Mutiny On the Bounty? Thoughts on news that the Bounty may be scrapped.

The Armed Forces Pay Review Body (AFPRB) has issued its annual report, recommending an across the board pay rise of 2% for the armed forces, both regular and reserve, as well as a rise in a range of allowances.

These reports are always well worth a read, not just for the headline numbers, but also for wider details that provide insight into the state of the modern armed forces. For example that the MOD has some 25,000 service personnel (some 19% of the regular force) held at 5 days notice to move on tasks.

Also of interest was the discovery that of the senior officer cadre (1* and above), just 4.5% of the workforce are female. This is a particularly concerning statistic as women make up some 10% of headcount overall, suggesting there remains a significant shortfall of female representation at the very highest levels of the service.

Image by Ministry of Defence; © Crown copyright

One area that was particularly interesting though was the comments by the AFPRB on the concept of the ‘Bounty’ which is paid annually to volunteer reservists, along with discussions about the relationship between regular and reserve forces.

The Bounty payment is awarded annually to reservists who meet all mandated training tasks of them (usually but not always linked to providing somewhere between 20-30 days per year in a variety of ways, from annual training to attending drill nights). The payment is tax free, and paid in an annual lump sum that increases over 5 years, and is currently worth almost £1900 at maximum level.

Traditionally the Bounty was seen as an inducement to encourage reservists to take part in training, and provide assurance to their units that they possessed sufficient headcount at a trained level as and when required. It was a valuable way both of ensuring attendance and in trying to monitor overall readiness and training levels.

Interestingly the report notes that in the last year only 65% of reservists qualified for a bounty payment – or roughly 21,000 of the 32,000 in the reserves. This means that only two thirds of the UK reserve forces met the minimum required level of training required to qualify for payment in the last year.

There are a multitude of reasons why a reservist cannot always meet their full commitment – a busy work life, the arrival of a new child, real world family pressures and so on. Trying to balance off these complex drivers of work, family and the reserves isn’t always easy and can at times see the reserves firmly parked as the lowest part of the trinity.

Also people deployed on FTRS and operations may not necessarily qualify (although the rules are complex and ever changing) and there are ways when people are active for the regular military, but do not necessarily get their payment.

This is recognised and there are a variety of ways that waivers can be offered, and means to get people worth retaining the payment if they are worth it without abusing the system. But, it is still mildly concerning that the reserves can only count on two thirds of their headcount as being of the minimum trained standard to support the regular forces.

The AFPRB go on to note that there will be a review due in 2021 of the reservist Bounty, and also wider remuneration for the reserves – It contains the potentially mildly concerning phrase “When looked at from a fresh perspective, the TB (Bounty) could be seen as an unusual way to reward and incentivise voluntary service”…

This indicates that there may be thinking afoot to look again at whether the Reserves will continue to accrue this allowance, or if their pay package will be amended to cover other allowances instead.

From a top level perspective, the potential savings of scrapping the Bounty and moving to allowances or other payments may allow considerable savings – in very broad handfuls the payments last year would have cost some £40m to the 65% who did qualify, so hardly small change.

There is also a long standing concern in some quarters of the reserves, recognised in the report itself about the disparity in pay. Reservists do not get paid X Factor (the allowance to reflect disturbances to regular service life), despite many reservists being available, often at very short notice to support work at home and on operations short of mobilisation.

This can be a sore point, particularly when coupled with the fact that reservists do not qualify for the same extensive range of allowances and payments open to the regular forces. There is at times perhaps a perception in some quarters that the reserves are seen as voluntary labour, and do not qualify for the same reward or recognition as regulars.

While this may be overly harsh, there is perhaps a case that Reservists do feel that there is a special set of asks placed on them – namely to be able to support work, military and home commitments and balance off all three in different ways, and at different times. Being a reservist means accepting that the military can, and does, intrude on your real life and expect you to deploy at short notice, putting real life on hold.

It is frustrating to hear the view ‘well that’s what the regulars get’ when the regulars do get an entirely different package of pay and allowances – surely if you want equal treatment, you should pay your people in the same way?

