Army work finishes with Final Report

I’ve written occasionally about the work I do as Chairman of ATR (Lichfield)’s Independent Advisory Panel. ATR stands for Army Training Regiment and the Lichfield bit means Whittington Barracks.

It is a panel made up of 7 people who have expertise or experience in different walks of life… senior police officer, senior official from County Education, Director of Tamworth Borough Council, senior Execs from large business and me as the public life bod. It is supported by ATR (Lichfield)’s Commanding Officer, the Adjutant and the Regiment’s WO1. The Panel was formed about fifteen months ago and we have spent that time looking closely at the different ways the Army trains new recruits.

The work has been around inspecting aspects of the Whittington site but more so interviewing lots and lots of new recruits at different stages of their training programme and also families when they attend Passing Out Parades. We’ve had instant and unrestricted access to the Barracks at any time which, in itself, is an impressive signal that the Army are keen to cooperate with this.

Although we can’t instruct ATR (Lichfield) to change the way they do things, our experience, in the main, is that where we have discovered areas needing change or improvement they have made the suggested changes fairly willingly. The original brief I had that it would take a few days over my period of involvement went by the wayside long ago. It’s taken much longer to do the job properly but, that said, we’ve all tried to make the time because it has been a very interesting and, I think, worthwhile piece of work.

We produced our ATR (Lichfield) IAP Final Report recently and to a vast extent the Army are clearly very good at training new recruits and particularly concerned with their health and welfare whilst being trained.

With ATR (Lichfield) closing down next year and the training of new recruits moving to ATR Pirbright our work is now coming to an end. We had our penultimate meeting today and I’m planning one more to look at producing a short document on our experiences so new IAPs can be set up with some background tips to help.

I’m off to ATR Pirbright next week to meet Army top brass and the four other IAP Chairmen from around the country to discuss how things are going in general… should be interesting.

You can read our Final Report here.

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