Housing for service families poor, says MPs

The Ministry of Defence (MoD) and its housing contractor CarillionAmey are letting down service families by providing them with poor accommodation, MPs said in a Public Accounts Report on Wednesday.

The report said service families were often left without basic facilities such as hot water and heating.

“It is unacceptable that such problems with service housing have continued for many years. In certain cases, frustration with the failure to undertake small-scale repairs may be driving some highly trained personnel to leave the military, wasting the investment made in them.”

The MoD manages 50,000 service family accommodation units in the UK. Through the national housing prime contract private firms are responsible for maintenance of the properties.

Service families are offered housing at a subsidised rate and consider them to be an important aspect of military life.

The report said the MoD has an opportunity with the announcement of a future accommodation model at the end of 2016 to decide whether to continue its relationship with CarillionAmey.

In examples published in the report, a service family was allocated a house with broken pipes under the kitchen sink, an unusable gas hob and a wasps nest in the shed. Another family was left without heating and hot water for weeks, even though they had told the company they had a four-year old child and seven-week old baby.

With the exception of March 2015, the report said that in each month between December 2014 and January 2016 CarillionAmey failed to meet its performance indicator by completing 95% of its tasks within the agreed response time.

CarillionAmey said it accepted that it had let service families down, and apologised for the “significant failure” and for putting families through discomfort the past 18 months.

Daniel Easthope, managing director of CarillionAmey told BBC News that its housing service was now "performing well".

"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,” said committee chair Meg Hillier MP also to BBC News.

"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."

Shares in CarillionAmey's parent company Carillion were down 0.62% to 254.6p at 1222 BST.