RAF Coningsby Food Bank
 

Big splash on Sky News and report playing regularly on Kay Burley show and presumably during the rest of the day.

https://news.sky.com/story/some-mili...risis-12900704

Revealed: The military personnel turning to food banks as cost of living crisis hits

Some individuals can no longer even afford the price of the subsidised meals at their mess, while others can't afford to go home and see loved ones of the cost of travel.

Listening to sky this morning it mentioned RAF personnel get subsidised food, accommodation and fuel. Not sure how much that amounts to in this day and age. I take it they mean heating fuel, Jo public will think they get cheap petrol for cars etc.

The article refuels to fuel "grants" which could be Journo speak for Get You Home mileage? Pretty sure a few variations of that still exist

If you believe everything Kay Burley says you'll believe anything.

https://www.britishlegion.org.uk/get...-living-grants

This has been an issue for a while. My son was a grunt. During his deployment to Afghanistan in 2006 I had to put money into his bank account so he could afford decent food at Bastion and the FOBs he detached to.

Apologies in advance for thread drift. Personally I (literally) cannot bear Ms Burley. How she's survived despite so many gaffes is beyond me.

Her interviews in the run up to the 2019 general election were so dumbed down and biased I was surprised no party personalities (especially Mr Farage) didn't report her to the BSA.

NEO

Owning own home, mortgage rates rising, expensive area mentioned. Not hard to imagine issues

The RAF wanted to employ those who reflect society. This is a reflection of society so should not be a surprise.

When I first joined the RAF and then married, my wife and I were a traditional family. We lived in a MQ and were initially kitted out with Barrack Store furniture. As and when we were able to afford our own furniture, we bought it and handed back the loaned furniture. If we couldn't afford things when I was a J/T we didn't have them until we could afford them.

Newly Commissioned, we bought our first house with a mortgage at 15.5%! We worked out what we could afford and bought within our means; the same with our cars.

True, all Service personnel have been ripped off by the Government in the past two decades and the AFPRB has not done its job properly. It should say "This is what the award should be ..." and leave HMG to say why it won't pay it rather than starting "We live in a time of austerity and we recognise that so take 1.5% as that's all HMG can afford".

Modern society has not helped today's younger generation. They want kids before they marry; they want to live in a 4 bed detached house filled with the furniture and goods that they see on TV; a new car; overseas holidays and a social life whether that be clubbing or eating out.

Part of me feels sorry for them that education and societal 'norms' have let them down but being in the military should be different. Personal discipline, support mechanisms, people-focused managers and a 'reasonable' income. I say 'reasonable' because I look at the job site "Indeed" and most jobs are at minimum wage or salaried at £24-26K. Now the Army is recruiting via Indeed and the starting salary is £33k. If Service personnel really need to go to a food bank, it sounds like personal mismanagement, for which they can get plenty of help to resolve both within and outside the Service.

I have just looked at the RAF Pay scales online and LAC to SAC earn 22-25k per year. This is the same as a cashier at Tesco, according to Indeed and Tesco's own site. The question I ask is, 'Is that fair?'. The SAC has joined to defend the nation, may go to war, and may not retuen based on the experiences of Iraq and particularly Afganistan. They will be told where to live, when to move, and may spend many months away from their family - whilst earning Tesco money. I do not dispute that the Army are recruiting at 33k, although I cannot find it. However, I can assure you that the RAF are not paying such sums. Add in appalling accommodation and a management structure that could not care less about you if you happen to be a white male, and it does not appeal as a career

I served from 1990-2018, pilot, no ground tours, no promotion, I just flew. I saw the steady decline in benefits, lifestyle and the increase in staff-speak, bull$hit bingo, and soft and fluffy wokeism in favour of being a credible fighting force. I should have left many years before I did and regret not doing so, the RAF told me that the grass was not greener outside, and I now know that to be a bare-faced lie.

My personal advice to anyone thinking of joing the RAF would be this - do it. Get in, get as much training as possible, gain every qualification on offer, then get out as fast as you can. The training and skills that the RAF will give you are hugely valued, in demand, and can bring significant compensation. But not in the RAF.

Part of the problem one thinks may be traced back to pay as you dine.

The things that get me are the loss of JT and change over to SAC Tech, changes from airman and women to aviator, changes in Uniform adding a belt and the sh*tehawk on the shoulders, plus another uniform in the wings, changes in Stations where the Staish no longer rules the roost and 1 star officers are often over them.............

They all add up to squandered monies, why change a badge and rank when there was no need, how much did that cost with a new paperwork trail, new uniforms the same, more cost, aviator from airman / airwoman, again means everything relating to the previous ranks needs to be amended etc.... all of it is just a waste of money, money that could have been better spent on ensuring accomodation and housing is sorted.

Accomodation sold off 27 years ago to mates. MQs that is. Have you actually been in SLAM accomodation in the last 20 years? Just asking? Pay as you stave was a joke as well. But it was all cut the wage and pension bill. Oh, a core menu that was dire.

People can blame whom they like but from personal experience Pay as you starve, which as a SNCO I fought vehemently against, was introduced with little if any opposition.
Blame the people who used the messes at the time, the stampede from them to get it introduced, was frankly ridiculous. All they saw was a pound sign.
Shift workers missing 2 or 3 meals a week in their mess was a major factor in people's thinking.
It was always going to end in tears and I was laughed at for saying so at the time.

Sucked in by the PR
 

I looked in my Deleted Items for the Indeed advert from yesterday for Household Cavalry. On closer inspection at the small print, which showed up the inaccuracy of the headline, it says "During your initial training, you’ll earn £16,844, after which your salary will rise to £21,424. If you set your mind to it, you could reach Corporal within 5 years, earning £33,065."

