James Cartlidge is Shadow Defence Secretary and has been MP for South Suffolk since 2015
As Shadow Defence Secretary, if asked to pick the single most pressing issue facing our military, one would be hard pushed not to alight on recruitment and retention – the subject of my second in a series of pieces I am writing for conhome on Labour’s Strategic Defence Review (SDR).
Yes, we face a pressing need to restock our munitions, which Labour are exacerbating by delaying a pathway to 2.5% – undermining our ability to rearm against the growing threats we face.
It may also be true that we face an extraordinary opportunity to boost our overall capabilities through un-crewed technology – using autonomy to fight with drones and robots, in theory sparing our infantry the Russian ‘meat grinder’ approach witnessed on the frontline in Ukraine. Nevertheless, people remain critical to our Defence, and the impact of a changing labour market – denuding the forces of many key people – affects everything from the availability of ships and submarines to the basic arithmetic of fighting strength.
Inevitably, the shout goes up… ‘fourteen years’, no doubt pointing to statistics showing the services failing to hit recruitment targets. For example, in 2023 the Army fell 10,000 short of its 65,000 enlistment target. Of course, this refers to the US Army, which to be fair already seems to be doing better since Trump came in. But Germany’s Bundeswehr is thought to be 20,000 recruits short and there is plenty of evidence that military manpower is a global problem. Nevertheless, the fact other nations are struggling does not remove the damaging impact of the problem at home, which must be addressed if we are to restore warfighting capabilities – and why it must be a key focus of the Defence policy review process that Kemi Badenoch will be setting in train.
Whilst there will be many other aspects to consider, I happen to think accommodation is one of the most important. As the most recent Conservative Defence Procurement Minister I was not involved directly in many of the personnel issues – but the defence estate was very much my bailiwick, and I have to confess to being somewhat ashamed in my early Ministerial visits, inspecting the homes our service people lived in, whilst we expected them to serve their country and be prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice.
This is not to blame other Ministers – both Ben Wallace and Grant Shapps, the two Secretaries of State under whom I served, were seized of this issue.
Indeed, our Defence Command Paper Refresh in 2023 allocated an additional £400m for accommodation, and later that year I announced a ‘winter plan’ which saw significant improvements against the previous year, with thousands of homes receiving upgrades and treatments for the perennial issue of damp and mould. Customer complaints – a staple of my Ministerial correspondence – would go on to drop substantially. Nevertheless, this did not change the basic fact that had struck me from the first weeks in the job: much of our service accommodation needs more than sticking plaster, it needs a wholesale rebuild to modern standards.
Here’s the problem – to rebuild an asset, rather than simply refurbish it, you need to own it. And that doesn’t just mean the individual properties; you need to own the overall estate so that you can plan any rebuild in a coherent fashion. But the defence estate was sold off in England and Wales in 1996 to Guy Hands’ Annington Homes.
I made it my top strategic priority to buy it back.
Fortunately, my Conservative predecessors as Procurement Minister – particularly Jeremy Quinn – had made important progress on testing the legal aspects of buying back the estate. So I went to work on the business side of the bargain, getting top class support from within the Department and across Whitehall to eventually persuade HMT that this was good financial sense – after all, the billions to buy back the estate would be offset by a similar reduction in the national debt as our liability to Annington disappeared, and that’s before you considered the potential value of creating additional homes for the open market.
Ultimately, we finally reached a point where negotiations had commenced with Annington prior to the election and the deal itself was concluded by the incoming Government. What this now affords is the opportunity for what could and should be, if Labour are sufficiently ambitious, one of the most significant regeneration programmes of recent decades. The defence estate consists largely of relatively poor quality homes, built to a low density. The problem with estate regeneration (i.e. building new properties where homes already exist) is that you have to ‘decant’ the sitting tenants, and then there’s all the other issues from planning to finance.
Whereas, with the forces it is necessarily commonplace to move around the estate; planning should be less of an issue in many cases, particularly ‘behind the wire’; and it makes financial sense to stop spending millions on sticking plaster, and instead rebuilding the assets themselves. This would be to a higher, modern standard and greater density, boosting both the quantity and quality of homes in the total defence estate area, and making it easier to deliver some of the previously planned, wider accommodation entitlement changes that could otherwise stall.
But we have to be realistic about the time such an overhaul would take – and therefore, to have an impact on the immediate retention challenge, we have to show those who serve that we mean business. This means putting in place a vehicle that can actually deliver change and involve service people in the process. So what ‘vehicle’ might suit?
In 2020 the other half of our Shadow Defence team, former Armed Forces Minister and long-standing Defence select committee member Mark Francois MP, wrote a compelling paper on military retention entitled ‘Stick or twist?’. His suggested policy at the time was the establishment of a ‘Forces Housing Association’, structured as a “self-standing trust for the benefit of service personnel and their families”.
My business background prior to entering Parliament involved working with most of England’s major housing associations. As ever, there are good and bad examples, but the key point is that such a structure could potentially not only offer a mutual approach that involves representation of service personnel in the organisation but – critically from a regeneration point of view – a housing association is able to deliver the twin tasks of both managing the estate day to day and rebuilding it.
Of course, there would be technical details to bottom out, but the need to address the people issue is so paramount that I will tasking our policy review to consider the feasibility of a Forces Housing Association along similar lines to those originally set out by Mark Francois, given the opportunity for a comprehensive overhaul of the estate that our successful estate buyback affords.
I hope this sends the signal that as Conservatives we will not be limited by being in Opposition in contributing fresh ideas to how the British military will strengthen its people offer, particularly where it needs to most urgently – on the home front.
