Buried deep in the Ministry of Defence’s latest accounts is the startling fact that Richards has amassed a retirement hoard worth £4 million.
It is thought to be the largest sum ever racked up by a public servant and is likely to raise eyebrows at a time when the Army has been forced to sell off its crown jewels such as the Old War Office in an effort to raise money.
The pot, which stood at £3.99 million last March, includes a lump sum payout of up to £445,000.
The accounts state that he receives a gold-plated annual pension as high as £150,000 before tax. However, a source says that due to Coalition tax changes, his pension will now be £117,107.
The reason that pension has such a high value is that it’s likely to be paid out for a long time. He’s 62. Actuarially, that’s going to be paid for 20-25 years.
Also, interest rates are currently low so that actuarial value of the lump sum that equals such an income is high.
Bit of a non-story really.
If you caclulate the lump you’d need in a private pension fund to give you the annual payouts civil servants enjoy as a pension, we’d likely find a lot more of these are worth way over a million pounds.
According to the Mail, “General Sir David Richards . . confessed to a modest ambition to indulge his passion for sailing if he could earn enough.”
Well if that’s all he wants, perhaps Sir David could give me his £4m, and in return I’ll supply him with a medium size sailing dinghy or small yacht, plus membership of a yacht club. I get near £4m and Sir David gets what he wants. Everyone’s a winner (especially me).
If there is a story here, it is that there are two. This man, like all the rest of the Higher Brass, failed to defend what mattered: the Regiments. We are seeing the last of them being slowly abolished and the Generals with the nice pensions are keeping silent.
The other story is the continuing slide into Third World buffoonery in the Army. Britain has eight divisions with a varying number of regiment-sized units. Let’s say five. That is 40 real command slots for colonels, or too often Brigadiers. Does the Army have 40 colonels?
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2924339/One-three-Army-brass-face-chop-cut-bureaucracy.html
700? Seriously? We only have 250 working tanks (the Army has more than that but they are in storage) and about the same number of artillery pieces. So we could put a full colonel in charge of each one.
And of course:
Loyalty is the coin of the Realm as far as the Army is concerned. What sort of fool thinks that rotating officers in and out of standardised, character-less, units every two years is going to breed loyalty? They need to go and read what actual real professionals have said about America’s World War Two Repple-Depples.
Given primary school teacher can retiring with pots worth £500k, the numbers we’ll be seeing as the last 15 years worth of massive senior salary increases turn into pension annuities will be staggering.
Wasn’t the BBC’s Alan Yentob’s pension pot £6.3m when he retired in 2009 ?
“We only have 250 working tanks”
Ah, but the British Army does have 400 hundred horses. And shiny steel breastplates for the requisite number of cavalrymen.
So if comes to a dust-up with the Russians it can have another go at the Charge of the Light Brigade & see if it can get it right this time.
About what the Army’s fit for.
We can do the Navy & the RAF some other time.
Just the one 400 hundred, there. (But no doubt they’d like 40,000)
bloke (not) in spain – “Ah, but the British Army does have 400 hundred horses. And shiny steel breastplates for the requisite number of cavalrymen.”
Actually I approve of that. Except for so many of them not being cavalrymen but girls pretending to be cavalrymen.
I think the recruitment effect is worth the price of the horses alone. Not mentioning the tourism and all that.
“I think the recruitment effect is worth the price of the horses alone”
Good grief!
You’re serious, aren’t you.
bloke (not) in spain – “You’re serious, aren’t you.”
Afraid so. Britain has been lucky with its Upper Class. They have always been willing to go out to some corner of a foreign field and die for Britain. France has not been so lucky since the French Revolution. America’s Upper Class has very conspicuously refused to do so since Vietnam. No healthy society can expect to survive unless the Ruperts are willing to die for it.
Our Ruperts like horses and hob-nobbing with the Royals. Hence the cavalry regiments. Yes, we really do need them. And they are cheap, so why not?
I think they have tanks, too.
I always enjoy the ritual sneer at our American cousins.
Worth remembering.
In the late thirties the US didn’t have a modern army. With its regional adversaries Mexico & Canada & other potential foes oceans away, it didn’t need one.
