A scandal over the state of military accommodation has deepened as it emerged that nearly a third of homes require repair, despite firms being awarded maintenance contracts worth £650m six months ago.
Among 47,900 service family accommodation (SFA) properties made available by the Ministry of Defense (MoD), a total of 13,900 are awaiting works.
Targets to resolve issues with the homes are said to have been missed due to the sheer volume of complaints.
Growing frustration within the military over the contrast between the promise to service families and the reality of a housing stock in disrepair led to an unprecedented apology by the MoD in September.
The MoD had said it would provide additional resources, but as of 13 October there remained a major backlog of cases of rot, broken doors and leaking roofs, according to a statement written to the House of Commons.
One wife of a serving sailor in the Royal Navy at Portsmouth, who said she has lived with leaks and rot for two and a half years, said the latest arrangements for the maintenance of service accommodation appeared to have caused confusion.
“There is lack of coordination between the company taking the reports and the ones doing the repairs,” she said.
The new contracts that began in April were supposed to bring an end to decades of substandard living conditions said to be driving people out of the forces.
Service families have made more than 9,000 complaints about their accommodation since the start of 2021, according to a second written statement to parliament.
Under the new National Accommodation Management Services (Nams), Pinnacle Group was awarded a £144m contract to run the national service center that handles complaints. It is responsible for providing a single point of contact for families.
The company’s chief executive is Peregrine Lloyd, a former City fund manager who moved into the outsourcing sector in the 1990s. The company’s accounts record Pinnacle’s highest paid director, who is not named, as earning £320,000 in 2021, up from £291,000 the previous year.
The bulk of the contracts, worth £506m, were handed, however, to the outsourcing companies Amey Community and Vivo Defense to carry out the repair orders passed on to them by Pinnacle.
The defense arm of Amey was previously run by Amanda Fisher, who boasted on becoming chief executive of the parent company in 2021 of making it profitable. The highest paid director at Amey earned £732,000 in 2020, before Fisher took the top job.
Vivo Defense is a 50/50 partnership between the contractor Serco, which announced a 6% rise in profits in its half-yearly financial report in February, and the facilities management company Equans. Vivo Defense is yet to file accounts.
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Amey and Vivo Defence, who are responsible for the failures relating to the preparation of homes, response times for maintenance appointments, missed appointments and the completion of repairs, did not respond to a request for comment. They have, however, previously apologised, in a joint statement for the level of service.
A spokesperson for Pinnacle, who is responsible for a failure to resolve complaints, said: “We are committed to providing excellent service and do understand that the transitionary period is taking longer than anticipated.
“In our customer-facing role, which includes operating the National Service Centre, we are bringing on board additional resources to improve complaints handling times, while Defense Infrastructure Organization (Dio) works with its repairs and maintenance providers Amey and Vivo to address the root cause.”
The state of the accommodation for the armed services has long been an issue of concern, exacerbated by a decision by the Conservative defense secretary Michael Portillo 26 years ago that has left the government paying for the upkeep of MoD properties but unable to exploit the increase in their value.
In 1996, the MoD sold 57,400 properties used by soldiers to Annington Homes, a company now owned by Terra Firma, the private equity company of which billionaire Guy Hands is a major investor, for £1.7bn and then leased them back at a discount over a 200-year lease.
In 2018, the National Audit Office said the deal had cost the taxpayer up to £4.2bn due to the huge increase in the value of the property sold.
John Healey, the shadow defense secretary, said: “Problems with household basics like heating and repairs are far too common, and aren’t getting fixed. Ministers have been told about problems with poor accommodation for years but they’ve taken no action.
“This is a far cry from the homes fit for heroes that forces personnel and their families deserve. The government must get tougher on their outsourced contractors so complaints are sorted and service personnel have the homes they’re happy to live in.”
A Ministry of Defense spokesperson said they were “working with our suppliers to make rapid and sustained improvements to the service received by families, including investing over £170m and upgrading 14,000 homes in the last financial year”.
