Twentieth Report - Optimising the defence estate

The Department has no meaningful targets or high-level performance framework to incentivise it to develop an affordable estate that better supports defence needs. The Department missed two short-term government targets set in the 2015 Spending Review to release land for 55,000 new homes by March 2020 and raise £1 billion from the sale of land by March 2021. It raised £538 million and released land for just 9,200 houses, having never thought it could meet the target. The Department did not seek to update its targets to reflect changing circumstances, such as the decision of the United States to retain three large airfields in East Anglia that the Department had planned to sell. Furthermore, since 2016 the Department has shifted emphasis from primarily identifying land to sell to ‘optimising’ its estate, which renders a target to reduce the estate’s size less relevant. The Department now forecasts its estate will shrink by only 16% and has just abandoned its one remaining target to reduce the built estate by 30% by 2040. It has not yet introduced any targets to replace this and acknowledges that it needs more specific, shorter-term targets focussing on deliverables to encourage it to identify and dispose of land it no longer needs, but it does not know what these should be. Recommendation: By 31 December 2021, the Department should reset its estate optimisation targets, developing specific shorter-term deliverables, including reductions in the size of estate; sale proceeds; and savings in estate running costs.

The Department has made slow progress in reducing the size of its estate. Since 2015–16, the Department has reduced its built estate by just 2%. It has spent too long planning and re-organising, thereby delaying disposals. Recently, the Department appears to be getting a better grip on estate optimisation. It now has a central 6 Optimising the defence estate team coordinating the DEO Portfolio and has resolved a funding gap to 2031. The Department has also delegated more responsibility for estate management to TLBs. It must now live up to its new Permanent Secretary’s mantra of “delivery, delivery, delivery” and tackle significant challenges. In 2019, the Department ended its 10- year contract with its Strategic Business Partner five years early because it was not delivering expected benefits. This created a skills and capabilities gap which the Department is seeking to fill by building in-house capabilities, although it currently remains reliant on contractors. To maximise sales receipts, the Department is working with local authorities to include site disposals in local plans and is developing strategies to dispose of large and complex sites. It has also started looking at ways to speed up the slow and complex process of rehousing displaced units and selling vacated sites, including engaging with the government-wide Project Speed, which aims to quicken infrastructure projects. Recommendation: By the end of this Parliament, the Department must be able to demonstrate that it has built on recent developments to deliver planned site disposals. Each June, it should provide the Committee with an update on its progress, reporting against its revised performance framework. It should also identify and apply good practice from across the public and private sectors to ensure it is achieving timely disposals which maximise returns.

The Department’s ability to make informed decisions on estate management and on which sites to sell remains constrained because it still lacks good management information on its estate, despite this Committee highlighting the problem in

The Department’s forecast savings from its DEO Portfolio by 2040 have already fallen from £2.4 billion to £0.65 billion, and there is a very real risk they will melt away completely. The Department’s estate is costly to run and maintain—it spent £3.1 billion on estate maintenance in 2019–20—and part of its rationale for reducing the size of the estate is to cut running costs. However, slow progress in completing site disposals means that it continues to pay for assets it does not need. As a result, its forecast benefits from the DEO Portfolio by 2040—measured in terms of disposal proceeds and reduced running costs, offset by rehousing costs—have fallen from Optimising the defence estate 7 £2.4 billion to £0.65 billion. But even this figure remains extremely uncertain. There are indications that the costs of works on sites that will house relocated personnel and equipment are increasing as more detailed planning is undertaken and the extent of works is better understood. In addition, the Department has not budgeted for the costs of upgrading its building to meet its net zero commitments, which early estimates suggest will be at least £1 billion. This also creates risks for the affordability of the Department’s disposal programme as the budget is based on reducing building costs by £1 billion. Recommendation: The Department should collect better data on the actual cost of preparing sites for disposal and the building works on sites receiving relocated personnel and equipment, including the cost of meeting sustainability commitments. It should use these data to re-assess the forecast savings from the disposal programme and include this in its annual update to the Committee.

