MOD officials admit failings in defence housing over past 40 years will take time to fix

MPs have been told that Armed Forces personnel and their families deserve better housing but it will take time to fix issues following decades of neglect.

Figures show nine out of 10 homes in the estate need improvement and repair, with a new Defence Housing Service due to come into operation next year.

The Ministry of Defence operates nearly 48,000 Service Family Accommodation (SLA) properties across the UK.

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Speaking to Parliament’s Public Affairs Committee, Chief Executive of the Defence Infrastructure Organisation (DIO) Mike Green said: "We have a plan.

"We are in the process of setting up an arms-length body to deliver it, and we will deliver it.

"It does take time and money to fix 40 years of neglect – we are not complacent.

"We are on a journey – we've fixed the big things that are in front of us.

"We are working with lots of people to get better.

"The core components of the houses that we own are not great, so we go out to them a lot, and we fix them a lot.

"I'm a great believer in doing it efficiently, which is what we're planning to do.

"I'm a great believer in doing it properly, so when I looked at the housing stock and you find things like vents that don't lead anywhere, single brick walls, no cavity insulation, I am not surprised that our houses need a lot of love – we have under-invested in them for the best part of 40 or 50 years. That needs to change.

"It comes back to the effect on the family, because it does affect families and I'm sure we would agree wonderful service personnel deserve better."

The new Defence Housing Service will manage, maintain and upgrade SLA homes and could be operational by 1 April.

It is part of a major drive to improve the quality of accommodation for service families across the country, with recent figures showing improvements in satisfaction with military housing.

MOD figures from June showed 75% of families were satisfied with their home, up 12% on the previous year.

Chief Operating Officer of DIO David Brewer added: "We will see people moving into better quality homes progressively throughout the period of 10 years.

"The Defence Housing Service will publish the plan to do that in its first year of operation.

"We're doing quite a lot of the planning and analysis that sits behind that now.

"But at the same time as we're doing those fundamental repairs, much more quickly than that, everybody will be seeing an improvement in the standard of the repair service, the standard that we prepare homes to when families move in, because we have between 10,000 and 15,000 families moving home each year and we're trying to ratchet up the standards there.

"So people will feel a benefit quickly, but really tackling the underlying problems will take the whole of that 10-year period."

The Committee also discussed a 1996 deal for the Ministry of Defence to sell and lease back properties from Annington Homes – an agreement that ended up costing them £14.5 billion pounds over three decades.

MOD Permanent Secretary Jeremy Pocklington told MPs: "It was not a good deal.

"It was not a deal the department would make today.

"The most important lesson is the importance of government taking a long-term view of the stewardship of a national asset.

"That is how I feel. I know that's how the Defence Secretary would feel about this issue and that needs to be the most important thing rather than the short-term pressures."