Homes for heroes? Assessing the impact of the UK’s Military Covenant

Abstract

The British Military Covenant can be located in and from many sources and from 2011 onwards in primary legislation. This article argues that the provision of military housing amounts to an early test of how the military covenant is understood and used by those involved in defence policy, and those in the armed forces affected by it. It finds that housing was a prominent feature of how service personnel understood how they were valued, but was not explicitly understood as a covenant issue by those personnel or the officials in charge of the Defence Estates. We locate three reasons for this: (1) the covenant has been poorly translated from aspiration into policy practice, (2) the covenant is unevenly understood across its stakeholders which has the effect of generating disappointment through misaligned expectations, (3) those engaged in the reform process surrounding the Defence Infrastructure Organisation (DIO) saw the covenant as a means to energise reform. Ultimately housing was seen as a dry and technocratic business area and thus an issue ripe for being refracted through the covenant was ultimately left outside of its remit.

Keywords:

• Defence
• security
• civil–military relations
• public policy
• public administration
• housing

Notes

1. All errors of interpretation of course remain with the authors.

2. Converted using the currency converting site “xe.com” on 4 December 2014.

3. The review described the covenant as follows: The Army uses the term “military covenant” to describe the mutual obligation between the nation, the Army and each individual soldier: an expectation of personal sacrifice and the forgoing of some personal rights and freedoms on the one hand, and of fairness, respect and appropriate terms and conditions on the other. This mutual obligation is codified in the Army’s doctrine publications (p. 201).

4. The terms is used in Sarah Ingram’s book “The Military Covenant: Its impact on civil-military relations in Britain, Ashgate, 2014, and she in turn attributes it to her PhD supervisor, Christopher Dandeker.

5. The homelessness charity “Shelter” estimates that over 80% of homes on the open market are beyond the means of first time buyers. http://england.shelter.org.uk/news/june_2014/over_80_of_homes_on_the_market_unaffordable_for_first_time_buyers accessed 1 June 2015.

6. Please see: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/forces-help-to-buy accessed 1 March 2016.

7. For details of the overarching scheme see: http://www.helptobuy.org.uk/ accessed 5 December 2014.

8. The MoD retains around 6630 homes or 13% of the total, Report of the Task Force on the Military Covenant, p. 13, quoting 2008 NAO report into Service Accommodation.