The UK Government has come under sharp criticism from the Labour Party for its decision to prevent serving Armed Forces personnel from testifying in a Defence Sub-Committee inquiry regarding service accommodation.

This move, attributed to Defence Secretary Grant Shapps, has raised questions surrounding transparency within the Ministry of Defence (MoD).

“Barring Armed Forces members from contributing to the inquiry shows a worrying lack of transparency from the MoD at a time of plummeting satisfaction with service life,” say Labour in a statement received by the UK Defence Journal.

Further highlighting the situation, Luke Pollard, Labour Shadow Minister for the Armed Forces, stated:

“The Conservatives are failing our troops and their families with the shocking state of service housing. With satisfaction with service life plummeting, it is outrageous that instead of fixing leaky and mouldy homes, the Defence Secretary is silencing personnel and trying to sweep their problems under the rug.”

In light of these recent developments, Pollard mentioned Labour’s ongoing proposal to introduce an Armed Forces Commissioner. The envisioned role of the commissioner would be to champion the rights of Armed Forces personnel, ensuring a better quality of life and giving them a resounding independent voice in matters concerning their welfare.

Recent statistics further underscore the gravity of the accommodation issue:

  • As per MoD records, 40% of personnel residing in Single Living Accommodation are housed in the lowest quality lodgings, labelled as grade 4. Alarmingly, over 4,300 personnel live in housing of such substandard condition that the MoD does not levy any rent, classifying it as below grade 4.
  • According to the latest MoD data, 40% of tri-service personnel have expressed dissatisfaction with the overarching standard of their Single Living Accommodation.
  • Furthermore, a report from The Telegraph indicates that since April 2022, military families residing in Service Family Accommodation have been compensated over £1m in shopping vouchers due to issues arising from subpar housing.

The UK Defence Journal has sought a comment from the MoD on this story. As of now, a response is still awaited.

George Allison
George Allison
George has a degree in Cyber Security from Glasgow Caledonian University and has a keen interest in naval and cyber security matters and has appeared on national radio and television to discuss current events. George is on Twitter at @geoallison
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77 COMMENTS

  1. It’s not service personnel that suffer, it’s their families. The the MoD privatised service accomodation some time ago, in one of the worst deals for the taxpayer ever. That’s why Schraps wants to cover up the appaling state of the buillt service environment at this inquiry

    Schraps is a wide boy from Watford. Before entering politics he ran several (failed) internet companies and he had at least 5 aliases. How he ever managed to make SoS Defence amazes me – but then Sunak must have put him there for a reason….

    • It is the families that suffer.

      But also spare a thought for a serving person who has a mould / damp / cold place to get their head down.

      This stuff isn’t hard to fix – fine the providers escalating fines – it will soon get fixed then.

      • Damp and mould yes if its caused by structural issues like leaks but living style and not ventilating a property are one of the major causes of damp in the UK. Cooking and drying clothes in unventilated spaces push litres of water into the warm air of a property.

        I used to get damp in a flat I lived in, bought dehumidifier, didn’t work so after reading up on damp in many cases its too much moisture in the air in the property. The reluctance of many is open the windows and ventilate. Simple physics means warn air in a property holds more moisture than colder air, yes even if its raining outside that air can have less moisture than the air inside a home. So simply exchanging the air from inside to out can remove huge volumes of water and prevent damp and mould. \I completely resolve my damp problem by opening windows and getting new air with less moisture into the flat. Ironically many older properties which have been retrofitted with double glazing etc which seal the property start getting damp because previously the old sash windows allowed air flow. My parents house has horrible damp from having the wall cavity filled with insultation, they’ve had to live with it for years because the cost of fixing it is 1000s.

        Yes if its structural its often easy to fix but determining the cause can be difficult, many companies and experts who specialise in damp are looking for work to repair the damp ie new damp proof course, plastering and will not suggest its a lifestyle issue that can be fixed simply.

        Even the Guardian acknowledges the most common cause of damp is poor property ventilation.

        https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2008/mar/01/diy.homes8

    • Buildings are neglected as well , at Aschurch the decayed asbestos roofing was dropping down onto vehicles in storage , hatches are open for ventilation !

