My Lords, Amendment 9 is similar to the amendment to which I spoke in Grand Committee—I think it was Amendment 13 on that occasion—which sought to amend the Bill to ensure that personnel who successfully apply to work part-time will still be entitled to service family accommodation and resettlement support.
The noble Baroness, Lady Smith, will recall that during discussions in Grand Committee I provided assurances that regular service personnel undertaking part-time working would retain the entitlements currently available to full-time regulars. I was able to give those assurances because providing our people with service accommodation is pivotal to the work we are doing to enable personnel and their families with mobility in support of defence capability.
To support my earlier reassurances, I stress again that regular service personnel who successfully apply to work part-time following the introduction of these new measures will be entitled to service accommodation commensurate with their personal status category and other qualifying criteria in the same way as their full-time colleagues. There is no reason to alter the entitlement to accommodation for those who undertake part-time working in the future since these individuals will retain an enduring liability for mobility and will still be subject to the same moves associated with new assignments as others in the regular Armed Forces.
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Having said that, defence recognises that the current system for accommodation can be unaffordable and inflexible and that it does not support personnel to live in the way that many of them want to live today. Currently, around 20% of personnel opt out of subsidised accommodation because it does not work for them. We are reforming the accommodation model so that all regular personnel can receive support to live how they want to. We recognise the need to offer accommodation that meets their needs and expectations today and in the future.
I spoke during Grand Committee of the Future Accommodation Model—FAM—project that is due to be introduced in 2019 as part of the defence people programme. FAM is currently exploring options for a more flexible accommodation offer to give service personnel more choice in how they live and to offer accommodation based on need, not rank or marital status. Extensive work is being undertaken to consider a wide range of options, from widening entitlement based on the current model of service-provided accommodation, through to making greater use of the private market by providing a subsidy to help more personnel live in private accommodation, including by helping to meet their aspirations for home ownership. We hope to be able to say more about this by the end of the year. However, the key assurance I wish to give to the noble Baroness is that eligibility under FAM will not be altered or subject to geographical restriction for those personnel who work part-time when the new measures come into force.
Support for service families has been a recurring theme during the Bill’s reading in this House. That is wholly appropriate because it lies at the very heart of the work we are doing to support our people. I feel it is important to reaffirm the point that I have made throughout, which is that enhanced flexible working options are about providing opportunities for our people who want to work more flexibly and not disadvantaging them or their families by limiting access to support and entitlements. We are not in the business of providing new opportunities to our people in one breath and disincentivising them on their accommodation in the next.
The noble Baroness seeks through this amendment to commit defence to providing information on future accommodation needs in the light of trends of serving on a part-time basis. I have said before that we expect a small yet significant number of personnel to undertake flexible working. I think that the noble Baroness understands that the long-term impact of these new options will be difficult to assess in the early years of implementation. For these reasons the impact on service accommodation is likely be minimal, but it will also be challenging to measure, particularly in light of the fact that there are no plans for the entitlements to be altered. That is not an attempt to dodge the issue, because I am able to say that we are considering options to include questions on accommodation provisions in the Armed Forces continuous attitude survey to help us better understand the impact of FAM on retention when the new model is introduced.
With all this in mind, we will work closely with the services to monitor the impact of these new measures
on personnel who choose to work part-time and aim to report any findings in the Armed Forces covenant annual report.
I am very willing to have a meeting with the noble Baroness to discuss repairs and maintenance of the defence estate, which falls slightly outside the scope of her amendment, but I hope that, for the purposes of the amendment, she has been reassured by what I have been able to say today and that she will agree to withdraw it.