Article published in The Daily Telegraph, 17 July 2026. © Richard Kemp

It’s a familiar story to those of us who have served in the Armed Forces. When money is tight, which it always is, the first thing to be sacrificed is accommodation and welfare facilities for our troops and their families. That’s why for many decades the standard of housing, both for single soldiers in barracks and married personnel in their Ministry of Defence-provided houses, has very often been woeful.

Despite government pledges to improve the quality of housing, the same thing’s happening again. To help fund the new Defence Investment Plan, the MoD intends to deprive a homes refurbishment programme of hundreds of millions of pounds. That will delay by years the work that is needed to make many homes habitable. Instead of relocating cash from the welfare budget, overseas aid and net zero fantasyland, the Government is forcing the very troops that it relies on to defend this country to help foot the bill for the equipment they need to fight with.

I know just how damaging poor accommodation standards can be to military morale. My battalion lived in a barracks in Cambridgeshire that had been run down for many years with almost nothing spent on modernisation and refurbishment. Walls were crumbling. Houses were inundated with black mould. The heating and hot water boilers broke down all the time. In the depths of winter soldiers and their families shivered in their barracks and houses for days while waiting for a poorly funded maintenance system to kick in.

When we moved out of that barracks for a posting to Northern Ireland, the place became a holding centre for illegal immigrants. But before they could move in it had to be extensively refurbished at vast expense. What was good enough for the men and women defending our country was evidently nowhere near good enough for people who had broken into the country unlawfully. That showed the troops how much they were valued by their government.

The Londonderry barracks we ended up in was little better. Impressive stalactites hung from leaky water pipes. Vermin was rife. (more…)