The Department has still not tackled the long-known problems with the poor quality of its estate, which continue to harm the well-being of service personnel. The condition of living accommodation is vitally important for the Armed Forces’ ‘lived experience’, yet the latest survey on their views and experiences shows continuing dissatisfaction with accommodation and its maintenance. The Department has not resolved the indefensibly longstanding issue of the estate’s poor condition, 30% of which is in an unacceptable condition. It has operated a’ fix on fail’ approach to maintenance for more than a decade, although increased investment following the 2020 Spending Review will enable it to use preventative maintenance at more sites. In June 2021, it let new estate maintenance contracts—valued at more than £2 billion during the next seven years—but there remains a risk of repeating the failed approach we have seen on previous contracts. In addition, the Department continues to grapple with a range of estate-related projects. The pilots of the Future Accommodation Model have been long-delayed, and it remains uncertain whether the outcome will provide personnel with what they want, especially post-COVID. The Department is in arbitration with Annington Homes to negotiate a reasonable rent, and it needs to ensure an orderly exit from other PFI arrangements as they end over the next five years. Recommendation: The Department must demonstrate to the Committee in its annual update how its commitment of appropriate resources to tackling the problems which affect the lived experience of its personnel have had an effect, to the extent that we start to see improvements in the relevant scores in the annual armed forces continuous attitude survey. 8 Optimising the defence estate 1 Disposing of estate that is no longer needed

On the basis of a report by the Comptroller and Auditor General, we took evidence from the Ministry of Defence on optimising the defence estate.1

The Department told us that it has the key elements of a strategy, and that the DEO Portfolio is the major component of this. The Portfolio, however, only covers the UK built estate. The Department could not demonstrate that it has a coherent, comprehensive strategy to deliver necessary reforms of its whole estate and to manage all related estate initiatives.8 Instead, it has a plethora of estate initiatives, such as the Future Accommodation Model for improving service personnel accommodation, which will affect the DEO Portfolio once the Department has decided whether or not to proceed. The reform of the reserve, training and overseas estates remains outside the Department’s estate optimisation plans, with the Department instead having undertaken separate reviews of each in recent years, further illustrating its disjointed approach.9 Slow progress in rationalising the estate

Since 2015–16, the Department has reduced the size of its built estate by just 2% (1,600 hectares). The Department also failed to meet two short-term targets set by Government in the 2015 Spending Review: to release land for 55,000 new homes by March 2020, and to raise £1 billion from the sale of land by March 2021. It raised £538 million and released land for just 9,200 houses, having never had any clear plans for how it would meet the 55,000 target. This failure is partly explained by changing military requirements for the estate after the targets were set, such as the decision of the United States to retain three large airfields —RAF Molesworth, RAF Mildenhall and RAF Alconbury—that the Department had planned to sell. The Department, however, did not seek to update its targets to reflect these changed circumstances.10

The Department’s slow progress in reducing the size of its estate is because its initial plans were unrealistic, and consequentially it has spent far too much time re-planning and re-organising. For example, since 2018 it has fundamentally revised its disposal plans three times, shifting away from prioritising disposals to optimising the use of its estate.11

In 2019, the Department ended its 10-year contract with its Strategic Business Partner, led by Capita, five years early because the contract was not delivering expected savings and improvements in running the DIO.12 This created a gap in the skills and capabilities that the Department needs. It is seeking to build in-house capabilities to fill this gap but, at present, it remains reliant on contractors. Overall, the Department has 168 staff working on the strategic management of the defence estate.13 By 2023–24 the Department hopes 7 Qq 6 to 9 and 12; C&AG’s Report, para 8 8 Qq 6 to 9; C&AG’s Report, para 4 9 Qq 14, 76, 85 and 88; C&AG’s Report, para 3.15 10 Q 80; C&AG’s Report, paras 2.15 to 2.20 11 Q 6; C&AG’s Report, paras 10 to 12 12 Q 35; C&AG’s Report, para 2.4 13 Letter dated 19 July 2021 from Permanent Secretary to the Committee 10 Optimising the defence estate to fill all 91 core delivery posts, such as quantity surveyors and project managers, with permanent civil servants. However, it has already fallen behind target, having just 53 permanent staff in post in March 2021, compared with its target of 61 at that point.14