So I got sucked in by the big ticket weasel words as intended. I agree with everything that you wrote and, over my 43 years of service, saw a huge change in Service life and the loss of all that made it enjoyable too.

I would have tolerated the contractorization of almost everything if it was genuinely value for money and a maintenance of, or improvement in, the current provision but I cannot give any examples, though I'm sure other contributors might have shining examples, of what was improved by contracting when the costs are taken into account.

One of the biggest fiascos was HRG Travel now operated by AmEx. That shows how much money must be involved to attract such a company. The number of times that I used "Print Screen" to show the JSAU that flights, hotels, trains and hire cars were so much cheaper on usual booking sites than using the enforced booking tool. I took it up with the top Civil Servant at Main Building when he held a public forum. His response was that he took Whizz flights at 0500 to do his bit and everyone laughed until his neck went red. The reason behind this expensive nonsense was a fundamental lack of trust in the integrity of self-bookers. If we were trusted to write Op Orders to send millions of pounds worth of kit to far-flung places, surely we could be trusted to book a budget flight from LGW to Europe for the conference that empowered the Op Order? :ugh:

Completely agree. A vocal minority gave the illustrious leaders of the day all the excuse they needed to slash catering and bring in this model. The organisation has failed the youngsters, which at least in previous decades it tried not to do.

As a young singlie, if I ran out of money by the 20th of the month (never did!), I had 3 meals a day and a roof over my head. I had heating and hot water. Even if I could do no more than stay in and watch telly, I was OK. We had financially irresponsible people then, and we do now. The difference now is those people are sometimes hungry, have indifferent heating and hot water provision. Even some of the sensible youngsters are struggling.

It seems the only people puzzled by the outflow of people are those in the Bucks/Greater London area....

A further complete agreement. That arrangement is absolutely shocking.

An interesting point made by Martin Lewis was that interest rate have been at a historic low for the past 12 to 13 years after the 2008 crash and are now returning to pre that era level of 5 to 6%. Many of those entering the market in the past 10 years have never seen rates at the levels they are now plus the move away from 25 year mortgages to 2 to 3 year deals hasn't helped. I remember the rates in the early 90s going from 5 to 6% in an afternoon to 15% plus until the UK left the ERM........Major and Lamont's doing.

I was a JT back in the 70's, seems like the RAF has changed quite a bit since I was in. I remember a fellow JT and his wife just couldn't manage their finances and got into debt. The family officer got together with the couple and their bank manager and between them decided the bank would manage their finances, all bills going to the bank and the debt slowly paid off. It looks like banks have changed a lot since then too.

The bank managers of old who knew their customers have been replaced by a computer that says no. IIRC that it was a contravention of QRs to be in so much debt as it could prove to be a security risk. Everyone was encouraged to be upfront and honest.

Disclaimer: Gen Xer here, very comfortably off with a large property on a long fixed mortgage at a low rate, with a big AFPS75-heavy pension to come, so what I'm about to write is not motivated out of jealousy, frustration or lack of financial nous. I'm doing very well indeed. But I also pay close attention to the issues facing younger people now.

Boomers. It is no use harking back to 15% interest rates and disciplined budgeting and refraining from luxuries, etc etc etc. There are fundamental differences between the economic situation in which you paid those mortgage rates and the situation which millennials and Gen Zers have experienced for almost their entire adult lives. One, your interest rate spikes were more or less matched by wage inflation, at least if you had an effective union (as many more civilians did). Two, your mortgage interest was tax deductible. Three, your mortgages were restricted to a lower multiple of earnings, which kept a lid on house prices and deposit sizes. Four, the large increase in City remuneration following deregulation of investment banking and the slightly later influx of foreign money to London property had not yet had their distorting effects on the market, with ripples out along commuter lines and into the regions via second homes. Five, housebuilding has fallen ever further behind population growth, constrained by the grip of NIMBY voters on local planning authorities and compounded by changing social norms which have increased the number of single-occupant and single-parent households. All of that makes getting onto the property ladder without some form of windfall support an increasingly hopeless task for young people.

Making life doubly miserable for them in the latest crisis is the fact that wages are emphatically not keeping pace with inflation, and rents (for those not fortunate enough to be eligible for social housing) are astronomical due to the imbalance between supply and demand.

My parents had completely unremarkable careers which if they'd been military might have seen Dad rising to FS and Mum to Cpl with 10 years out of the workplace mid-career. Yet they were able to retire before either reached 60, mortgage free in a house which (had they not sold it to top up Dad's superb final salary pension) would today be worth almost a million pounds, having put a child through private school at their own expense and holidayed at least once per year (a rate which has increased since retirement). The idea that a young couple of similar standing today could accrue such wealth or aspire to such a lifestyle is simply laughable. Their discretionary spending could be zero, and it would still be impossible.

So, please save the exhortations to budgetary discipline. The best way you can help younger people to get on is to write letters in support of every planning application for housing in your district, green belt or not. Be a YIMBY. If you want to go all in, vote for election candidates who promise to support housebuilding. Yes, it will erode the paper value of your property. No, you did not earn all of it.

Good friends with an ex Uk army helicopter pilot, hes now serving in the ADF. I think he said he technically took a minor pay cut on the salary, but the allowances more than make up for it. For example the house he living in is paid for by the army. Hes living in a 5 bed 2 bath house that was 6 years old when he moved in. While in the UK he was living in a small apartment on base where the heating didn't, mold in most rooms