Housing for Britain’s armed forces is so bad that families often have to live without such basics as heating and hot water, according to a scathing report by a cross-party committee of senior MPs.
The Ministry of Defence and private contractor CarillionAmey are “badly letting down service families” and the failure to carry out repairs “may be driving some highly trained personnel to leave the military, wasting the investment made in them”, it says.
The report by the public accounts committee describes CarillionAmey’s performance as “totally unacceptable” and says it is right that the MoD is considering terminating the contract.
“It is completely unacceptable that families should have to move into dirty houses with broken appliances, or be left to care for children in homes without hot water or heating,” said Meg Hillier MP, who chairs the committee. “Forces families are suffering because of poor service under a contract agreed on terms that were wrong-headed from the start.”
Liz Phoenix, wife of a Royal Marine, told the MPs:
We are still seeing people with mouldy and damp homes, rat infestations … Families are moving into properties that are disgustingly filthy – when I say filthy, I mean flea infestations and dog hairs on carpets. These are absolutely horrendous situations that people are moving into.
The committee heard evidence about a military family who described how they had returned from overseas to their allocated house to find the property was dirty and poorly maintained. The family said CarillionAmey was reluctant and slow to respond to complaints, and that its representatives did not appear to be aware of the company’s quality standards.
Examples of poor maintenance included fractured and detached drainage pipes beneath the kitchen sink; the gas hob fractured and unusable; oven dirty and light broken; shelves missing; exterior walls caked in grass clippings; paved areas covered in weeds, flower beds unturned and bushes overgrown; entrance area filthy; and an active wasps nest in the shed.
Another service family was left without hot water and heating for several weeks, despite telling CarillionAmey that they had a seven-week-old baby and a four-year-old. The contractor was slow to repair the boiler and failed to coordinate plumbers and roofers to install the new one. The serviceman said:
The impact on our family has been huge. We have been constantly worrying about keeping the baby warm, we have not been able to clean bottles properly.
Another serviceman said he was told his family would not have an upstairs toilet or bathroom for up to four weeks – it was suggested his wife should wash the family, including a disabled child, in the under-stairs toilet.
It took the personal intervention of the defence secretary, Michael Fallon, for CarillionAmey to hire more staff and set out a plan to improve the quality of its subcontractors’ work. CarillionAmey told the MPs it was not yet making a profit from the contract, but anticipated it would do so in the future.
“Responsibility for this lies with both CarillionAmey and the government. The MoD seriously misjudged CarillionAmey’s capacity to deliver a service which CarillionAmey accepts it was not equipped to deliver,” says the committee’s report. Almost 5,000 complaints were made by service families between March and May this year alone.
CarillionAmey won multimillion-pound contracts for maintaining about 50,000 housing units, because it was the lowest bidder. The MoD said it had been able to retain only £10m of the £115m paid to the company to date and it was “looking at options for penalising CarillionAmey further”, according to the report. The MoD will decide this summer whether to terminate CarillionAmey’s contract.