    • I suspect this is the start of the forces being shut up full stop. If his efforts on Sunday on Laura Kuenssberg’s programme is any thing to go by when he rewrote things he said just months ago, black will be pronounced white by years end and we will have by his reckoning 5 aircraft carriers, a thousand tanks and 500 Typhoons.

  2. Maybe if you read the article correctly, you’d realise this is referring to living accommodation for service personnel and their families, not accommodation when on deployment/training.

    • If all you have is a hammer everything looks like a nail.
      If you’re an anti-wokeist everything looks like snowflakes, even the services.

      • indeed…reasonable living accommodation for you and your family is not Woke, it’s just something to expect in our society with the resources that it has…sort of like sanitation, clean water, food etc. personally I’m a believer in the leader accepting and experiencing what those they are in-charge of experience…..I’m sure there is some lovely barracks in London Chaps could live in while he is in London.

  3. So whilst the new Defence secretary is showing his true colours regards his appointment (HS2), It must be pointed out that service accommodation has been subpar since Francis Drake circumcised the Spanish with that big cutter of his in 1588. My first posting was to 24 Field Squadron at Kitchener Bks Chatham and on a Thursday night we all cleaned the block for OCs inspection on a Friday morning and one of the tasks we did was paint the sinks white in which to cover up how decrepit they were.
    Not once have we seen a serving MP (in power) opine about the standard of forces accommodation (nearly always the army as the other 3 (included the booties in that) know how to look after their own.) Nope it is always those in opposition, and then when they get into power, that concern for the troops is dropped in which to concentrate on more pressing concerns:

    Rent boys from Brazil,

    Flipping your second home: Conservative MP Andrew Rosindell (who was mentioned earlier here regards nuclear powered escort ships) Claimed £125,000 in second home expenses for a flat in London, while designating his childhood home 17 miles away – where his mother lived oh and he also claimed £400 every month for food, Oh and by the way, he’s currently on bail for rape.
    Expenses. On that note, to become a soldier I spent 6 months in basic training, time in uniform before getting my first, Cadre Cse, Sgts Cse, educational Cses, trade Cses, military Cses , in which to learn how to do my job which at the end of the day was to take men into a war zone and get them back again (And for the civies out there, do you know how much paperwork that entails?. In contrast MPs only do one course and that is the one where they learn how to claim expenses.

    Throwing money at far away causes (China, india, India (yes Iran) Pakistan and get this, the PM handed over and extra £2 billion to the Green Climate fund (GCF)  the other week (It’s the fund set aside from 2017 by western nations so that less developed countries can dip in to fight climate change, which for some strange reason includes China and India. Want to guess which country was at the top of the list before that for handing over £2 billion to the GCF

    Only yesterday it was revealed that the Home Office has a diktat that asylum seekers can only be accommodated in 3 star hotels or more. Why are they in Hotels?  because the ethical latte crowd (including a load of MPs) deemed that Military accommodation wasn’t good enough for them.

    The reason the Poppy and the British legion came into being in 1921 was because how the Government washed its hands of those who has given everything for the country and here we are 102 years in virtually the very same situation.

    • I can’t speak for the Army, but I stayed in some very good accommodation during my time in the RN 1999-2013. SLAM was pretty standard across all main operating bases with en suite rooms, kitchens, tv rooms ect. RAF Cottesmore had older style H blocks. But everyone had their own room, most big enough for a double bed. Traning camps weren’t so good, but you expected that at training establishments. This is the latest agreement on accommodation from the MOD.

      https://www.gov.uk/government/news/defence-announces-new-accommodation-offer-for-armed-forces-personnel

      • Robert, I was about to say you must have strayed onto a crabfat camp.(they do like they’re condements) but you covered it.😉👍

          • Widows op! Oh gawd, the fricken nightmares. Same where ever you went. Better looking the more cervasa sunk. 😱🚺🍾🦄
            👍

    • Kitchener was sold off for re-development in 2017 and is now a tasteful collection of 3, 4, & 5 bedroom townhouses and 1 & 2 bedroom joint-ownership apartments. As far as I know, the WW2 military hospital that was built underneath it is still there

      • The former barracks in Winchester (Peninsula Bks?) has long been a gated yuppie community. The squaddies who lived there in the barrack blocks from way back would be amazed.

