Government does some good for the forces

Thousands of Service personnel and their families are to see their homes refurbished sooner than planned as details of how a £50m advance from the Treasury will be spent are announced today, Tuesday 23 June 2009.


http://www.mod.uk/DefenceInternet/DefenceNews/EstateAndEnvironment/ForcesAccommodationToBeRefurbishedSoonerThanPlanned.htm

Apologies if already been done but search returned nothing

 

Fair's fair, let's give them some praise for that. Shame it took a major crisis to get it, but money is money and investment in services married quarters is way too long overdue.

 

Don't hold your breath for a collective cheer. The usual suspects on here are far more comfortable accentuating the negative.

A lot of credit must go to Admiral Laurence, who seems to be a very able DE Director.

 

Agreed, still not going to sway my vote though

 

Should have been done earlier.

Im not congratulating a government that should have done it years ago.

 

Lets see what the improvements consist of first. I drove back from somewhere boring the other day through some army quarters that looked fairly newish, near Aldershit. Something wasnt quite right about them. I looked more closely and saw that the roofs of the houses were felted rather than tiled. I do hope that the estate I drove past was a facility for search training rather than a real quarters patch.

 

I thought that the married quarters had been sold to a private company. Is that not true?

 

apparently so company called defence estates: http://www.defence-estates.mod.uk/sfa/aboutSFA.php

 

Then why is public money being used to upgrade private property?


I am not saying Mil accom should not be improved BTW. I just don't understand why it is a public liability to improve private property.

 

Extremely good point in fact, surely soldiers pay rent to this company so why isnt this being spent on improvements to said properties??

Hold on a tick...CAPITALISM!!! why would they want to waste profit margins on improving properties when they could just claim the cash off the government?? unless were barking up the wrong tree here??

Anybody live in service family Accommodation who could shed some light on this

 

The Tories flogged off the family silver and we have got to make the best of what we've got.

 

There are approximately 50,000 MoD homes in the country. This figure would provide about £1000 for each home.

Even on the assumption that the money is directed at the 19,000 "substandard" homes, it's still only a little over £2500 per home - which is a drop in the ocean given the way the Government spends money and the state of some of the homes.

We shouldn't give them credit for fulfilling a tiny part of their commitment after so many years in office.

 

You havent taken your tablets today have you?

 

Had no idea about the amount of housing actually involved in this so essentially the government are appearing to help the forces when in actual fact they're not providing that much at all.

 

Did you know that gov spends about 8x more on benefits than defence?