In June ’44 it provided the greater part of the Normandy invasion force. Later, the same week, it conducted a similar sized operation in the Pacific.
“Buried deep in the Ministry of Defence’s latest accounts”
Presumably this means that it was in the section it was supposed to be in and not front and center to make journalists’ lives easier.
This is all about chickens coming home to roost.
Back in the 70s when we had Governments micro managing the economy with pay and prices policies and then 80s when they were sorting the mess out the only way they could mollify the Armed forces and civil service unions was promises of future pensions.
Much as its good fun and satisfies our senses of of outrage to castigate the recipients we shouldn’t really blame them.
As ‘So Much for Subtlety’ says, the main story here is not Richards’ retirement package.
I could have tolerated him walking away whistling to the bank if he’d been any good as CDS. The problem was that he was an arse-crawler and butt-snorkeler whose only discernible skill was self-promotion.
At the time of the SDSR the forces needed a chief who could try and mitigate the effects of the cuts to come by persuading (by fair means or foul) the COS to take the hit across the board, sacrifice capabilities that were replaceable, and to preserve those which UK defence absolutely needed in order to meet the objectives of national strategy set by the politicians. This is something he failed to do, because he was utterly unsuited for the job.
He was a disaster for the armed forces, and his attitude was best summed up by the US Marine joke ‘Semper I’.
The problem was that he was an arse-crawler and butt-snorkeler whose only discernible skill was self-promotion.
The exact type of person who rises to the top of any large organisation, then. The private sector is no better.
“In June ’44 it provided the greater part of the Normandy invasion force.”
Well not on D-Day it didn’t. The numbers were built up afterwards.
But yes, there seems to be a fairly inglorious history of sneering at the US army despite the fact that they have a much better track record of learning from their mistakes and of taking advice from outsiders.
It rather that proves the point, Charlie. Roughly half the troops went on the beaches were US. The other half includes the Canadians who, like their neighbours the other side of Niagra Falls, had no requirement for a modern land army until the late 30’s build-ups.
One might be entitled to believe this was supposed to be the British Army’s raison d’etre.
@ b(n) is
The British army had fighting continuously for nearly five years by then. North Africa, Malaya, Burma as well as France, Belgium, Norway, Greece, Italy and had taken more casualties than the number of men the Yanks put onto the Normandy beaches.
The British only started rearming after Chamberlain (nominated as the fall-guy by Socialist propagandists for the horrendous lack of preparation before 1937 partly because he was dead and could not defend himself) was put in charge. The fault was partly complacency, partly the Labour Party’s militant pacifism, partly Baldwin’s pandering to it in order to win the 1935 election.
Britain didn’t have much of an army in 1939 either. But this is sensible – why have a large, enormously expensive army, with all the cost of replacing obsolescent equipment, when you are surrounded by water at least 26 miles wide?
This man, like all the rest of the Higher Brass, failed to defend what mattered: the Regiments.
Written with the closed mindset of a bureaucrat par excellence. It isn’t the regiments that matter, it is military capability that matters. Arguably the tribal regimental system is part of the problem, though few serving personnel, particularly those benefitting from that regimental system, are capable of seeing its flaws, clinging doggedly to the argument that the tribal system promotes unrivalled espirits de corps. It’s amazing that other armies manage to get by without it.
And to add, the “big versus little regiments” battle didn’t happen under Richards, or Rev Dannatt. It was fought under the Prince of Darkness himself, who as a Corps then big regiment man was undoubtedly wholeheartedly sympathetic to the retired Colonels whining that the chronic under-recruiting of the “shires” infantry (especially the Jock regiments) was a transient glitch.
bloke (not) in spain – “I always enjoy the ritual sneer at our American cousins.”
Out of everything I said, that is what you take away? I did not sneer at the Americans. I sneered at their ruling class. George H. W. Bush volunteered to fight for Canada because he wanted to get into the War early. Kermit Roosevelt pulled every string he could not merely to fight but to land on D-Day. JFK lost a brother. America’s Upper Class fought WW2. Good for them. The Upper Class did not fight in Vietnam. Harvard is said to have not lost a single Graduate in Vietnam. They have conspicuously refused to fight ever since.
