PARLIAMENTARY DEBATE
Service Family Accommodation: Maintenance - 19 June 2023 (Commons/Commons Chamber)

On Thursday, I was delighted to attend an annual reception at RAF Shawbury in my constituency. That important base trains helicopter pilots for all the armed forces, and we are proud to host it in North Shropshire. However, I am less proud—indeed, I am not proud—of some of the accommodation provided for service families there. This Armed Forces Week, I have had to secure an Adjournment debate to raise the unacceptable repair and maintenance and the poor overall state of housing, as it has become increasingly apparent that service families who live both in Shawbury and at the barracks in Tern Hill in my constituency have not always been able to return to safe and warm houses at the end of each day. Worryingly, the situation has worsened since the maintenance contract was restructured and renegotiated in April 2022.

Let me provide the House with some examples. One of my constituents had a roof in need of full repair and a bird cover for the chimney. The repair simply did not happen. My constituent wrote:

“We still get massive crows falling down our chimney, but we have learnt to live with it.”

A second family endured severe damp and mould, and their children suffered ill health as a result. They wrote:

“My children have been ill for months due to damp and mould never being resolved. We’ve never as much as had a call back to arrange a visit... We called yesterday to raise a repair with water pouring out of our pipes outside. It was classed as ‘non urgent’, so no appointment was made. This morning, we have woken up to no running water in our property—none. We cannot flush the toilet. We cannot wash our hands. We cannot access basic human rights... When I called Pinnacle to raise this issue, I was told it’s ‘non urgent’ and they will keep the job open, but with no guarantee anybody will fix it today.”

At the reception on Thursday, I met a serviceman whose family had suffered from damp and mould, no heating in their utility room and blocked guttering. For three years, they had to wash using a bucket because the water pressure was too low to shower. In another case, I was told,

“we were without heating from 5th December 2022 until 6th January 2023, with 2 young children aged 2 years and the other 6 months.”

I commend the hon. Lady on bringing forward this issue. The fact that 46% of personnel are married or in a civil partnership and 23% are in a long-term established relationship underlines the importance of family in the support network of our service personnel. The standard of accommodation that those families are in is a vital cog in that network. Does the hon. Lady agree that it should be of the highest standard and well maintained, so that the focus of our troops remains on their job and not on a flood in their bathroom at home?

I agree with the hon. Gentleman’s points.

Finally, a constituent wrote to me:

“About to go my third night without heating or hot water…. After also having 26 days without running water, I have run out of avenues to pursue with Pinnacle etc and I think I speak for thousands of service families across the UK when I say that this needs to be addressed. Please help!”

When I raised these cases with the former Minister, the right hon. and learned Member for Cheltenham (Alex Chalk), the Defence Infrastructure Organisation and the contractors Pinnacle and Amey, which serve service families in my constituency, I was grateful for their response and their genuine desire to resolve the issues. We had a constructive meeting, and they have looked into each individual case as a matter of priority. However, when the local MP, a Minister of State and senior management in the contractor companies have to become involved in a process to resolve such basic issues, it is clear that the process is broken not only for my constituents but for service families up and down the country.

The situation is entirely unacceptable, especially given that families are paying rent for the unsuitable housing. That is why it was no surprise to read the results of the Ministry of Defence satisfaction survey last week, which showed that the poor standard of housing is taking its toll on our military families. Satisfaction in the overall standard of service accommodation has fallen to 46% in 2023, from 60% in 2014. Satisfaction with requests for maintenance and repair work decreased to a paltry 19% in 2023 from an already low 46% in 2014, while satisfaction with the quality of the work has also fallen to 19% this year, from 40% in 2014. It was also not a surprise to hear that the poor state of housing means many servicemen and women are considering leaving the profession because of the strain on their family life.

I draw my hon. Friend’s attention to the armed forces continuing attitudes survey, which found that one third of spouses said that they would be happier if their partner chose to leave the service. Does she agree with my constituent, retired Colonel Michael Woodcock, who wrote,

“Remaining in the service too often depends on a most hardy spouse”?

My hon. Friend raises a good point. Community, support and family life are extremely important to servicemen and women, and I will come to that shortly.

It is important to recognise that families cannot resolve the issue simply by moving to private rented accommodation elsewhere in the vicinity of their base, as often it is unaffordable or just unavailable, and outside the military community. As we know, service families often move house every two years or have a parent or family member away from home on a tour of duty for an extended period. The support network of families who understand their circumstances is really important. It is crucial that service family accommodation is suitable.

