MoD sites

MoD loses billions of pounds after selling military housing, NAO finds

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I admit it. It was my experience of the bit of this deal in terms of RAF Scampton that in part led me to prepare the note on the need for a rural sovereign wealth fund.  I hope in the light of this story you might read it again and help me build interest in a better way forward – you can access it here.

This story itself tells us:

Had the MoD retained the housing stock, due to the property price boom, it would have stood to gain between £2.2 billion and £4.2 billion, the watchdog concluded in a report out today.

The MoD sold the homes, used to house members of the armed forces, to Annington Property Limited, in a deal worth £1.6 billion in 1996.

Since then, the MoD has been renting the homes back from Annington in a deal that is set to be renegotiated in 2021.

Amyas Morse, head of the National Audit Office, said today: “The department carried out a sale and leaseback deal almost twenty years ago, based upon pessimistic views of the future growth in property values, but with the mitigating feature that the rents charged to the military families who lived there were restricted for the first twenty years.

“This has cost the public sector a great deal in capital growth, and it has been a great deal for the landlord.”

When the current agreement ends in 2021 Annington Homes is expected to demand a huge increase in rent.

Currently, the MoD pays £178m a year in rent, with a discount rate of 58%, but this could rise by £250m a year when the current deal ends.

MoD fears for Trident base if Scotland says yes to independence

There is a brilliant book by Norman Davies I am reading called “Forgotten Kingdoms” It has changed my perspective on the past. It makes a really convincing case with reference to now lost kingdoms that if we take a long view the modern nation state is a deluding concept. It helps put the debate about Scottish independence in this article into a different perspective seeing its potential occurrence as just the movement of a long historical tectonic plate rather than a grievous attack on the notion of a “United Kingdom”.

What I find more interesting about this story therefore, is the implications for coastal rural England if there is a need to  relocate the nuclear fleet south of the current border.  I have often profiled the positive economic impact military installations have on rural places, I get free red arrows displays all the time on my drive past Scampton to work. If such a move did take place Scotland’s loss would be England’s benefit. The article itself tells us:

The British government is examining plans to designate the Scottish military base that houses the Trident nuclear deterrent as sovereign United Kingdom territory if the people of Scotland vote for independence in next year’s referendum.

In a move that sparked an angry reaction from the SNP, which vowed to rid Scotland of nuclear weapons as quickly as possible after a yes vote, the government is looking at ensuring that the Faslane base on Gare Loch in Argyll and Bute could have the same status as the British sovereign military bases in Cyprus.

The move would be designed to ensure that the Trident fleet would continue to have access to the open seas via the Firth of Clyde. Under Britain’s “continuous at sea deterrent”, at least one Vanguard submarine armed with 16 Trident nuclear missiles is on patrol at sea at any one time.

The warnings over Faslane come as the British government issues stark warnings to the people of Scotland about the dangers of independence. But William Walker, professor of international relations at the University of St Andrews, told the Guardian: “Threats and counter threats are going on. The risk the government in London is taking – and I think they are waking up to this – is that it all seems like scaremongering.”

The Ministry of Defence is officially working on only one option for the Faslane base ahead of next year’s Scottish independence referendum – a defeat for the SNP, thereby guaranteeing the survival of the base that has housed the nuclear deterrent since the Polaris era in the 1960s. An MoD spokesperson said: “We are confident that the Scottish people will vote to remain a part of the United Kingdom.”

Nuclear waste ‘may be blighting 1,000 UK sites’

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I have talked previously of the need to think through the positive employment benefits of the role of the MoD in rural England. Interestingly the Rural Growth Network proposal for Swindon and Wiltshire seeks to think through the issues around changes to the MoD presence in that rural area.

This article demonstrates the darker side of an MoD legacy and I suspect may run and run. It tells us:

Hundreds of sites across England and Wales could be contaminated with radioactive waste from old military bases and factories, according to a new government report.

Up to 1,000 sites could be polluted, though the best guess is that between 150 and 250 are, says a report on contaminated land by the Department of Energy and Climate Change (Decc), released last month, but previously unreported.

This is far higher than previous official estimates, with evidence from the Ministry of Defence (MoD) last December suggesting that there were just 15 sites in the UK contaminated with radium from old planes and other equipment.

The MoD has come under fire from former prime minister Gordon Brown for trying to evade responsibility for cleaning up the contamination it has caused. His constituency in Fife, north of Edinburgh, includes one of the most notorious examples of radioactive pollution at Dalgety Bay.