You don’t like that coming from me? Fine. Read Arthur Hadley’s Straw Giant. He is not sneering either.
With its regional adversaries Mexico & Canada & other potential foes oceans away, it didn’t need one.
Which is why so much of the Army fought to get an officer slot in the Philippines.
In June ’44 it provided the greater part of the Normandy invasion force. Later, the same week, it conducted a similar sized operation in the Pacific
America was a different country. Or rather WASP America was and is the same country. The US Army is now strongly White and Southern. But America has allowed immigration to produce another country – the urban North-Easterners. Who now produce most of America’s ruling class too. They do not fight. They sneer at people who do. Nothing much wrong with WASP America. Especially the South.
John – “Written with the closed mindset of a bureaucrat par excellence. It isn’t the regiments that matter, it is military capability that matters.”
Actually no. The bureaucrats hate the Regiments because it makes their paperwork so hard. It was the bureaucrats that came up with the Repple Depple – so much easier to administer.
It is military capacity that matters. We agree. But that capacity depends on trust, cohesion, and regimental tribalism.
“It’s amazing that other armies manage to get by without it”
They don’t. The Soviets did not trust their own people and so they, like the French and the Americans, mixed their soldiers together in bureaucratically-convenient uniform units. The Germans kicked their butts. All of them actually. The Germans did not. They kept their historic Regiments. They made sure that people were loyal to their Regiments. They returned new officers and wounded soldiers to their regiments, come what may. And their Army was grossly more effective than anyone else’s.
So sure, if we want to lose a minimum of 2.5 soldiers for every German we kill, we can copy the Revolution model. Or we can stick with what works.
Fuck me,that escalated quickly.
… clinging doggedly to the argument that the tribal system promotes unrivalled espirits de corps.
It is military capacity that matters. We agree. But that capacity depends on trust, cohesion, and regimental tribalism.
No it doesn’t. Many effective armies use different systems to inculcate trust and cohesion. And the Germans of WW2 did not follow a regimental system like that of the British army, either then or today.
Logically your argument is self defeating, since the British regimental system of WW2 did not produce an army as effective as their German counterparts. So there must have been other factors to account for their per-capita combat effectiveness.
The question is not whether the Regimental System brings benefits in terms of unit cohesion: it does. The question is whether that benefit is worth the costs.
Here’s a thought. Even were it true that the British regimental system could deliver the combat effectiveness of the German system of WW2, would you want the generals that same system produced? The ones that lost two world wars, because the grand sum of their strategic thought was to be better at killing than the enemy?
Oh, wait …
John – “No it doesn’t. Many effective armies use different systems to inculcate trust and cohesion. And the Germans of WW2 did not follow a regimental system like that of the British army, either then or today.”
Not today perhaps. But then they did. A very similar system in fact. When they were forced to reduce their army after WW1, they kept all the traditional regiments, except that they downgraded them to companies. So a regiment would have companies that carried the name and the history of a former regiment, and when Hitler came to power, they rebuilt the regiment.
Sometimes they were very British. There are dozens of German accounts of people posted to former cavalry regiments where they felt snubbed because they did not have the requisite aristocratic breeding.
“Logically your argument is self defeating, since the British regimental system of WW2 did not produce an army as effective as their German counterparts. So there must have been other factors to account for their per-capita combat effectiveness.”
Well no it isn’t. That Britain, a liberal society, did not produce an Army as effective as the Germans is hardly surprising. What is surprising is that the British Army did not collapse like most Armies, nor did soldiers desert en masse, nor has the public ever opposed a war so violently that Britain had to give up. That in itself is unusual when you look at the rest of the world. Without the regiments we might have been as effective as the Americans. But without their artillery and air support.
“The question is not whether the Regimental System brings benefits in terms of unit cohesion: it does. The question is whether that benefit is worth the costs.”
The costs are minor administrative inconvenience. That is what paper pushers are for. We sacrifice what matters for what does not.
