your capacity as Chief of the General Staff?
General Sir Peter Wall
Yes, at the end of my first year in this role. We have been trying to recollect exactly what our sentiment was at the time in order to be able to answer your questions as fully and accurately as possible.
Mr Bacon
But “not too happy” would probably sum it up?
General Sir Peter Wall
Not at all happy, to be honest. Who would be? I do not think the Government was happy, either, in giving us that challenge. We had assimilated the prospect of perhaps an 88,000 Army. What we then had to do, of course, was go off and redesign the whole thing from scratch. Whereas you can assimilate the 7% or 8% reduction by doing marginal adjustments, the taking into account of the need to integrate a 30,000 Reserve with an 82,000 Army, which was 20% smaller than the previous size, was the cue for a complete redesign from scratch. That was what we did, and we have come up with a hybrid solution with an integrated Regular and Reserve force. The Houghton Commission did not necessarily anticipate that that was how the 30,000 Reserve would be used, but that is what we have decided to do. It will therefore take us a little bit longer to forge this track to 2018 whereby the two elements will be able to co-exist.
Mr Bacon
Was that the point at which you decided—I am sorry, but I forget the term of art that you use for Regular soldiers who leave and then go on to the—
General Sir Peter Wall
The Regular Reserve.
Mr Bacon
Was that the point at which you decided to make greater use in your planning of the Regular Reserve?
General Sir Peter Wall
If I am really honest with you, we knew about the Regular Reserve and knew that it had reasonable utility. It is, as we have understood, the potential gap between a Regular Army of 82,000 and the point at which the Reserve will come online in 2018 and understanding how we call out and train the Regular Reserve where we have started to concentrate more efforts. I should add that there were lots of Regular Reservists in Iraq at the beginning of that operation. There is a consistent trickle of Regular Reservists as part of the force in Afghanistan, so this is not a rare phenomenon.
Mr Bacon
May I just ask Dawn Marriott-Sims of Capita something? On the contract that you had, the general used the phrase “letting contracts that are honoured”. As far as I understand it, you have honoured your contract—that is why you were paid the money. The MOD would not have paid you money for a contract that you had not honoured. That is correct, is it not?
Dawn Marriott-Sims
Yes.
Mr Bacon
Although the contract said that they were hoping you would recruit 6,000 Reservists, by recruiting 2,000 and because of the terms of the contract, you have honoured your contract.
Dawn Marriott-Sims
If I may confirm, at the point at which the contract was let to us in March 2012, 6,000 Reserves was not a number that we would have recognised. The report and the change in direction to make greater use of the Reserves over and above the Regulars came after the contract with Capita had been signed. If I refer back to when we were planning how we would deliver to the requirements of the Army, at that point in time—we spent the best part of three years bidding for this particular contract—there was no consideration to Reserve planning and solution design around the Reserves.
Mr Bacon
So the goalposts were being moved as you were in the process of bidding?
Dawn Marriott-Sims
We signed a contract in March 2012, and the report we were just referring to came out in July 2012. There was one other significant event that occurred after we signed the contract, which I also think is material. In April 2012, the Army had a policy change on the entrance standards for Reserves, which is known generally as common selection. For the benefit of clarity, the process for joining the Army had a set standard and the TA, as it was then, had a very different and far simpler application process that was much easier for people to get over. After we signed the contract in March, there was a policy change in April that harmonised the selection processes, making it much more challenging to join what was then the TA but is now the Reserves. There were two material events that occurred after we had signed the contract.
Mr Bacon
How much did the MOD pay you?
Dawn Marriott-Sims
The contract value is £440 million over 10 years.
Mr Bacon
How much did you spend bidding for it? You said it took you three years.
Dawn Marriott-Sims
We spent in the region of £5 million.
Mr Bacon
Just bidding for it?
Dawn Marriott-Sims
Just bidding.
Chair
We will come back to that issue, but I hear what you say about the standards.
Nick Smith
Sir Peter, I want to ask two more questions about the Regular Reserve, which you talked about mobilising. You talked about them coming back into service in Iraq and Afghanistan and about contacting up to 10,000, but possibly being able to mobilise 20,000. You also talked about two thirds of the Regular Reserve—
General Sir Peter Wall
I expected us to be able to establish contact with between two thirds and three quarters of these people, with a view to mobilising them, should it be necessary.