If the usable stock is decreasing or service families are put off taking a home because of the issues I have described, the vibrancy of the community is badly affected and service life overall becomes less appealing, as the survey results have showed. Empty and dilapidated housing stock often exacerbates the situation, because where there is a shortage, families must stay in substandard homes. There also appears to be a failure of the contract arrangements to deal with empty properties. One constituent reported houses being left empty and unheated, but with the mains water still turned on. In the winter cold snap, the pipes burst, meaning that the ceilings fell in and serious damage occurred.

Other houses on the estate have had insulation fitted to roofs with unrepaired holes in them, meaning that when water ingress occurs, it causes even more damage. The houses will now cost thousands to repair to an acceptable standard and the families affected will be owed compensation. It is a truly false economy to have allowed that to occur. It is wastes taxpayers’ money and reduces the options for service families who want to live near their base and their community.

Does my hon. Friend agree that there is a degree of hypocrisy in the fact that we celebrate brave servicemen as our heroes because they put their lives on the line for the security of our nation, yet we cannot guarantee them the most basic support?

I agree with my hon. Friend wholeheartedly.

My understanding is that the current maintenance contract allows just two weeks after a family leaves a house to carry out any required upgrade work, including any repairs but also big-ticket works such as retrofitting insulation and replacing kitchens and bathrooms. Clearly, two weeks is not long enough if a significant amount of work is required. That leads to incomplete or poor-quality work, which costs more to fix in the future and causes disruption to the family living there.

The overall feedback from my constituents—there has been a lot of it—is that the response to requests for repair and the management of empty houses have deteriorated since the contract was restructured last April, and that while the coming of spring and summer has improved living conditions in the short term, there remain significant concerns about the operation of the process. There appear to be too many hand-offs between, in the case of my constituents, the contractors Pinnacle and Amey. I note that in response to an urgent question in December last year, the former Minister acknowledged that there were IT issues. That rings true with the experiences that have been related to me, in which requests have either not been logged in the first place or have gone missing in the hand-off between the two companies.

Anyone who works in a business knows that IT issues in a contract restructuring of this scale are inevitable, but the Minister suggested that they were unresolved in December 2022, a full nine months after the restructured contracts went live. Has there been any further improvement to date? I have a constituent still reporting little progress on a leaking roof and radiators. The roof was fixed in five days, but the scaffolding remained up for five weeks at goodness knows what unnecessary cost to the taxpayer and the radiators still leak. There is damp and mould, and they have not been given the results of a damp survey that was apparently carried out in December last year.

I hope I have illustrated the chaotic and broken process of reporting an issue and getting it fixed under the newly restructured contract, the shocking state of dilapidation of some empty homes that could otherwise be used for housing our service families, the impact on the service family community, and the unacceptable waste of taxpayers’ money. This is the price of a failing process. We have spent much time in this Chamber rightly debating, and indeed agreeing on, the need for social housing to be of a decent standard, and for tenants to have the right to demand a decent standard, both in the context of the Social Housing (Regulation) Bill as it passed through Parliament and in demanding an end to the system that led to the shocking death of Awaab Ishak.

I congratulate the hon. Lady on setting out the issues in her excellent speech. Labour launched our “Homes Fit for Heroes” campaign a few months ago to focus attention on this scandal and my Front-Bench colleagues have said that, if elected, we will make addressing it a priority. As she said, we cannot carry on with leaky roofs, broken boilers and damp; we must make this a priority. Does she agree that the Government could have done a lot of work already to improve things for the services?

I thank the hon. Lady for her intervention. I broadly agree with her.

We need to accept that our service families have the same right to decent housing as everyone else in this country. When they report a problem, they should expect a response. I do not need to remind anyone that, as my hon. Friend the Member for Bath (Wera Hobhouse) pointed out, servicemen and women are prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice for us. We should at least ensure that they can have a hot shower and a mould-free home in a supportive community. I am sure the Minister will agree with that point, so I would like to conclude by asking him to respond to some questions about the functioning of the contract as it currently stands.

Will the Minister update the House on the current situation regarding outstanding calls and issues raised? How confident is he that all the data on those calls has been captured, given the issues I have recounted of problems not being recorded or being lost in the hand-off between the two companies? What is the long-term plan to deal with the issue of empty properties falling into disrepair and out of use altogether? Does the Minister believe that the current contract structure is commercially viable in the long term, given the unanticipated additional resource that the contractors have had to commit to resolving backlogs and dealing with the additional hand-offs within the process? Is there a deadline by which he expects these contracts to be operating on an acceptable “business as usual” basis? Has he considered restructuring and renegotiating the contracts, given the obvious operational difficulties that have been experienced? Finally, is he able to quantify the additional cost to taxpayers of dealing with the problems that have occurred over the last year?