    • I was going to come in hard on this as it’s an outrage however what that man said 👊🏼

      🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿🇬🇧

  4. This is exactly why Sunak chose him, because he is nothing more than a yes man and will bow to Sunak everytime, problem we really have is next election, what a choice we have, useless conservatives or useless Labour, either way defence is well and truly up the creek without a boat let alone any paddles….

    • He’s perfect for the job: out of everyone in the cabinet you can grant Shapps had his next job after the election lined up before Rishi was even PM (*dadum tiss*.)

      So he can be trusted to calmly carry on with manning a steadily sinking ship and not do anything bold that might make things worse.

      The Tories seem to realise their only chances of survival as a party is to court the anti-green extremists in the hopes that they provide enough fuel to last the winter until the future Labour government makes a mistake.

      • No their big chance is to court the tens of millions of pensioners by maintain the ludicrous triple lock and paying them for their votes. Pensioners are now, apart from the rich non-doms plumbers, electricians, builders (cash in hand and non-disclosed incomes), city traders and bankers the only people in society with any money these days.

  5. It is a great pity Labour did not have the same concerns when they were last in power. This is cheap headlines and proves they are dishonest!

      • I’m not saying the Conservative Government is any better having served this country for 42 years all I’m saying this opportunism by the opposition. Both Conservatives and Labour have neglected Defence over the last 50 years and we are little more thanks a defence force. Our service personnel have in general worst accommodation than asylum seekers.

        • I remember that when Northern Ireland (Op Banner) first kicked off some soldiers were accomodated in a hastily converted public toilet block – hope it was throughly cleaned!

    • that is the point of the opposition, they are meant to hold the present government to account…if every opposition just let it pass because 10 years ago the same thing happened, we would literally have no oversight of government…..quite frankly the most destructive issue we have in politics is that we allow the only answer the present government gives is…well what are your plans…or what about your record…..it’s irrelevant as the oppositions job is to hold to account highlight the issues..the governments job is to answer those.Only at the point we have an election does the plans or record of the opposition have any meaning or should be used.

    • Does HS2 have to go as far as Birmingham? I’m sure it’ll be fine as long as it gets to Chequers. As a back up to the helicopters don’t you see, and for only £100bn. Also did we really need any more offshore wind farms when we’ve barely explored highly profitable fracking? If subsidence causes a few houses to crumble, I’m sure they won’t belong to anyone important. Northerners probably.

      I look forward to such farsighted policies coming to Defence.

      • Let’s be honest..no one really wants all those northerners and midland types getting access to London….after all we did trash the railways for a reason you know…keeping the provincials in their place ( wherever that is that’s not London or the south east).

  7. I see the Labour Party is alive and well today, both in Westminster and on UKDJ. Service accommodation in places is awful; when I was a Councillor back in the 1980’s it was awful in places and in the the 1990/2000’s when I worked closely with schools and education groups it was awful in places. Apparently back in the Napoleonic wars it was fairly grim. The tragedy is more to do with how society treats it’s armed forces decade by decade, century by century and that’s down to ALL political parties

  9. It would be interesting to see some analysis on how much money would be saved on retention by spending money on decent accommodation.

    • MikeR wrote:

      “”It would be interesting to see some analysis on how much money would be saved on retention by spending money on decent accommodation.””

      That’s an interesting question, but that said, Soldiers pay less for lower grade accommodation and a lot are more than happy at that. I know i was.

      • I had various standards of SLA during my time from newly-built with en-suite and kitchenettes all the way to glorified Nissan huts. I think it was in the region of £1.50 a day accomodation charges. The only thing the average squaddie ever cared about was how hard it was to clean for the OC’s inspection and the difficulty of getting girls in from town. I can’t believe anything has changed much.

  11. Graham M wrote:

    “”One of our cadet range weekends was at Napier Barracks, Folkestone.””

    Can you imagine the outcry if they had been put up in St Martins plain

  12. Hardly a surprise from Shapps.

    Yesterday he was over the media maundering on about HS2. Chap seems to think he is still Transport Minister.

  13. If that was a joke it completely missed the point of the article, hence why no one thought it was a joke. Let’s not pretend there aren’t delusional people who actually have this viewpoint though.