Nick Smith
When was the last time we mobilised over 20,000 personnel like that?
General Sir Peter Wall
I don’t think we will have done that. We probably mobilised very low thousands in the whole period of the Balkans, and at the beginning of the Iraq campaign. We would not need anything like that number, but that is the field from which we would select individuals to fill specific gaps in the structure that we rely on those people for.
Nick Smith
At the moment you are looking at a pool of around 20,000 to 25,000 Regular Reserves, anticipating the possibility of them being brought into service in the short term?
General Sir Peter Wall
Probably 10% of that at any one time to fill the voids we might have.
Chair
Can you explain this to me, because I am ignorant on this? People in the full-time Reserve services are different?
General Sir Peter Wall
They are different. Full-time Reserve service personnel are Reservists who work full time. They are nothing to do—
Chair
Quite. So they actually cost as much as a Regular?
General Sir Peter Wall
Slightly less, because they do not get the X factor. They are employed primarily at home not abroad. There are two categories. They cost about the same, within 10%, at the time they are serving. Obviously when their full-time service finishes, their contract says that they revert to normal levels of TA involvement, which is about 40 days a year.
Chair
To boost the figures on the number of Reservists you are getting, am I right in saying that you are adding into that figure the full-time Reserve service?
General Sir Peter Wall
Yes we are.
Chair
You are. So that I get it clear, you have said—and I think we were very shocked that you were not consulted—that the purpose behind the further cut in Regulars was to save money.
General Sir Peter Wall
Yes.
Chair
If in fact, because we are not managing to recruit the Reservists, we are bringing in these full-time Reserve services personnel, you are not saving money, are you, on those particular people?
General Sir Peter Wall
There are about 2,000 of those full-time Reserve service people; that is 2% to 3% of the Army strength, depending on whether it is the current strength or where we are going to end up in 2015.
Chair
So you have taken them out of one and put them in the other?
General Sir Peter Wall
No. They are essentially filling gaps in our structure that are born either of Regulars we have lost or have not recruited, or people where there is an additional demand born of a specific surge required for operations. For example, we have up-gunned our recruiting operation, as you would expect us to, particularly for the Reserve, in order to satisfy the demands of this growth to 30,000. We have got quite a lot of full-time Reserve service people who channelled into the staff structure to meet what was an unforeseen requirement, and it gives us very useful flexibility. It is entirely right that we should recognise what those people do and, of course, their growing experience has long-term utility.
Chair
I am sure they do a brilliant job. All I am trying to find out and establish is that those 2,000 people three years ago would have been counted in your Regulars and they are now being counted in your Reservists, so to be honest they are being used to manipulate the reduction in Regulars.
General Sir Peter Wall
No, they were never included in the Regulars. They were always a separate compartment and a proportion of them is now included in the Reserve ambition.
Chair
But it is a slight manipulation of figures.
General Sir Peter Wall
I think we should get recognition for what they do and the capability they give us, which is what this about. It is about capability more than it is about numbers.
Nick Smith
It sounds like they are going to do a great job, but it also sounds like they are your new contingency, because you have had to drop the numbers in the Regular Army and you have failed to recruit to the Reserve.
General Sir Peter Wall
Yes, they are performing important roles. They tend to be in relatively senior posts, not in the rank and file number that we are trying to swell as this growth from 20,000 to 30,000 in the Reserves. They are slightly different types of people.
Chair
Will people you have made redundant fall into this new category in any way? Is anybody made redundant being offered a Reservist role?
General Sir Peter Wall
People who are made redundant can volunteer to join the Reserve but they will end up in a different part of the Army in all probability.
Chair
What is that? Just expand on that for us.
General Sir Peter Wall
We are making people redundant in employment groups where our demand is reducing—i.e. we are moving to a new structure and the people who are being made redundant are in jobs that no longer need to be filled. If they pop up in the Reserve in a later life, it will be in the Reserve part of an organisation, as opposed to—
Chair
Will they pop up in the Regular Reserve list?
General Sir Peter Wall
No, because people who are made redundant do not have a Regular Reserve liability.