I am grateful to the Minister for his time at this late hour on a Monday, and to Mr Speaker for granting a debate on an issue that I know is of the utmost concern both to the service families currently based in North Shropshire and to those elsewhere in the UK. I look forward to the Minister’s response.

Order. Before I call the Minister, I should remind him that as the debate started before 10 pm, we will go through the interesting procedure of interrupting his speech at 10 pm so that the Whip can move the motion for the Adjournment one more time.

Thank you for the reminder, Mr Deputy Speaker. It is a while since I was last in this situation.

I am grateful to the hon. Member for North Shropshire (Helen Morgan) for her interest in this matter, and for initiating the debate. I represent a garrison town, I am a veteran and an active reservist and two of my children are in the armed forces, so, unsurprisingly, I am determined that we should do everything we reasonably can to give service people the accommodation that they deserve.

Unfortunately, our personnel have not been well served in this area for decades covering numerous Administrations, including one involving Liberal Democrats. Too often our people have had to put up with poorly built housing that has been crudely adapted with the advent of central heating. I have lived it in my service career, and I have seen it professionally. Sadly, in the years after the Annington deal only £100 million of the £1.66 billion in sale proceeds was reinvested in upgrades, with predictable consequences, and the Future Defence Infrastructure Services accommodation contract, which went live on 1 April last year, has yet to live up to its potential. We have heard some examples of failure today, and I have examples of my own.

We should not forget, however, that there are some great examples of service family accommodation. I can say from first-hand experience that some of it is truly exceptional. On 18 May this year, the Ministry of Defence announced a £173 million investment in capital purchase of family homes in the UK for armed forces families, comprising the purchase of 310 brand-new homes and the purchase of the freehold of 113 modern, formerly leasehold, homes. The brand-new homes have been purchased in the last 12 months, and are due to be occupied by the end of this year. All will meet modern energy performance certificate standards, and some will meet the very highest, a grade A rating.

In 2022-23, as part of that purchase, the MOD bought 66 homes to support Imjin Barracks at Innsworth, 58 homes at Brize Norton, and 36 homes at Aldershot. As well as those, we have agreed to purchase an additional 176 homes at Innsworth over this and the next financial year, to be completed by 2025. These homes will be net zero. So investment in accommodation is going up. During the last seven years the MOD has invested more than £936 million in service family accommodation improvements, including about £185 million last year spent on modernising homes, tackling damp and mould, and improving thermal efficiency. This is part of a wider £3 billion FDIS programme that has replaced the old facilities management contracts.

However, customer satisfaction has fallen, especially in relation to damp, mould, heating and maintenance. During the December cold snap, there were reports of personnel being without heating for more than five days. Response times for maintenance and repair works have been slow, although I have to say that conversations I have had recently suggest that families have noticed an improvement in responsiveness. That is anecdotal, but I offer it for what it is worth, and we shall see whether it feeds through into our survey data in due course.

In relation to the hon. Member’s concerns in her constituency, on 9 June, DIO’s regional manager and estate officer for RAF Shawbury met Amey counterparts and a warrant officer representing the station. All parties were also at a families’ surgery that morning. Only two families attended the surgery, a significant reduction on previous surgeries, linking to the point that I made earlier from my experience.

I hope that the scale of the challenge and the financial commitment that Defence has made to improving accommodation are clear. They are certainly heartfelt as far as I am concerned, but for context, it is worth pointing out that we are also committed to keeping rents low. The hon. Member for North Shropshire may be interested to know that, on average, our service families in North Shropshire pay £323 a month for a three-bedroom property. I have checked and I found that private renters in the same area can expect to pay an average of £750 a month for the equivalent home.

Defence is responsible for 47,800 military homes across the country. Right now, 97% of all MOD family accommodation nationally meets or exceeds the Government’s decent homes standard, and the figure for occupied service family accommodation in North Shropshire is also 97%. By means of comparison, in Shropshire, 76% of all private rented homes and 79.5% of social housing meet the Government’s decent homes standard. I hope that the hon. Lady has raised that with her local authority.

I should say that the seven occupied properties in the hon. Lady’s constituency that are below the decent housing standard are structurally safe and sound and met the standard when occupants moved in, but have since fallen below. Remedial action on the door and window lintels at fault is expected this summer. I hope that she is reassured by that.

However, when we are dealing with housing, it is inevitable that things will go wrong, as we all know. When they do, the response needs to be first-class, but according to the last armed forces continuous attitude survey, which canvassed service personnel late last year—and was published earlier this month—only 19% of respondents were satisfied with the response that they got. That is not good enough.