“Here’s a thought. Even were it true that the British regimental system could deliver the combat effectiveness of the German system of WW2, would you want the generals that same system produced?”
The regimental system was not responsible for the generals and so your obfuscation is irrelevant.
SMFS,
“The costs are minor administrative inconvenience.” – except you have to justify them to the taxpayers, who won’t be convinced that they should be losing their local A&E department to pay for cleaning the 13th Loamshires’ mess silver.
“The regimental system was not responsible for the generals and so your obfuscation is irrelevant.” – Unfortunately, the way to generalship is via the regimental system: if your face doesn’t fit you won’t rise to unit command and therefore will never go beyond.
I think you’re incorrect in many of your assumptions, based as they are on some romantic notion of a time that never was. The 1914 BEF were excellent (if short on numbers), but that came about as a result of some rough handling by the Zulus and the Boers, where professionalism was sadly lacking. Nice shiny buttons, though. By 1918 we were leading the world in mechanised, combined-arms warfare… all of which was thrown away postwar as senior officers retreated into their comfort zones.
By 1939 the BEF had come to epitomise the phrase “all the gear and no idea” as it had forgotten all it had learnt by 1918. Not that we learnt much then, as the early phases of the campaign in Normandy showed. By the end though we were getting it – just in time for all those changes to be abandoned as we returned to “proper soldiering”. It amazes me how many officers read Sydney Jary’s “18 Platoon” and overlook the bit at the end as he describes how an orbat designed in blood to fight in Europe… is abandoned during the preparation for future fighting in Europe.
For a current example, we’ve just had two mission failures in Iraq and Afghanistan: the response of the Army’s senior officers, products of the splendid regimental system all, is to issue diktats about the eating of sandwiches in the Mess and to engage in bitter internecine squabbling over whether the jacket of the Personal Clothing System should be worn “out and down” as designed, or whether ‘regimental pride’ demands that the sleeves be rolled up and the jacket tucked in.
Good to see they’ve got their priorities right, isn’t it?
The costs are minor administrative inconvenience. That is what paper pushers are for. We sacrifice what matters for what does not.
…
The regimental system was not responsible for the generals and so your obfuscation is irrelevant.
I was not referring to administrative costs. The regimental system results in a plethora of petty fiefdoms deeply resistant to meaningful change. The ridiculous brouhaha over the wearing of combat uniform that Jason mentions is symptomatic, but there are far greater costs.
Whilst general Cowan received an unmerited lambasting in the press for a tongue in cheek missive about sandwiches, that same public discourse fails utterly to hold the generals to account for their lack of strategic vision, blithely following the prevalent narrative that it was all the fault of the politicians. The generals are products of the regimental system, and the career management that is beholden to that system. A career management system that is, consequently, deeply flawed.
In the meantime the army fights intercenine battles over bits of tin (cap badges) without once considering the relative military worth of the units they represent. It’s true that you go to war with the army you have, rather than the one you would like, but the British army does very little in-between wars to assess what would make it better. Why the resistance to change? At least in part, the answer is the regimental system, and its deep culture of conservatism.
Neither you nor I know the value of the regimental system. No serious attempt has been made to assess both its costs and benefits. There is simply no good data to back up the assertion that the regimental system, on balance, increases military effectiveness.
Where is GlenDorran when I want him?
£3.99m is 33,3 times the £117, 107 pension that Richasrdfs might get. The FT says that the real return on index-linked gilts is -0.89% but that gets nowhere near to a pension of £117,107 pa being worth £3.99m/.
Are we supposed to think that Mr Richards has taken a longevity lichen?
The numbers look about right to me, for an RPI-linked pension.
‘It isn’t the regiments that matter, it is military capability that matters’.
This was more or less demonstrated back in 2012.
Two battalions that were fully-manned and up-to-strength (2 Royal Regt of Fusiliers and 2 Royal Welsh Regt) were disbanded. Two of the undermanned Scottish regts could have been canned instead, but oh no. Cameron and Hammond were afraid that this be turned into a political football by the SNP.
Notice the fact that saving the two Scottish cap-badges made fuck-all difference in the referendum.