Nick Smith
This idea of the Regular Reserve just seems to be filling a gap that has come about. Did you anticipate the Regular Reserve performing this new role?
General Sir Peter Wall
Yes, it has always been there as a form of strategic resilience for the Army, and it is successful.
Nick Smith
But to this size—to this anticipated difference in numbers?
General Sir Peter Wall
It is a contingency plan. Events will tell us whether we end up calling it out, and if we need to, we will.
Mrs McGuire
Can I just ask a question that is maybe for the MOD, rather than the General? The impression has been created that this is a new, modern flexible approach to maintaining our military capability and capacity, that our new Army will be mixture of those who are Regulars and Reservists, and that you could almost combine the numbers and say that we have 82,000 Regulars and 30,000 trained Reservists ready to spring into action. We have just heard the General say that actually, he probably would not estimate any more than about 10% of them being available, or being necessary to call up. I wonder whether the MOD are playing a bit with figures here—a bit of smoke and mirrors—and instead of this new super-duper flexible approach, with a mixture of folk who are either full-time or in reserve, we actually have a dramatic reduction in our armed forces or our Army; we are not planning to draw into any situation any more than 10% of the Reservists, which would probably have been the average for most situations that the Army have faced in the last number of years. I understand that in Iraq it was nearly 20%, but do you see where I am coming from on this one? It looks like we have still got the capability and capacity of 112,000, whereas we really have the capacity of 82,500 plus 3,000.
General Sir Peter Wall
That is exactly right, but we have designed it with that realisation in mind.
Mrs McGuire
But the impression with the figures is that it looks as though we have this flexible capacity up to 112,000, when really what we have got is 82,000, plus, the General has estimated, no more than 10% in a normal situation.
General Sir Peter Wall
About 10%.
Chair
Golly!
Amyas Morse
Can just I check something, General, since we are talking about the position of the Regulars? What is the relationship between deploy time and what you ideally want for your forces in harmony and training? Has that not already been compressed in the last few years? Can you just talk to us a little bit about what you expect in terms of long-term sustainability of forces and them being able to refresh and renew themselves, and them not being exhausted?
General Sir Peter Wall
If the whole Army were going at full tilt—coming to the end of a campaign era, the indication that that is likely in the near future is not that high, but who knows?—people will be doing six months’ operational service with a 24-month gap. So, they will be doing six on and then 24 months not on operations as part of their managed careers, as part of their unit’s contribution to contingency capability, and so on and so forth. That is the model that we have used pretty well all the way through Iraq and Afghanistan, and it stood us in good stead in terms of incidents of mental health, and all that sort of stuff. In the Reserve, the maximum expectation is that a Reservist would get called up for one year in five. Half of that year would be spent on an operational tour with the other half being the essential training to get them ready and then decompression at the end.
Amyas Morse
Stepping back a little and looking at the context that we are in, does that mean that if we did get involved in a substantial operational requirement and did not have Reserves at the requisite level, the pressure would fall on the Regulars? You might be under pressure to maintain that cycle of harmonisation.
General Sir Peter Wall
If we find ourselves nationally in a context where effectively an Army running on the rubric that I have just described is not big enough, there will be an increased dependence on the Reserve, but most of the running faster would be done by the Regulars doing extended tours and so on—9 or 12-month tours, as happened to the United States recently.
Mrs McGuire
Do those extended tours cause problems for retention?
General Sir Peter Wall
I am sure that it would have a direct impact on retention.
Mrs McGuire
Which almost exacerbates the problem with recruiting across the board, whether Regulars or Reservists.
General Sir Peter Wall
It has an impact in terms of raw numbers and in terms of the experience that you can take forward to successive operations.
Chair
What you are describing to us—I am grateful for the openness—is a situation that is not reflected in the strategy. You are saying that we are reducing our Regular forces, with a little bit of supplementation from what we manage to do in the volunteer force, but we are going to be dependent on 82,000.
General Sir Peter Wall
The bulk of the capability is always going to come from the—
Chair
I read one quote in preparing for today, which was from Allan Mallinson, who said that the Government are “presiding over a dismantling of our military capability without parallel since 1698”.