There are some signs in the last two to three years that the Department has started to get a better grip of optimising its estate. The new Permanent Secretary told us that the Department now has good prospects for delivering its estate optimisation plans in the future, driven by a mindset of “delivery, delivery, delivery”.15 In 2018, it delegated budgets and liability for managing the estate back to TLBs, which the Department explained puts accountability and responsibility in the same place. The Department told us that it will be giving TLBs mandates in the next few months to start implementing and delivering each of their various programmes.16 Since May 2020, the DEO Portfolio has had revised governance arrangements which set out responsibilities for delivering and monitoring programmes within the Portfolio. The Department has established a central coordinating team which provides oversight and guidance to the Portfolio. This team also supports the Portfolio Board, which provides direction on implementing the Department’s strategy and holds the TLBs to account.17

The stages that the Department must complete before it can rehouse displaced units and sell vacated sites can be slow and complex. The Department’s planned site disposal projects are scheduled to take an average of six years to complete, although on occasion it has achieved faster disposals, including for the Strategic Command chaplaincy and the joint bands. The Department said that it shared our frustration with the time taken, and explained that it has started to look at ways it might speed up disposals. It is working with commercial teams to support quicker construction and delivery of sites, which it expects will reduce timescales by 12 or possibly 18 months. It is also engaging with the government-wide Project Speed, which aims to reduce the time to deliver government infrastructure projects.18 While the Department told us that it works closely with the Government Property Unit, it could not point to any systematic exercise to identify good practices in other departments.19 Incentives to develop an affordable estate

The Department expects to spend £5.1 billion over the 25-year lifetime of the DEO Portfolio to 2040. In 2021, it resolved the medium-term funding shortfall in the Portfolio— caused by the government’s 2018 decision to withdraw the private finance model—and has committed to a budget of £4.3 billion over the 10 years to March 2031. This budget relies on the Department generating sales income of £2.2 billion between 2021–22 and 2039–40, which it can then recycle in the Portfolio.20

Sales receipts, and the year in which they are received, may fluctuate and there is a risk that forecast income will be lower than expected. Disposals might be affected by factors such as market conditions, the impact of COVID-19, the planning application process 14 Q 12; C&AG’s Report, paras 3.16 and 3.17 15 Qq 6, 46 and 90; C&AG’s Report, para 16 16 Qq 12 and 63 17 Q 6; C&AG’s Report, para 3.2 18 Q 56; C&AG’s Report, paras 1.11 to 1.14 19 Q 57 20 Q 51; C&AG’s Report, paras 12, 17, 3.4 and 3.5 Optimising the defence estate 11 and programme dependencies, such as the readiness of sites receiving displaced units. The Department told us that it could mitigate this by moving money between projects depending on the relative progress they have made.21

The Department is also seeking to maximise sales receipts through working with local authorities to ensure site disposals are included in local plans. It is developing strategies, including working with development partners, to dispose of large and complex sites, such as a major regeneration of the Bordon Garrison site in Hampshire.22

At the time of our oral evidence session in June, the Department had only one remaining estate optimisation target, set in the 2015 Spending Review: to reduce the built estate by 30% (23,200 hectares) by 2040–41.23 The Department said that this target was based on a top-down assumption that was not based on detailed plans, and was arbitrarily based on how much the Armed Forces had shrunk between 2000 and 2015.24

In 2016, the Department expected the DEO Portfolio would reduce the size of the built estate by 25%, and that other sales would reduce it by 5%. However, since 2016 the Department has shifted emphasis from primarily identifying land to sell to ‘optimising’ its use of the estate. This change, coupled with the requirements of the recent Integrated Review, essentially renders this single target to reduce the size of the estate by 30% meaningless.25 The Department admitted it will get nowhere near the target, and by 2040–41 it now expects to reduce the built estate by just 13% (10,100 hectares) through the DEO Portfolio and by 3% (2,000 hectares) from other sales. It also expects to sell 35 training sites comprising 0.5% of its rural estate (855 hectares). The Department wrote to us after the evidence session and confirmed that the 30% target is no longer appropriate and will not be pursued.26 It recognises that it needs more specific targets focussing on deliverables over the lifetime of this Parliament to encourage it to identify and dispose of land it no longer needs, but it could not tell us what these should be.27 Management information