  14. As one of the tradesmen that refurbishes these properties, there is a long list of them and there are ever diminishing tradesmen to do the work. Youngsters now do not want to do this kind of work. 🤷‍♂️
    Sorry, but there are 7m folk on the dole or not working, thousands of illegals and as we have seen in the procurement report that Francois hailed, the MoD is a mess.
    We need a new broom, we need tough decisions and frankly the main three parties are not it. I do not know whom, but we need someone asap!!

  15. I had thought accommodation would have got better with the shrinking forces and closing of barracks? Did they not pick the ones with good accommodation and services to keep open?
    Really it’s not hard. Get the folks that build holiday inns etc to put up some single person accommodation. Make it a bit more friendly for long stays.
    50k a room build price, 20 for £1m, 2000 for £100m. Repeat for 10 years. Cost £1b. Sorted. Then keep going renewing stock.
    Using land already owned saves lots of costs. Maybe it costs more to build. Maybe less.
    Family homes do the same.
    Perhaps the maintenance budget needs a boost.
    It’s no unaffordable and I would use money outside the defence budget to boost it initially if no cash is available. Use new home builder funds, green accommodation funds and so on.

    • Far too sensible, never going to happen. Agree this issue needs a protected allocated year on year budget. Hence why the national infrastructure fund should be used.

    • My suggestion is get the singles accomodation built by the same companies that build the new student accomodation in places like Nottingham. There are loads of different examples in the city. Just Google student accommodation in Nottingham and scroll to one of the clearing sites.

    • I like your term ‘long stays’ – most soldiers’ postings are 3 years.
      I also like your idea of using the Holiday Inn builders.

  16. Here’s an idea. Call me daft but use some of the national infrastructure funding, which doesn’t appear to be delivering very much at the moment to revamp all of the armed forces housing over the next 5 years or so.
    Or if we can’t afford to repair the roads, schools, hospitals or even build a railway line put up taxes in a targeted way.

  18. The Charity Stoll are selling their veterans accommodation in Chelsea:

    https://www.insidehousing.co.uk/news/veterans-housing-provider-agrees-deal-in-principle-to-sell-site-to-chelsea-fc-82381

    I note that Roman Abramovich wanted to buy this too but offered to create new flats for the veteran pensioners. The new American owners won’t do the same deal. I’m not an apologist for Russians but you see the difference immediately. Yes they run a business but they could rehouse all those veterans from the profit they make each year. The chief executive of Stoll should be ashamed of himself.
    I wonder how long before the Chelsea pensioners place is sold off as well. I doubt that they can as there is probably a covenant in place forbidding this or it would have been sold off for luxury apartments years ago.

    The only thing this government wants to do is offer 3 star accommodation to a bunch of grifters and chancers coming over the English channel. I agree Grant Shapps is dodgy as hell and silencing the soldiers and their families will cause further discontent in the army. I mean who the hell in their right mind would join the army now for substandard accommodation not fit for asylum seekers that have never contributed to the UK? Then if they are very lucky they could be hounded by rich upper middle class lawyers for shooting people in a theatre of war (this is still going on).

    In addition, most of the armed police in London will hand in their notices soon (its worst than the papers state believe me on that), Then soldiers (on less salary than the police officers) will have to perform their full duties.

    I’m currently reading about the Great Indian mutiny of 1857 caused by small insensitivities that grew bigger over time until the dam burst its banks. I think a similar thing is happening in the UK where the rich upper class and upper middle class are taking everything they want at the expense of the working class, lower middle class and middle class. How long before we see large scale civil disruption….or potentially worse. I know of English friends that are homeless whilst asylum seekers get 3, 4 and 5 star accommodation.

    This is a shambles of a Conservative administration and starting to look as bad as the Blair years (or god forbid even worse). I’m a Conservative voter of 30 years but even I want shut of these inept losers, grifters, chancers and criminals (some with convictions now). Perhaps they can take their friends in the boats with them when they leave. Will Labour be any worse…I won’t vote for them but the reform party instead. UK politics is utterly and totally broken and it’s only going to get worse…

    • I believe it was even free of charge – amazing.

      Our guys of course pay rent, council tax, utilities bills (singlies pay that in their rent charge, pads pay the individual supply companies as a civilian would).

      • Let me see,HM forces ,eh around 100,000++, US forces…oh my god it’s early.😏👍 and our Clowns 🤡 are better at ripping us off.😄

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