General Sir Peter Wall
I want to offer a little comfort against that. You need to recognise that we have something called the whole force, which includes Regulars, Reservists, MOD civil servants and contractors. We have made extensive use of contractors to provide infrastructure support and services in Afghanistan. In doing so, we have emulated what a lot of other armies, such as the Americans, have been doing for some time and to a greater extent than we had hitherto done. When you consider your response to a particular campaign, challenge or intervention, you will answer the exam question with mixtures of those four types of people. The Reservist and civil service pieces are going to be within fairly narrow boundaries. We know the size of the Regular Army and, as Amyas’s question indicated, we can make that run faster, but that inevitably has a consequence for retention. We are looking hard at how we let the right sort of labouring contracts to contractors to enable them to carry out logistic functions that, in a bygone era when military manpower was less expensive, would have been done by people in uniform. The picture is not as bleak as Allan is painting.
Chair
But it is a pretty depressing legacy as you come to your retirement.
General Sir Peter Wall
Thank you very much. All that I would say is that we have worked very hard within the resource envelope that we have been given to get as much capability out of it as we can, and I think that we have done a reasonable job.
Chair
Yes. I think that your effort—it is just the legacy that you are leaving.
General Sir Peter Wall
Yes.
Jackie Doyle-Price
We have become caught up in the numbers here, but the key thing is capability. Would you agree that it is more important to get the quality of Reservists, rather than actually dashing to hit a target?
General Sir Peter Wall
The big change in the Reserve is not actually the raw numbers articulated in the Houghton commission, but rather how we are integrating them into this new style Army. They are not coming as individuals; they come as formed bodies at company, squadron or battery level. The groups are self-contained with capability commanded by Reservists at major level. All the ranks that you would see in the Regular Army are replicated in the Reserve element to plug into a Regular battalion or regiment. We are asking for collective capability with operational judgment and leadership from the young officers, the senior warrant officers and, ultimately, the major who is commanding it. That’s a completely different proposition from what we have been using the Reserve for in Afghanistan. It used to do it like that in the cold war, but we don’t have enough of the vibrant type of people who are going to give us that capability. So the real issue is not how many new youngsters we can recruit to be riflemen, but where we are going to find the sergeant-majors, sergeants, young officers and company commanders who can take this organisation on operations. We have some good examples; we have one such company doing exactly that in Cyprus at the moment on a peacekeeping operation. But of course, war-fighting operations are a quantum more demanding than that. So that is what I am worried about. The numbers are important, of course, but the type and quality of people, and the commitment they can give, are very important.
Jackie Doyle-Price
But for us to understand what is happening for Army 2020, what we really have to get to grips with is the redesign of the British Army, not the numbers. The numbers are part of it, but they are a distortion from what we are talking about, which is a change in how you are operating, effectively.
General Sir Peter Wall
Yes. And with the people, the equipment and the training.
Meg Hillier
Could you remind us how long the requirement is for a Regular to be in the Reserve and available? How many years do they have to be available for?
General Sir Peter Wall
To go into the Regular Reserve, five years after they have completed their service.
Meg Hillier
Okay. You talked about one year in five being available for operations. If the situation that you were discussing just then with the Comptroller and Auditor General about a bigger need arose—you talked about increasing the tour length for the Regular Army—would it be possible to ask people to do one in four? Do you need legislative or contractual change?
General Sir Peter Wall
I think it would be possible, but I think the political premium, which is not something I am able to comment on, would be an obvious issue in that.
Meg Hillier
Okay, but you don’t need any kind of legal change?
General Sir Peter Wall
I don’t think we do. I think we will have to give you clear advice on that, because the Defence Reform Bill is taking a view on all of that.
Meg Hillier
Forgive me; I have not followed the Defence Reform Bill in detail. Can I just ask one other thing? Jackie and I were thinking along some of the same lines. You talked about people being in specialist jobs. The Honourable Artillery Company, for instance, is close to my constituency, and I have met some of the Reservists, generally when they have come to Hackney to talk to school children. Clearly, some people are very specialist. What other particular specialist areas do you envisage the Army will need? What careers in civilian life do you need to recruit them from in order to make sure you have the right bodies? It is no good having intelligence officers from people who have got, dare I say it, a teaching background—maybe a maths teacher, I don’t know.