James Cartlidge is Shadow Defence Secretary and has been MP for South Suffolk since 2015
As Shadow Defence Secretary, if asked to pick the single most pressing issue facing our military, one would be hard pushed not to alight on recruitment and retention – the subject of my second in a series of pieces I am writing for conhome on Labour’s Strategic Defence Review (SDR).
Yes, we face a pressing need to restock our munitions, which Labour are exacerbating by delaying a pathway to 2.5% – undermining our ability to rearm against the growing threats we face.
It may also be true that we face an extraordinary opportunity to boost our overall capabilities through un-crewed technology – using autonomy to fight with drones and robots, in theory sparing our infantry the Russian ‘meat grinder’ approach witnessed on the frontline in Ukraine. Nevertheless, people remain critical to our Defence, and the impact of a changing labour market – denuding the forces of many key people – affects everything from the availability of ships and submarines to the basic arithmetic of fighting strength.
Inevitably, the shout goes up… ‘fourteen years’, no doubt pointing to statistics showing the services failing to hit recruitment targets. For example, in 2023 the Army fell 10,000 short of its 65,000 enlistment target. Of course, this refers to the US Army, which to be fair already seems to be doing better since Trump came in. But Germany’s Bundeswehr is thought to be 20,000 recruits short and there is plenty of evidence that military manpower is a global problem. Nevertheless, the fact other nations are struggling does not remove the damaging impact of the problem at home, which must be addressed if we are to restore warfighting capabilities – and why it must be a key focus of the Defence policy review process that Kemi Badenoch will be setting in train.
Whilst there will be many other aspects to consider, I happen to think accommodation is one of the most important. As the most recent Conservative Defence Procurement Minister I was not involved directly in many of the personnel issues – but the defence estate was very much my bailiwick, and I have to confess to being somewhat ashamed in my early Ministerial visits, inspecting the homes our service people lived in, whilst we expected them to serve their country and be prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice.
This is not to blame other Ministers – both Ben Wallace and Grant Shapps, the two Secretaries of State under whom I served, were seized of this issue.
Indeed, our Defence Command Paper Refresh in 2023 allocated an additional £400m for accommodation, and later that year I announced a ‘winter plan’ which saw significant improvements against the previous year, with thousands of homes receiving upgrades and treatments for the perennial issue of damp and mould. Customer complaints – a staple of my Ministerial correspondence – would go on to drop substantially. Nevertheless, this did not change the basic fact that had struck me from the first weeks in the job: much of our service accommodation needs more than sticking plaster, it needs a wholesale rebuild to modern standards.
Here’s the problem – to rebuild an asset, rather than simply refurbish it, you need to own it. And that doesn’t just mean the individual properties; you need to own the overall estate so that you can plan any rebuild in a coherent fashion. But the defence estate was sold off in England and Wales in 1996 to Guy Hands’ Annington Homes.
I made it my top strategic priority to buy it back.
Fortunately, my Conservative predecessors as Procurement Minister – particularly Jeremy Quinn – had made important progress on testing the legal aspects of buying back the estate. So I went to work on the business side of the bargain, getting top class support from within the Department and across Whitehall to eventually persuade HMT that this was good financial sense – after all, the billions to buy back the estate would be offset by a similar reduction in the national debt as our liability to Annington disappeared, and that’s before you considered the potential value of creating additional homes for the open market.
Ultimately, we finally reached a point where negotiations had commenced with Annington prior to the election and the deal itself was concluded by the incoming Government. What this now affords is the opportunity for what could and should be, if Labour are sufficiently ambitious, one of the most significant regeneration programmes of recent decades. The defence estate consists largely of relatively poor quality homes, built to a low density. The problem with estate regeneration (i.e. building new properties where homes already exist) is that you have to ‘decant’ the sitting tenants, and then there’s all the other issues from planning to finance.
Whereas, with the forces it is necessarily commonplace to move around the estate; planning should be less of an issue in many cases, particularly ‘behind the wire’; and it makes financial sense to stop spending millions on sticking plaster, and instead rebuilding the assets themselves. This would be to a higher, modern standard and greater density, boosting both the quantity and quality of homes in the total defence estate area, and making it easier to deliver some of the previously planned, wider accommodation entitlement changes that could otherwise stall.
But we have to be realistic about the time such an overhaul would take – and therefore, to have an impact on the immediate retention challenge, we have to show those who serve that we mean business. This means putting in place a vehicle that can actually deliver change and involve service people in the process. So what ‘vehicle’ might suit?
In 2020 the other half of our Shadow Defence team, former Armed Forces Minister and long-standing Defence select committee member Mark Francois MP, wrote a compelling paper on military retention entitled ‘Stick or twist?’. His suggested policy at the time was the establishment of a ‘Forces Housing Association’, structured as a “self-standing trust for the benefit of service personnel and their families”.
My business background prior to entering Parliament involved working with most of England’s major housing associations. As ever, there are good and bad examples, but the key point is that such a structure could potentially not only offer a mutual approach that involves representation of service personnel in the organisation but – critically from a regeneration point of view – a housing association is able to deliver the twin tasks of both managing the estate day to day and rebuilding it.
Of course, there would be technical details to bottom out, but the need to address the people issue is so paramount that I will tasking our policy review to consider the feasibility of a Forces Housing Association along similar lines to those originally set out by Mark Francois, given the opportunity for a comprehensive overhaul of the estate that our successful estate buyback affords.
I hope this sends the signal that as Conservatives we will not be limited by being in Opposition in contributing fresh ideas to how the British military will strengthen its people offer, particularly where it needs to most urgently – on the home front.