But similarly does the Bounty drive negative behaviours of itself? There is plenty of support for the view that the payment rewards those who turn up to the right events, not necessarily the right training, and that if a face fits and is seen as a ‘good egg’ then it may get the payment, even if not necessarily worthy or operationally capable.

By driving the behaviour that requires people to chalk up X days, people can, and do, look for any opportunity to get time in – the traditional Jan-Mar dash for days, as people seek to get any training in, no matter how tenuous, to get over the Bounty line is arguably not the best use of public funds – surely training should be relevant, not done purely to get Bounty.

There is also a wider challenge of people needing to promote and finding that career courses are not running, so that they are unable to attend the right training event, or cannot get the time to do it if rescheduled at the last minute (as often happens) and find themselves with a deficit of days – at times like this, the sense of not getting Bounty qualified may be enough to drive otherwise motivated people away.

The challenge is to find a way to assure overall levels of readiness and be able to generate a core cadre of people able to take on short notice challenges if required – for example the COVID mobilisation this year, or standing to in order to support operational tasking.

This probably does require a deeper look at how you not only compensate people, but also how you pay them a rate which ensures that the military get their time and attention. If you are in a busy job, particularly if you are a higher rate tax payer, then the reserves is not only not particularly lucrative, but it also may be lower down your priorities to be available for at short notice. How do you pay, or reward, people to make them want to be available when needed?

This isn’t as simple as saying ‘give Reservists X Factor’ but it does require some thinking around how you can essentially manage a force of 30,000 people, the readiness state you want to hold them at, and how badly you need their services – for example, the need for medics may be much higher than the need for some other trades.

Bounty may not be the right answer, but if it is taken away it is likely to cause many people to reach the conclusion that it is not worth staying. For people on the average UK salary (approximately £29,000), Bounty payments make up a very significant additional part of their annual income.

For some families, Bounty is the difference between going on holiday or staying at home. For others its about the ability to pay car insurance or other big costs. It is seen to many as a way of putting money by to pay families back for their support – being used to pay for nice things to say thank you to a family that puts up with regular weekend absences and time away from home.

Lose this tangible factor and suddenly people may decide that it isn’t worth it in the same way. The loss of Bounty would potentially cause many people who have stayed in, in part because the money makes a difference, to walk away.

Whatever solution replaces it has to make financial sense too – for higher rate taxpayers, replacing Bounty is essentially going to mean they need much higher daily rates of pay to compensate to ensure they are not out of pocket after tax, or payment of additional allowances – this could cause real friction between those on lower tax bands who perceive others as earning more than them.

Given all of this, Bounty does work as a unifier for the force as it represent a single equitable payment that can be seen as both reward for time offered, and compensation in lieu of the various deeply complex allowance packages that exist for regulars. While it may seem old fashioned, it perhaps causes less admin and hassle than trying to work out the vast range of disparate allowances a unit of reservists may qualify for in its place – and far less divisive too.

Perhaps the bigger question comes back to one of what is it that the Armed Forces want their reserves to deliver? In a world where the volunteer reserve makes up some 20% of overall strength, they will be an increasingly important source of bodies to support military operations.

But is the model of volunteer reservists credible in an age of complex operations, lengthy pre-deployment training and where even the most junior soldiers require a lot of professional skills and experience that can quickly fade away?

Perhaps the future of the reserve is a combination of one that offers opportunities for high readiness, highly trained professionals like doctors or engineers, coupled with opportunities for former regulars able to do their old jobs. It can then offer a bulk pool of people able to mobilise at longer notice for ‘stuff’ but recognising you bring them in for the body, not for their skills necessarily, and then use them as a contingent reserve for UK operations and military in the public eye duties.

The biggest problem of all may be that modern military operations are so complex, that the roles are so time demanding and the capabilities and skills required so challenging, that the ability to be a spare time serviceperson and be credible just is no longer there. Is it time to ask whether someone can be a credible soldier in their spare time in the modern operating environment?

Whatever model you settle on though requires a means of ensuring that reservists are properly compensated for the time they offer. Failure to do so may mean that there could very well be a munity on the Bounty…