General Sir Peter Wall
There are some obvious areas where capabilities are more easily sustained in the civilian world that can then be imported into the military for operations—things like the cyber world; aspects of hi-tech communications; language and culture, where academics would be welcome—
Meg Hillier
Forgive me, but what role?
General Sir Peter Wall
Interpreters, intelligence analysts, or translators in a intelligence gathering context. The most obvious one is the national health service, particularly the trauma end of the NHS, where we already have a strong relationship. There are other walks of life where people will want to do a different job in the Reserve from their day job, so they are not on a busman’s holiday, or a busman’s operation.
Meg Hillier
Is there any group that is particularly hard or easy to recruit for at the moment?
General Sir Peter Wall
We have a strong hinterland in the medical world, and there is no doubt that our skills have contributed to the trauma capability of the NHS; it is a symbiotic thing there. Cyber is untested, but is very important. The logistics world is an obvious place, with big logistic corporates and so on. I stress that a lot of people will want to do something other than their day job.
Chair
I want to get us on to talking more about the contract with Capita and those areas. The Report says that, when you took over the contract in Capita, you were given 55,000 names. That went down to 12,000, of which 6,000 were over a year old and therefore probably redundant.
Dawn Marriott-Sims
That is absolutely factually accurate. At the point at which the Army handed over the operation to us, there had been a working assumption, backed up by evidence, that 55,000 candidates were in flight of the recruitment process, but the reality is that the number is much closer to 6,000. Before we started, we were running significantly behind to reach the target number for that particular year. That number was a combination of Regulars and Reserves—I don’t think the Report specifies that, but it was a combined number—which put us at a significant disadvantage before we started. There were then the well-documented IT challenges.
Chair
Yes, we will come on to that, but let us just stick to the subject. Mr Thompson, how could you get it so wrong?
Jon Thompson
How could we get what so wrong?
Chair
The figures. You hand over 55,000 names to Capita in this new contract and it turns out that only 6,000 are live and potential recruits, either to the Regular Army or the Reserves. How could you get it so wrong? You are the accounting officer, Mr Thompson, and as I understand it from the figures we have you are doing quite a lot of recruiting from outside the Army. How could you get it so wrong?
Jon Thompson
I can’t answer that question. This was an Army recruitment partnering project. It went through the normal processes. The Army believed that it had 55,000 people in the pipeline, and I assume that Capita gave some spotlight on it. Sir Peter could give you the—
Chair
You are the accounting officer—this is just shocking. We can just about accept that if you go for a new system you need to clean up a bit of data, but 55,000 down to 6,000 is unbelievably awful.
General Sir Peter Wall
These are 55,000 expressions of interest, aren’t they, of indeterminate validity?
Chair
Well, they were a list that you passed on, for which the accounting officer has to take responsibility. You passed on a list, presumably on the basis of which you had signed contracts and had negotiations with Capita et al to get some sort of reality into the contract, and on which you have failed but are nevertheless paying Capita for. How could you get it so wrong?
Jon Thompson
Well, I was not personally involved, but let me attempt to answer. One purpose of letting the recruitment partnering project was to clean up a significant amount of data in this area that we felt was incorrect. We always anticipated that the 55,000 figure would need to be cleaned up. It was apparent from the various lists that were around at the time that there was going to be some significant duplication. I don’t think that Capita were paid to recruit 55,000 people, which was implied in your question, but you are right that the best data we had available at the time showed that 55,000 had at some time in the past expressed some interest, but that could have been some time ago.
Chair
Had I been running your Department, I would have gone ballistic at that sort of exchange. What did you do about it? It is one very simple thing. This whole new way in which we are delivering the Army—I hear your scepticism about it, Sir Peter—depends on the success of getting Reservists. Here you are at point 1, stage 1, and did you do anything about it? Did you just think, “Oh well, 55,000 should actually be 6,000. That doesn’t matter; let them get on with it. It’s just a bit of cleaning up of data”?
Jon Thompson
One of the points of trying to recruit a professional partner in Capita—
Chair
Are you shocked? I understand what the point is, but were you shocked by that?
