Question to the Ministry of Defence:

To ask the Secretary of State for Defence, what recent assessment he has made of the condition of Royal Air Force (a) single living accommodation, (b) mess accommodation and (c) service families accommodation; and if he will make a statement.

There has been no recent assessment of the totality of single living accommodation, which includes mess accommodation, provided by the Royal Air Force (RAF), but data collected between 2005 and 2020 does provide an overview of their condition. All single living accommodation the RAF provides to its personnel is required to be of a suitable standard and the Ministry of Defence (MOD) is currently working to define a Defence Minimum Standard (DMS) against which all single living accommodation will be assessed.

The MOD’s Defence Infrastructure Organisation manages, on a Tri-Service basis, around 50,000 properties in the UK including targeted improvement programmes and planning future requirements. Therefore, it is not possible to separately identify RAF Service Families Accommodation (SFA). However, as at 1 September 2021, of the 99% of SFA that were assessed, 87.8% of the properties were above the Government’s Decent Homes Standard and 8.9% were at the standard. The remaining 2.3% were considered below the standard and not allocated to Service Families.