Introduction

Chapter 2 is divided into six main sections:

• Personnel summary (Tables 2.1 to 2.6) - overall statistics relating to both civilians and Armed Forces personnel, including numbers overseas.
  
  
• UK Armed Forces (Tables 2.7 to 2.28) - summaries of the main trends in strengths, intakes and outflows of personnel in the UK Armed Forces. A table setting out the equivalent ranks between the Services and civilians is included as Table 2.28.
  
  
• Civilian personnel (Tables 2.29 to 2.38) - summaries of the main trends in strengths, intakes and outflows of civilian personnel.
  
  
• War Pensions (Table 2.39) - statistics on the numbers receiving various types of war pension.
  
  
• Compensation claims made against the MOD (Tables 2.40 and 2.41) - statistics on the numbers of new and settled claims made against the MOD.
  
  
• International (Table 2.42) - manpower holdings and ceilings by member countries of the Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (CFE) Treaty.

Key trends and summaries precede the UK Armed Forces and Civilian Personnel sections.

New Tables

UKDS Chapter 2 includes three tables presented for the first time: Table 2.14 (Strength of UK Regular Forces by Service and ethnic origin at 1 April each year); Table 2.15 (Strength of UK Regular Forces by Service and religion at 1 April each year); and Table 2.16 (Strength of the Trained UK Regular Forces by nationality and Service at 1 April each year). The deaths in the armed forces (formerly Tables 2.24 and 2.25 in previous editions of UKDS) and civilian sickness absence tables (formerly Table 2.36) are no longer featured in this Chapter - due to the inclusion of the new Health Chapter, these tables have now moved to Chapter 3. Tables 2.14 to 2.36 as presented in UKDS 2007 have been renumbered to allow for the inclusion of new tables and the transfer of health related tables to Chapter 3.

Data sources

The principal sources of data for personnel information presented in UKDS Chapter 2 are the civilian and Armed Forces administrative databases.

Armed Forces statistics to 2005 are compiled from pay records (Naval Service) or personnel records (Army and RAF) held by the Service Personnel and Veterans Agency (SPVA, formerly the Armed Forces Personnel Administration Agency). In March 2006 the transfer of all Service personnel records to the Joint Personnel Administration (JPA) system began. Statistics are compiled from JPA in the RAF from April 2006, in the Naval Service from November 2006 and in the Army from April 2007. All statistics before these points are derived from single Service legacy systems.

Civilian statistics are compiled from several sources. Data for MOD staff are taken from personnel systems; CIPMIS prior to April 2003, HRMS from April 2004 onwards and a combination of the two in the year in between.

The MOD has four Trading Funds1 that provide DASA with monthly extracts from their personnel systems. The Royal Fleet Auxiliary (RFA) data are taken from the MOD pay system and locally engaged civilians (LEC) data are derived from quarterly head counts provided to DASA by administrators in each Top Level Budget (TLB).

Data Quality

Armed Forces data on JPA are a combination of mandatory and non-mandatory fields populated by unit administrators and voluntary fields such as ethnic origin that Armed Forces personnel can choose to complete based on their self-perceptions. In 2002 the ethnicity categories were aligned with the new classifications in the 2001 Census of Population. Analysis conducted by DASA indicates that the percentage of ethnic minority Service personnel in the unknown or undeclared population is higher than in the declared population. If the percentage of personnel with unknown or undeclared ethnicity exceeds 40% DASA consider the risk of misrepresenting ethnicity percentages is too high to publish.

Due to ongoing validation of data from JPA some data are provisional. This is indicated by a superscript p next to the figure and means that the data are sufficiently accurate to be published but that further validation may lead to small revisions that should not materially affect the information presented.

Civilian data on HRMS are a combination of fields mandated by the People Pay and Pensions Agency (PPPA) such as grade with voluntary fields such as disability status. Civilian personnel complete these fields based on their self perceptions. If personnel that consider they have a disability are more or less likely to record their status than those who consider they are not disabled, the percentages of disabled persons presented will be too high or too low depending on the direction of the bias. It is not possible for DASA to measure this bias without surveying a random sample of the unknown or undeclared group.

Most tables presented in Chapter 2 meet the high standards of quality and integrity demanded by the National Statistics code of practice. The following tables require further validation of data and methods before they attain National Statistics status: Table 2.40, Table 2.41 and Table 2.42.

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1.   Defence Support Group (formerly Army Base Repair Organisation and the Defence Aviation and Repair Agency)
      Defence Science and Technology Laboratory
      Hydrographic Office
      Meteorological Office