Jon Thompson
Yes. There are a number of points in the Report for which the Ministry of Defence must take responsibility. You will undoubtedly get to the question of why the Ministry of Defence did not integrate two IT contractors, and we must take complete responsibility for that. There are other aspects on which we are doing okay, and there is one where I think we are doing rather well, but on this particular aspect, it is unacceptable. Let me be absolutely clear about that. It is also unacceptable that officials at the Ministry of Defence did not integrate, for example, two different contracts—they let two different contracts run.
Chair
We are not talking about that. We will come to that. I know that you are anxious to get off this figure, but the 55,000 names that were handed over were just completely Alice in Wonderland stuff.
Jon Thompson
As you know, I have been absolutely up-front with this Committee in the past. Where I think we have done things well, I have been quite happy to push back, and where we have done things that are clearly unacceptable, I will say that they are unacceptable. The question of two contracts that got out of line was unacceptable.
Chair
You are not answering the question. I will come to the two contracts, but I am talking about handing over to Capita 55,000 names, of which it quickly emerged that only 6,000 were potential recruits. Are you accepting a bit of responsibility for that?
Jon Thompson
I am accepting responsibility for the sins of my forefathers, as is the convention of being the accounting officer. This project stems back to 2008—it is a long-burning project that has been through various different processes—and it is unacceptable. We have tried to rectify that situation.
Chair
Can I ask another question? You are assuming that in this new Army that is going to defend our nation 55% of the Reserves will be trained—it goes up from 34% to 55%—but my understanding from the Report is that that is unevidenced. On what basis did you make that assumption, and can you tell us with any certainty that you can deliver on it?
General Sir Peter Wall
It is an increase in the target. The primary evidence for it is that we are going to set higher entry standards. You heard earlier about the common entry standard, which is the same entry standard as for a Regular soldier. That is entirely logical, as they will end up serving on the same operations and in the same units. There are improved procedures in the Regular training pipeline, and we are going to export various coaching techniques into the Reserve space by making the array of training options for Reservists potentially more compatible with their employment regime, so the drop-out rate for reasons other than military failure, such as lack of personal momentum, is diminished. Obviously it is a target, but we set it because we think it is achievable, and we expect to move there in stages.
Chair
By?
General Sir Peter Wall
It will go from 34% to 51% to 55% over the next two years, as I recall.
Chair
And you think it is doable, do you?
General Sir Peter Wall
Yes, I do.
Chair
According to the Report, by 2016-17 you will need to recruit 9,270 Reserves, of whom 8,000 are new recruits, each year. This year, we recruited 2,000. Is that doable?
General Sir Peter Wall
That is the peak demand in this growth period.
Chair
Is it doable?
General Sir Peter Wall
We are working very hard at it—I told you earlier what we are doing. Time will tell. It needs to grow significantly over the next year to give us confidence that the 2016-17 target can be hit. It is ambitious, but it is what we are shooting for to get to the numbers of people we need by 2018.
Mr Bacon
Is it right that recruitment for the Reserves is counter-cyclical with the economy, so when the economy is doing badly, Regular recruitment goes up, but when the economy is doing well, Reservist recruitment goes up? The argument that has been put to me is that employers are more flexible in a competitive market to get people, so, although it might sound paradoxical, it is easier to recruit more Reservists in a buoyant economy. Does that hold water?
General Sir Peter Wall
The bit about the Regulars is certainly true. I would take comfort if I really believed that the Reserve element of it—the upside—is going to happen. We don’t have evidence for that yet, although there is a perfectly rational explanation for why it might be the case. We will be working on it with employers. A lot of this progress has to be done by making the conditions for the individual more advantageous by dint of their employer’s attitude. We are doing a lot of work on that, but it has not yet flowed through into the work space, to be honest.
Meg Hillier
I want to check what the consequence is. If you don’t get the pipeline peak of 8,000, for how many years can you go with a lower level?
General Sir Peter Wall
I think if we got up to 25,000 or 26,000, and it had the right people in it—I am going back to the question about capability—we would be able to sustain ourselves. Obviously, we would rather have the full population, which is what we are shooting for. When you get to within 10% to 15% of the target, the quality of people argument transcends the numbers.
Meg Hillier
And that is on the five-year rotation, not on anything less than that?
General Sir Peter Wall
Yes, exactly.
