16.1 |
The welfare of Service Personnel
“The
increasing frequency of deployments on overseas operations and
time
away from home
are factors causing people to leave the Armed Forces.
More
than 15
percent of Army Personnel are away from home more often than is
planned
for under
the Department’s ‘Harmony’ Guidelines which are being
consistently
broken. The
Department has little scope to reduce the operational tempo which
is
impacting
on personnel but in case of enduring operations, such as those in
Iraq and
Afghanistan,
it needs to provide people with greater stability of work
patterns.
“There are
indicators of overstretch in specific areas, such as the
severe
shortfalls
in personnel in some specialist trades, such as nurses,
linguists
and leading
hands, and the routine breaking of harmony guidelines.
The
longer
this
situation continues the more it will begin to affect operational
capability. The
Department
maintains that the Armed Forces are stretched, but not
overstretched,
and would
only be overstretched if there was a failure to meet military
commitments.
But the
Department also needs to ascertain the ‘tipping points’ where the
degree
of stretch
itself precipitates the loss of scarce skills, putting operational
capability
at risk.”
173.
The Inquiry
asked AM Pocock what he understood by the concept of
“overstretch”.109
He told the
Inquiry:
“This is a
subject where it is easy to let the heart rule the mind. If we are
going
to be
completely objective about it, I would say there are two things …
can we
retain our
people? And … are we doing them long-term harm? The first one,
for
virtually
the whole period of the 2000’s, certainly up to 2007, retention was
virtually
static. The
Services were short of people, yes, but that was largely down
to
recruitment issues …
“On the
subject of, ‘Were we doing our people harm?’ we didn’t know, but we
were
looking
really hard [at that issue] …”
174.
Vice Admiral
(VAdm) Peter Wilkinson, Deputy Chief of Defence Staff
(Personnel)
from 2007,
added that, in his view, the Harmony Guidelines provided a useful,
objective
measure of
the degree of stretch:
“I think
they [the Harmony Guidelines] were a very good check on the
department
to make
sure they understood, perhaps better than before, what actually
they were
asking of
their people.”110
109
Public
hearing, 19 July 2010, pages 70-71.
110
Public
hearing, 19 July 2010, page 72.
33