Introduction

Chapter 2 is divided into six main sections:

• Personnel summary (Tables 2.1 to 2.4) - overall statistics relating to both civilians and Armed Forces personnel, including numbers by location.
  
  
• UK Armed Forces (Tables 2.5 to 2.25) - summaries of the main trends in strengths, intakes and outflows of personnel in the UK Armed Forces. A chart setting out the equivalent ranks in the Services and with civilians is included as Table 2.25;
  
  
• Civilian personnel (Tables 2.26 to 2.37) - summaries of the main trends in strengths, intakes and outflows of civilian personnel;
  
  
• Compensation claims made against the MOD (Tables 2.38 and 2.39) - statistics on the numbers of new and settled claims made against the MOD;
  
  
• International (Table 2.40) - 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.

Changes to Tables 2009

Due to ongoing validation of data from the Joint Personnel Administration System analyses of outflow by exit reason are not available for financial years 2006/07, 2007/08 and 2008/09. As a result the following table that appeared in UKDS 2008 has been removed: Table 2.25 - Outflow from trained UK Regular Forces by sex and reason for leaving.

Table 2.39 - Number of War Pensions in payment by type of pension, at 31 March each year has been moved to Chapter 3, to present it with the Armed Forces Compensation Scheme tables.

The following tables that appeared in UKDS 2008 have been moved to the Civilian personnel section of UKDS 2009: Table 2.2 - Civilian personnel by budgetary area and 2.6 - Civilian personnel in UK Defence Agencies and MOD-owned Trading Funds.

As a result Table 2.2 onwards as presented in UKDS 2008 have now been renumbered.

Table 2.12 - Strength of UK Regular Forces by Service and ethnic origin at 1 April each year has been moved to present it immediately after Table 2.9 - Strength of UK Regular Forces by ethnic origin and rank. As a result Tables 2.10 to 2.12 have now been renumbered.

Table 2.2 - Location of Service and civilian personnel in the United Kingdom has been changed from presenting figures at 1 July to showing figures at 1 April, consistent with other location tables. In addition, the regional breakdown now exclude all personnel stationed outside the UK.

Table 2.14 - Strength of the Trained UK Regular Forces by Service and nationality has been reformatted since UKDS 2008 to focus on the following three groups:

• Irish and Commonwealth personnel, for whom an upper limit of 15% of the total trained UK Regular Forces is in place for three of the Armed Corps of the Army under arrangements made under Section 41(2)(d) of the Race Relations Act 1976.
• Nepalese citizens, who have been able to transfer to the UK Regular Armed Forces from the Brigade of Gurkhas since 2008.
• Other Foreigners, who have not recorded their primary nationality as UK, Irish, Commonwealth or Nepalese.

Table 2.33 - Intake and Outflow of civilian personnel has changed from showing FTE numbers to showing headcount numbers, due to the unavailability of FTE data for a group of civilian staff.

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 prior to 2006 were 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 were 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 civilian 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

Most tables presented in Chapter 2 meet the high standards of quality and integrity as set out in the UK Statistics Authority’s Code of Practice for Official Statistics. However, all tables are subject to assessment by the UK Statistics Authority before National Statistics status can be confirmed. The following tables require further validation of data and methods before they attain National Statistics status:

• Table 2.38 - New claims and settled claims by broad category in each year
• Table 2.39 - New claims and settled claims by broad cause in each year

• Table 2.40 - Manpower holdings and ceilings by member country within the scope of the Conventional Armed Forces in Europe Treaty.

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. When ethnicity percentage figures for a Service are suppressed the figures for All Services are also suppressed to prevent bias.

Due to ongoing validation of data from the Joint Personnel Administration System the following statistics are provisional and may be revised: all Naval Service flow statistics from 2006/07 onwards, and Naval Service strength statistics from 1 April 2008; all Army flow statistics from 2006/07 onwards and strengths statistics from 1 April 2007; and all Royal Air Force flow statistics from 2007/08 onwards and strength statistics from 1 April 2008. DASA have initiated a major review of all provisional JPA data and aim to revise where required during the course of 2010. Revisions to strength figures are likely to be less than 0.5% of the provisional figure. Revisions of provisional flows could be as high as 50% because some of the individual flow figures can be much smaller.

Civilian data on HRMS are a combination of fields mandated by the People Pay and Pensions Agency (PPPA), such as grade, and voluntary fields such as disability status. Civilian personnel complete these fields based on their self perception. 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 \ undeclared group.

A review of unknown grade has been undertaken since UKDS 2008, and the number of Civilian Personnel listed against unknown grade for UKDS 2009 has reduced.

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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