R2OK!

mark occomore · Joined: 07 Dec 2006 Posts: 9955 Location: UK

A BBC report has shown how bad some army barricks are. Some army personal and familys are living in poor houses with shower blocks had cracked walls, mildew and broken pipes.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/6229393.stm

Cherskiy · Posted: Thu Jan 04, 2007 12:15 pm Post subject:

The state the MoD's finances are, the barracks blocks are the least of their worries. The RAF have been ordered to scale back on their flying training, troops are having to buy their own kit and the Navy are seeing some of their ships being flogged to the Chileans and Romanians to get some pennies in the coffers.

I'm not saying the families are not deserving - they definitely are - but the bean-counters don't see it that way and their priorities lie elsewhere. It's been like this for ages - I used to know someone who lived and worked at Brize in 1990 (the house was in Carterton, where the family houses are situated) and the house (for a family of five) was practically a shoebox in size.

Traditionally, however, families haven't been a huge priority on the MoD's resources. However, if this story blows up in HMG's face, then they could always flog off another Type 42 destroyer to pay for it....
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Rachel · Guest

Just cancel Trident... that would pay for everything for next 100 years!

Barkingbiker · Joined: 11 Dec 2006 Posts: 2313 Location: Lincolnshire

Having served in the RAF for 23 years, I can tell you that the standard of accommodation, be it single (barrack blocks, Sgt's & Officer's Mess) and married quarters has always varied from the terrible to the excellent, depending on location and status. Money has always been in short supply to finance improvments to accommodation, it must especially be the case now that accountants, more than ever before run the military. You only have to look at the case of inadequate funding of body armour for the troops in Iraq. Maybe these bean counters should be made to live in some of the awful accommodation that some our servicemen/women have to endure, and then tell them they don't have a never empty pot of money. The problem is that it is not just accommodation, engineers are always "robbing" serviceable equipment from one piece of essential military equipment to another because insufficient spares are provisioned. So sadly this is nothing new, be it getting worse, its just that service personnel, especially senior officers, have greater freedom of speech, IMHO.
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Cherskiy · Posted: Thu Jan 04, 2007 9:34 pm Post subject:

Yep, but the sad thing is, MoD(PE) - or whatever it's called now - can happily waste £Ms on the Nimrod AEW.3 (only to see them used for BDRT or scrapped), the radar for the Tornado F.2 (the infamous 'Blue Circle Bomber' because they reportedly flew with lumps of concrete in their nose-cones instead of a functional AI radar) and the complete shambles that is the current Chinook HC.2 procurement - £257M in the latter alone for eight helicopters that can't fly because they have a radar/software problem that will take another £150M to fix.

There's a huge amount of tax-payers' money wasted on procurement but when it comes to spending a couple of million to make the lives of some of our hard-pressed servicemen and women a little better (or safer), our political masters baulk.
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Barkingbiker · Joined: 11 Dec 2006 Posts: 2313 Location: Lincolnshire

While you have a procurement body that does not work or consult closely with both the operators and engineers, politicians that make purely political decisions about military hardware (TSR2, F111, P1154, BAC 311 & Spey engines in the Phantom F4K & M) it will result in huge waste in procurement costs. Yes you are right about the Tornado blue circle radar, we on the F4, both groundcrew & aircrew, would take great delight in taunting the Tornado elite. Why an off the shelf American radar/missile control system was not purchased has never ceased to amaze me; in fact we couldn't even do that with the F4 radar/MCS! Yes this is along time ago, it just proves that we never seem to learn from our mstakes. I think the cartoon in the front of Derek Wood's "Project Cancelled", by Wren and originally in Air Pictorial, sums up political interference in military procurement!
If just a fraction of this gross waste of money could be, as you rightly suggest Cherskiy, channelled into improving our sevice men & womens welfare and conditions of service, we would not be hearing these highly embarassing press reports abort accommodation.
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Cherskiy · Posted: Fri Jan 05, 2007 9:13 am Post subject:

Barkingbiker · Joined: 11 Dec 2006 Posts: 2313 Location: Lincolnshire