Hundreds of military families live in substandard housing

Hundreds of military families live in substandard service houses, The Mail on Sunday can reveal.

Nearly 600 homes do not meet the official criteria for ‘decent’ housing, the legal minimum standard which means they are in a reasonable state of repair.

It comes as Air Force Commodore James Savage, chief of accommodation for the Armed Forces, admitted that 8,000 repairs to military houses related to problems such as damp, black mold and heating have not yet been completed and would take months to fix.

Last month, defense chiefs withheld payments to private companies involved in the repairs while thousands of servicemen waited to work in squalid houses.

The government was forced to hold daily briefings with military housing managers in January, following a series of Defense Ministry reports on the conditions military families endure in freezing, damp homes.

It must also have “effective insulation and efficient heating,” but notes that “damp or cold hazard” may be allowed if the home meets other criteria, such as having a kitchen less than 20 years old and a bathroom less than 30 years old.

Despite this rudimentary definition, Defense Minister Alex Chalk revealed in a written statement last week that 585 military dwellings occupied by troops and their families do not meet this standard as of March 1.

Armed Forces Chief of Accommodation Air Commodore James Savage also admitted that another 8,322 repairs related to problems such as damp, black mold and heating still needed to be resolved.

He told Soldier Magazine: ‘Direct level meetings are still taking place two or three times a week.

‘There is very close engagement and close supervision of what they are doing, and we absolutely intend to do it until the level of performance reaches the required degree.

‘Realistically, that’s not going to happen overnight. It takes months of work to get to that point, but we are not accepting anything below what we establish in the contracts’.

The government was forced to hold daily briefings with military housing managers in January, following a series of Defense Ministry reports about the dilapidated conditions military families endure in freezing, damp homes.

Last month, defense chiefs withheld payments to the firms involved as thousands of soldiers and their families continued to wait for squalid homes to be repaired.

Troops of the First Queen’s Dragoon Guard, a high-ranking military regiment known as the Welsh Cavalry, are among those affected.

The Rev. Ailsa Whorton, who manages the guards’ pastoral care, said last week that housing issues made troops feel undervalued, leading them to think they were “not important enough to fix (their) roof.”