Vice Admiral Tim Laurence has been in post as Chief Executive of Defence Estates, the UK military's property department, for two years. He has had a busy but rewarding first couple of years at the helm:
"It's been tremendously interesting, tremendously challenging, and I've enjoyed every minute of it," he said. "I would say that there have been lots of successes in that time, but equally quite a number of frustrations and a few setbacks.
"There's still a lot left to do, in particular with Service accommodation; Service families' housing is very high on my agenda.
"When I was interviewed soon after taking post, I said that my top three priorities were accommodation, accommodation and accommodation; that remains true today."
Over the past 12 months Defence Estates (DE) has delivered some real success stories with new accommodation completed at bases such as Catterick Garrison, Dale Barracks in Chester, and Blandford Camp in Dorset. The targets for upgrading a further 800 properties in 2009/2010 are on course:
"Those figures are for the UK and those figures are on track," Vice Admiral Laurence said. "Worldwide for 09/10 we will deliver over 1,000 housing upgrades and I'm very confident indeed that we will deliver those results."
Chancellor of the Exchequer Alistair Darling announced as part of the recent budget that £50m will be advanced to spend on accommodation projects and upgrades.
Defence Estates revealed yesterday details of sites that will benefit from this advance of expenditure. They include South Cerney in Gloucestershire, Woolwich in South London, Waddington in Lincolnshire, Lossiemouth in Moray, Condor near Arbroath, and Culdrose in Cornwall:
"More than 1,500 Service personnel will benefit directly from this initiative on Service accommodation. The advance of spend for capital projects, together with £10m of funding which we have also made available, will allow us to accelerate our building and modernisation programme. This is excellent news for everyone."
In addition, Vice Admiral Laurence is optimistic that a ten-year Accommodation Management Strategy, which will identify in more detail DE's future accommodation plans, will be published shortly:
"We've been waiting for the outcome of the planning round to find out how much money we've got," he said. "We now have the results of that, and are looking at our targets for the next four years. We want to be sure that this information is as up-to-date as possible when we publish the strategy.
"The strategy will set out our overall approach to Single Living Accommodation and Families Accommodation. It will explain in more detail the various initiatives that we have in place. It will give an idea of our likely progress over the next four years - and more broadly over the next 10 years - and a view of the position we expect to reach in a decade."
Despite clear progress being made, a recent National Audit Office (NAO) report into Service Families Accommodation, published in March 2009, identified a number of areas for improvement, including the standard of DE's customer relations. Vice Admiral Laurence is clear where improvements need to be made:
"We're looking at a number of our processes, the way we do business, particularly for housing, where frankly we've not been good enough, we've not been up to scratch," he said.
"Our programme of improvements, led by Air Commodore Elaine West, has very much been discussed and agreed with the chief executives of the three Service family federations, and there is a major effort going into making Defence Estates a more customer-friendly organisation.
"I would accept the criticisms of the NAO report and I'm pleased to say that we're putting a lot of effort into addressing them. We recognise that our communication with families - especially those living in houses which are being modernised or are about to be modernised - has not been good enough. So we need to put more effort into keeping them informed of progress with current refurbishment projects, and of forthcoming work."
The NAO report also highlighted that an estimated £38m is spent on empty military properties every year. This is something which Vice Admiral Laurence believes DE is tackling head-on:
"The advance of spend for capital projects, together with £10m of funding which we have also made available, will allow us to accelerate our building and modernisation programme. This is excellent news for everyone."
Vice Admiral Tim Laurence
"We have a major effort called the Void Surge Programme," he said. "Voids [empty homes] reached a peak last summer of 21 per cent. We're already down to 17 per cent and the figure is still coming down. Partly this is about being more ruthless in identifying and disposing of houses we really don't need to keep. And partly it is about making our maintenance and upgrade programme slicker and more efficient, so that houses are brought back up to a habitable standard more rapidly.
"Over the past six months we've brought more than 1,200 houses back online that would otherwise have been empty. I'm hoping that those figures will continue coming downwards quite quickly.
"The fewer voids we have, the more people we can get into our own properties, and the fewer people will be in rented properties. Rented properties are to me a waste of money, but we use them if we don't have property in the right place and of the right size or scale to meet someone's entitlement.
"We don't say 'sorry we can't help you, come back in six months' time'. We say 'OK, we must house you so we'll rent a property'. In that respect we definitely do put our customers first. But I want to get more of our properties up to the top condition and ready for occupation, and have fewer people in rented accommodation."
The ongoing condition survey of family accommodation is still to be completed, with around 80 per cent of finished surveys in the bag. Vice Admiral Laurence explained the delay:
"We've surveyed more than 90 per cent of the houses in England and Wales. However some of the early surveys didn't include all the bits of information that we needed. So we broadened the scope of the survey after we had surveyed the first 4,000 or so houses. We wanted to get as much information as possible, so we have got to go back and survey some of those houses again.
"We have to track down some of the householders that have been quite elusive in letting us do the surveys. I would hope that we would have the bulk of it done this year, with just a few outstanding ones to do next year."
Although Defence Estates deals with a lot more than military accommodation, Vice Admiral Laurence maintains that his priorities have remained the same:
"Of the many areas with this broad-ranging and interesting job, living accommodation - and particularly families' housing - is what I probably spend most time on. It is the most difficult to get right, but I'm absolutely determined that before I hand over to my successor - at the end of April 2010 - we have a really good way ahead for families' housing."