P o s t b a g Postbag Dear Dawn
Unbelievable Disregard As a ‘dutiful service wife’ I normally accept my lot and get on with it, but I feel that it is important to expose the treatment we received recently in the hope that it will help to prevent others from being treated in a similar way.
When my husband found out he was deploying to Afghanistan, the last thing we expected was to be told we had to move out of our entitlement SFA. He had no idea where he would be posted to when he came back, and so this meant us moving to another house at the same unit for the duration of his four month deployment.
The justification for this was given as the need to make best use of the housing stock, and life was made very difficult for my husband when he challenged this. The upshot was that, instead of being able to enjoy family time together before my husband deployed, his last few weeks in the UK were spent packing boxes and shifting all of our belongings from our entitlement SFA to a below entitlement property about 500 yards away from our original home.
The below entitlement SFA was too small to accommodate all of our furniture, but, because the requirement for us to move was generated at Unit level, the Royal Air Force refused to pay our storage costs, which meant that we have had to meet these costs from our own pocket.
In their haste to tidy their housing plot, our home Unit ignored our welfare completely. The stress that they caused us was entirely unnecessary and avoidable, and came at a time when we were already concerned about the impact of my husband being deployed. This stress has continued through his deployment, as we have tried, and failed, to make our temporary dwelling feel like home (with most of our possessions still packed in boxes, ready for the next move). We are now facing our second move within four months, as we move to our new Unit.
The Royal Air Force aims to support the morale of deployed Service personnel ‘by making the fullest possible provision for their emotional and physical well being’. It is hard to see how this was upheld when our welfare was so cavalierly disregarded at unit level. Quite frankly, we felt that we had been ‘written off’ when my husband deployed and that we were no longer valued by our home Unit. This is not an acceptable way to treat anyone, and surely something must be done to stop this from happening to anyone else?
Yours sincerely (Name withheld)
Chairman’s Note: On receipt of this letter, the RAF FF sought policy advice on retention of SFA during deployments. The issue here is that the SFA was a ‘tied’ house, (ie linked to an appointment) management of which lies with the local Unit Commander. The family concerned should have been told in advance that they may be required to relocate, but weren’t. Our next issue of Envoy will carry an article to clarify the rules on SFA retention for both tied and non-tied SFA.
Dear Jenny
A need to lower my expectations . . . I do feel so sorry for the next person going into our quarter who will now have to deal with the same issues with the garden themselves. I am also more than happy to be used as an example of the type of problems that many military families face and how difficult the system appears to be.
So my journey with the MHS/DE circle of getting nowhere fast will begin again. Our quarter is (yet again) not up to the move-in standard which we would expect – as written down in MHS documents. This time however I will lower my expectations greatly. I don’t expect any job to be completed in one trip. I know I will have to spend countless hours waiting for workmen to arrive who don’t bring the correct parts and who say that they were never told what the job involved. When we require DE approval for a job I will expect that to take months and months and that whenever I make a complaint it is never redressed and
52 Winter 2009
the issue still remains. I do not want to let this make me ill again but my pessimistic outlook can only work in my favour as when the day comes that an issue is resolved simply and effectively I will be awash with contentment. Maybe one day!
Kindest regards (Name withheld)
Issues Manager’s Note: So, what we do with letters like this from Service family members? We are always grateful to receive them as it helps to build our database of evidence which we then use in the reports we present, in this case to DE, MoD and other interested parties, in the hope of getting things changed for the better. If you have similar experiences and want your evidence to count, please do get in touch.
www.raf-ff.org.uk
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