We remain extremely concerned that the Department has still not developed sufficient data to make informed decisions on estate management, including which sites to sell. It is now 11 years since this Committee identified problems with the lack of estate data, and 10 years since the Department established the DIO. However, the quality and completeness of the Department’s management information on the cost and condition of its estate remains a significant weakness.28

The Department told us that when DIO was established, its knowledge of the estate was not held in one place and that it has worked to understand what estate it holds and its condition. Despite this, the Department confirmed that it is still several years from having the data it needs to actually manage its estate properly. It is introducing an asset management system and, by January 2021, had assessed 65% of the assets on its estate. 21 Q 51; C&AG’s Report, para 3.5 22 Qq 23, 57 and 69; C&AG’s Report, para 3.22 23 Qq 6, 8 and 23; C&AG’s Report, para 3 24 Q 19; C&AG’s Report, para 1.7; Letter dated 19 July 2021 from Permanent Secretary to the Committee 25 Qq 20, 24, 33 and 54; C&AG’s Report, paras 4 and 12 26 Letter dated 19 July 2021 from Permanent Secretary to the Committee 27 Qq 21 and 32; C&AG’s Report, para 7 28 Qq 37, 43, 45 and 90; C&AG’s Report, para 19; Committee of Public Accounts, Managing the defence budget and estate, Tenth Report of Session 2010–11, HC 503, December 2010 12 Optimising the defence estate However, the Department does not expect to have reached a ‘competent’ level of asset management until 2025. The Department said that it will only be then that it will be able to manage its assets more effectively and enable the commands to take informed decisions on the optimum time to invest in buildings or take them out of use.29

The Department’s failure to develop a comprehensive asset management system is yet another example of the poor information that underpins how it manages its estate.30 This latest admission comes soon after we highlighted the Department’s lamentable failure to bring the SLAMIS system (to manage single living accommodation) into service after eight years of development. The Department told us it is only now launching a pilot to trial this new system.31 29 Qq 37, 39 and 45; C&AG’s Report, para 3.24 30 Qq 50 and 51 31 Q 40; Committee of Public Accounts, Improving single living accommodation for service personnel, Fifty-fourth Report of Session 2019–21, HC 940, April 2021 Optimising the defence estate 13 2 Achieving estate objectives Achieving long-term savings

The Department’s vision is to achieve a more affordable estate and part of its rationale for disposing of sites is to cut running costs. Its estate is costly to run and maintain, with the Department spending £4.6 billion on its estate in 2019–20, around twice the annual cost of maintaining the UK’s nuclear deterrent.32 The estate is a critical component of delivering military capability. However, holding an estate that is too large means the Department is spending more than is needed on estate management, when it could be investing in new equipment and better trained personnel. The Department recognises that slow progress in completing site disposals means that it continues to pay for the running costs of buildings it no longer needs, and that delays to site disposals means these costs will not reduce as much or as quickly as planned.33

The Department forecasts that site disposals in its DEO Portfolio will deliver net savings of £0.65 billion by 2040—measured in terms of disposal proceeds and reduced running costs, offset by rehousing costs. The Department emphasised that its estate disposal programme remains value for money. However, since 2016 its forecast benefits have fallen by 73% from £2.4 billion because of higher than expected disposal costs and delays in achieving disposals. The figure of £0.65 billion remains extremely uncertain. The Department’s estimates were based on preliminary studies rather than actual data on costs; additional costs falling to TLBs were excluded; estimates did not include the additional cost of meeting recent sustainability targets; and the risk of cost increases was likely to be underestimated.34

Further, the Department does not fully understand the cost of achieving site disposals, creating the risk that benefits will disappear. The 2020 Spending Review provided the Department with an additional £16.5 billion of defence funding, following which it announced that it would invest £4.3 billion to 2031 to enable estate disposals. This funding package relies on the Department recycling £2.2 billion of sales income between 2021–22 and 2039–40 in the DEO Portfolio. Therefore, any delays to disposals will reduce the funding available for relocation works.35