Mrs McGuire
I want to ask Capita whether you are ready to move on to this. You have already frankly revealed how much the contract is worth to your company. Can you explain to the Committee what you are going to do for that money, in terms of Army recruitment? I might come back to the general about the environment in which recruitment takes place. It is not all about you guys being slick; there are other areas.
Dawn Marriott-Sims
If I may, and focusing in particular on the Reserves, we are already starting to see the number of applications in the Reserve environment increasing. If I look from January to date, we have seen a 43% increase in the number of applications received—
Mrs McGuire
What does that mean in real numbers? A 43% increase in numbers from 10 is to something like 15.
Dawn Marriott-Sims
At the moment, we are receiving something like 600 recruiting applications per week for the Reserves. That figure compares with an April to December figure for last year. So we have already started to see some significant increases. And what I can put that down to is, in January, we launched a significant recruitment advertising campaign called “More than meets the eye.” What we are trying to do extensively is raise awareness of the Reserve proposition. We are also reviewing all aspects of the process itself. I mentioned common selection earlier. Where we can, we are trying to examine and break down each individual part of the recruiting process to ensure that it is as focused on the applicant as it can be, so that we make the journey into the Reserves seamless. That does not mean reducing standards; it just means making it more accessible. We are also working very closely with the Army at examining current policy. For example, with bringing on common selection, one of the challenges from our side would be the BMI requirements of somebody to join the Reserves and whether, actually, they are still fit for purpose. Those standards have been set in place for a very long time. There are some other areas of challenge. For example, tattoos in today’s common society are a lot more prevalent, but actually the guidelines for joining the Army and then taking into account common selection put that as a barrier to a significant number of our target population joining. So we are looking where we can jointly—
Mr Bacon
It is that they don’t have enough tattoos, or that they have too many? Is it the weight of the tattoo that is the problem?
Dawn Marriott-Sims
If you have got a tattoo, there is an Army policy that sets out very clearly the requirement for what it may or may not look like. What we are doing is looking at each and every part of the selection criteria to assess: “Is it still fit for purpose and is it a barrier to people joining?” and really just challenging the thinking around all of those sorts of things. We have not yet got on to the IT element, which I am sure we will—
Chair
Now, actually. Shall we go on to that now?
Mrs McGuire
I am quite happy with that, because IT is an important issue, but it is also the context in which recruitment is taking place. What are you doing to overcome these barriers?
Dawn Marriott-Sims
Let’s be clear: better IT does not result in more applications to join the Army. What will result in more applications is very targeted, specific advertising with a very clear, defined proposition. However, with the absence of IT, what we cannot do is move that population of people through the process seamlessly and easily. When the contract was let—
Mr Bacon
We won the second world war—I am told—and there were no computers. We seemed to manage it then and it was done with a quill pen.
Mrs McGuire
It was an existential question—come on!
Mr Bacon
I am quite serious. For at least 30 or 40 years afterwards, there were no PCs to speak of, yet we managed it with the post—postage and pens and paper. You said that effective IT in itself will not result in more applications, but it will result in more applications not being lost.
Dawn Marriott-Sims
Indeed.
Mr Bacon
And what has been happening, certainly in the Regulars and I am told in the Reserves as well, is that applications are simply being swallowed. For example, if you were a Regular soldier or Army officer, one of the questions that you used to be asked was, “Have you served in the Regular forces?” If you answered yes—truthfully—the system ate your application. It did not tell anyone else; it said: “This is an invalid application because this is for Reservists.” Whereas, of course, it would be relatively simple for it to say, “Ah, you go fast-tracked”, but it did not do that. It did not tell anybody else about it. Is that still a problem now or has that been solved?
Dawn Marriott-Sims
That is no longer a problem.
Mr Bacon
This may be difficult to answer, but do you know how many people you lost because of that process?
Dawn Marriott-Sims
No, we don’t. I cannot say how many people we have lost. I do not believe that—
Mr Bacon
But you did lose some?
Dawn Marriott-Sims
I don’t know that for a fact. The actual process of people converting from former Regular to Reserve only transferred to Capita this year as a result of redundancies that were made in the MOD in Glasgow. There was absolutely a bottleneck of people attempting to go from Regulars to Reserve. Jointly, we have now solved that problem. If there were people lost, I cannot comment on that. I don’t know.
Nick Smith
How big was the bottleneck?