My right hon. Friend is being characteristically frank about the problems, as well as the successes, of the policy. Can anything be done to the model of financing for the maintenance of service housing that would perhaps incorporate a financial incentive on the people who have the contracts, so that if they do not arrange for repairs quickly enough, they could conceivably feel it where it hurts, in their bank balance?

I am grateful to my right hon. Friend, who is absolutely right. The FDIS contract that was introduced early last year does just that. If he will forgive me, I may just come on to describe what that might mean, or has meant, in a few moments.

The day-to-day management and maintenance of service housing has, since early last year, been through FDIS, and it has been contracted out to three separate contractors: Amey in the central and northern regions; VIVO in the south-east and south-west; and Pinnacle, which runs the national service centre and co-ordinates activity.

Any contract transition is fraught with difficulty, and it certainly has been with FDIS. But there is a third issue that challenges delivery to our service families—namely, the underlying issue of poor original build quality, which flowed from decisions made in the 1950s and 1960s and was compounded by historical underinvestment. When combined with a resource-constrained “fix on fail” regime, the resulting effect has led to a maintenance logjam estimated to cost around £960 million.

These are explanations, not excuses. The new contracts introduced a number of improvements: clear customer satisfaction targets, for the first time in MOD housing history; more demanding target response times for most types of reactive maintenance; a higher standard of preparation of homes for families to move into; and financial consequences for contractors that fall short, and incentives to go beyond the minimum standards.

Currently, as a result of some of the poor performance already outlined this evening, the MOD’s contractual rights to withhold payments from suppliers are being exercised and deductions are being made, as appropriate. Withheld profits will be reinvested for the benefit of service families. In addition, a total of £1.14 million in compensation has been paid direct to service personnel by FDIS suppliers, at no cost to the Ministry of Defence, since the FDIS accommodation contracts went live on 1 April 2022.

We are taking further measures to address issues related to damp and mould. We have established a dedicated hotline to address specific concerns, and we have improved the initial triage process to prioritise cases. This is followed by an on-site visit to apply the initial treatment, assess the need for a follow-up and decide whether a professional survey is required. Since early 2022, homes are not being allocated where there is a known damp or mould issue.

Separately, tomorrow we will table a written ministerial statement titled “Defence Infrastructure Update,” which will update the House on the work being undertaken to reduce a backlog in expired gas and electrical safety certificates in MOD properties through an accelerated and targeted renewal process. I am not going to pre-empt that announcement, but suffice it to say that Ministers were made aware in May of an issue relating to a backlog of expired gas certificates that had accrued while families were occupying their properties. That has occurred for a variety of reasons, including residents being unavailable to allow access to their homes for inspections, and supply chain resource and contractor IT issues.

The backlog of electrical certificates is a consequence of changes in regulations in August 2020, which required certificates to be completed every five years instead of every 10. Needless to say, we have acted immediately. The Secretary of State and the Minister for Defence Procurement have spoken with FDIS contractors personally, stressing that we expect this backlog to be cleared in the next few weeks. The Defence Infrastructure Organisation has worked with its suppliers to improve communications to families, to ensure availability for inspections. The MOD’s contractors have also made progress in recruiting additional resource and improving their data management to reduce this unacceptable backlog.

The Government have required all contractors to submit rectification plans. There is no complacency, but those are now showing progress. Pinnacle’s national service centre is answering all calls in an average of 14 seconds, which is significantly better than its 90-second target. Amey and VIVO have brought waiting lists down significantly, with very big improvements in maintenance response times. At the end of last month, the maintenance backlog stood at about 5,000, which is down from a high of 21,100 in December 2022. The number of open complaints is down by about 70%, and most key performance indicators are now at acceptable levels or better across most regions.

We need the final few measures to be brought up to scratch and, crucially, for that performance to be sustained. That is easier said than done, but we are making headway. The Defence Infrastructure Organisation is working with VIVO and Amey to develop a programme of straightforward interventions to address damp and mould. Critically, we also have the means, through FDIS, to hold our contractors to account should they fail to meet their end of the bargain. If required, we can recoup money or refuse to pay it out. We have already used those levers robustly where we can and where it is appropriate to do so, and they have made a difference.

So I hope I have reassured the hon. Member for North Shropshire that we are on the case, and we will most certainly continue to hold our contractors’ feet to the fire. Our new accommodation strategy, published last October, sets out a clear ambition for where we want to be: a situation where all our people have access to good-quality accommodation, in line with modern living standards.

Question put and agreed to.