In addition, the budget for the Department’s disposal programme is based on it reducing building costs by £1 billion by 2039–40. This creates risks for the programme’s affordability. For example, as more detailed planning is undertaken and the extent of works is better understood there are indications that the costs of works on sites that will house relocated personnel and equipment are actually increasing rather than falling.36

Defence is the biggest emitter of greenhouse gases in central government, and the Department realises it must manage its estate in accordance with the government’s sustainability policies. The Department acknowledged the importance of a sustainable estate for achieving its net zero commitments by 2050, and the DEO Portfolio is a key element of its plan through the rationalisation of the estate and the refurbishment or 32 House of Commons Library, The cost of the UK’s strategic nuclear deterrent, March 2021 33 Q 23 and 54; C&AG’s Report, paras 3 and 14 34 Qq 32 and 52; C&AG’s Report, para 14 35 Qq 51, 59 and 61; C&AG’s Report, paras 17 and 3.5 36 Q 58; C&AG’s Report, para 17 14 Optimising the defence estate replacement of dated buildings. However, despite this it has not budgeted for the additional costs of increasing the standard of buildings to net zero, which its early estimates suggest will need extensive investment totalling more than £1 billion.37

Since our hearing, the Infrastructure Projects Authority, which monitors the delivery of major projects, graded the DEO programme as Amber/Red in its July 2021 Annual Report on Major Projects.38 According to the IPA, projects are rated Amber/red when successful delivery of the project is in doubt, with major risks or issues apparent in a number of key areas.39 Wider estate problems

The condition of living accommodation is vitally important for the Armed Forces’ ‘lived experience’, yet the latest annual survey on personnel’s views and experiences shows continuing dissatisfaction with accommodation and its maintenance. In May 2021, satisfaction by service personnel on the quality and maintenance of the estate was 34%, down from 40% a few years ago.40 However, the Department has not tackled problems with the poor quality of its estate, with 30% still being in an unacceptable condition. For more than a decade it has operated a ‘fix on fail’ approach to maintenance in large parts of the estate, meaning that it has been unable to conduct all the preventive maintenance that was needed.41

The Department told us that an additional £740 million funding over the next four years was allocated to infrastructure investment in the 2020 Spending Review, which will enable it to address estate priorities and move more of the estate onto a preventive maintenance regime.42 In June 2021, it also let new estate maintenance contracts – with a value of more than £2 billion during the next seven years. However, we remain concerned that the Department risks repeating the failed approach we have seen on previous contracts. The Department told us that unlike previously, these contracts use industry standard specifications. It thinks that this, together with a new monitoring regime and establishing incentives to improve armed forces’ satisfaction with their accommodation, will result in faster and better performance, although it could not offer an absolute guarantee.43

The Department continues to grapple with a range of estate-related projects. The pilots of the Future Accommodation Model have been delayed, and it remains uncertain whether the outcome will provide service personnel with what they want, especially post-COVID.44 The Department remains in the midst of arbitration to renegotiate its contract with Annington Homes to agree a reasonable level of rent, which process will not be resolved until the end of the 2021–22 financial year.45 The Department also needs to ensure an orderly exit from other PFI arrangements as they end over the next five 37 Qq 6 and 22; C&AG’s Report, paras 19 and 3.26 38 Infrastructure and Projects Authority, Annual Report on Major Projects 2020–21, July 2021 39 Infrastructure and Projects Authority, Annual Report on Major Projects 2020–21, July 2021 40 Q 78 41 Qq 28, 29 and 31, C&AG’s Report, paras 2 and 1.18 42 Q 29, 47 to 49; letter dated 19 July 2021 from Permanent Secretary to the Committee 43 Qq 78, 79 and 89; letter dated 19 July 2021 from Permanent Secretary to the Committee 44 Q 76 45 Qq 1 to 3 Optimising the defence estate 15 years. It acknowledged that it must make better use of the sites provided by these relatively expensive arrangements so that personnel benefit from their better condition and support measures.46 46 Q 25 16 Optimising the defence estate