A friend showed me a slide on ISTAR force recently and every aircraft on it was out of service.
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With delay of the publication of the DIP until March 2026, should have been autumn 2025, and an already mentioned black hole of £28B in military spending, what hope is there for the £70M towards the Cadet Expansion?
A quick and easy slice from the budget 
So in St John we always have 1:X + 1 - so for any activity you need a minimum of 2 staff, but then your activity ratio kicks in. So take a 1:10 activity, for 10 cadets you need 2 volunteers (1 + 1). For 20 cadets, you need 2 volunteers, for 30 cadets, 3 volunteers etc. It’s a fairly easy system to work out.
This has been my interpretation with ACF/CCF(A) and one that I follow for my activities.
I wouldn’t want to be the only CFAV with 10 cadets, not only from a safeguarding perspective, but also from the view that even with 10 cadets, there are elements of lone working that one needs to consider.
JSP 814 does something similar by saying “with a minimum of two present” after the ratios.
I can say that there are 3 squadrons technically in the Blackpool LAD, Burnley, Blackburn and their satallites are not to badly represented either, Another win for the North-West, Just ignore Blackpool being Blackpool on that list
The thing with staff:cadet ratios is to assume worst case scenario and see what happens. i got caught out on summer camp - orienteering 30 minutes from base, 30 minutes the other way to A&E, cadet falls and breaks both wrists… not enough staff for 2 to go to A&E (for safeguarding) and still drive remaining cadets back to base in the vehicles. Saved by FMT600, in fact - the TEST SNCO drove his service car to the orienteering place, then gave me the keys and drove a service minibus back to base. But I learned from that!
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Report from BFBS on the situation at Crowborough (though it is mostly focused on the resident detachments, not on the loss of weekend/holiday training capacity)
Army cadets impacted by housing of asylum seekers at military training camps ?
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Speaking as a local…
It’s just riled up all the local racists and flag shaggers to breaking point. The amount of misinformation on the various local Facebook groups is staggering. You literally have people camped out in vans waiting outside the site to cause drama.
It’s crap for the ATC and ACF who can’t parade currently, even though their buildings are outside the wire. It’s been stated for safeguarding reasons, but honestly the biggest threat I see there currently are the protesters attacking any vehicle going in or out the site.
There’s already been photos kicking round local Facebook groups of a couple of black people standing or walking about locally with the caption effectively ”See they’re allowed out. It’s not safe to go outside. They’re running away” blah blah. Out right racism. Now any non white person seems to become a target. Asylum seeker or otherwise.
They’ve been doing a weekly protest walk on Sundays which they all say prove the whole town is against this. And yet the numbers in the protest only represent a small percentage of the total population of the town, even with people coming from far and wide to join in. Including lots of social media folk from London/up north. I honestly think there’s a loud minority here, with a quite majority.
The local MP, who used to be my local MP, and was always useless, has spent a considerable amount of time just attacking the local district council ‘for not standing up for local people’, even though their hands are pretty much tied on what can be done. Every post making sure to make party political digs rather than solutions.
When this all kicked off in September, the cadets losing out angle was completely overlooked by everyone. The only arguments against this site were how dangerous the people are and women won’t be able to go outside at night etc. The cynic in me would suggest the only reason people care about the cadets suddenly is because they realised just being racist isn’t a good argument against the site.
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We saw the same issues at Scampton, when that was being eyed up by the Tories. There were rival flag-fornicating groups who were even squaring off against one-another, whilst openly wishing the asylum seekers who would have been housed there would just finish one-another off instead.
The “protestors” are an absolute vile bunch of scum wrongfully being portrayed as victims, and I have no time for them. Hell, one of their biggest arguments against not using Scampton was for the sake of Guy Gibson’s dog’s grave…
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It’s a shame we can’t even say the name of the dog
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lols and letters
On BFBS
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To drill down a bit into this, it’s not just the number of volunteers but the time they are able or willing to commit.
Of the volunteers who have joined my unit post Covid none can do 2 nights a week. Some are part time but regular, but others average out 2 or 3 nights a month.
This is not to downplay the value of their contribution, but we are just not really geared up for micro volunteering. This has a knock on effect on recruitment and retention.
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Agreed with this, I mentioned it as a conversation starter previously but the more I start to think about the solution, if we are looking at a large expansion we could easily be looking at other RFCA colleagues, to see how they can assist. For some reason there is a massive rivalry between RAFAC and the ACF however when you break it down, apart from flying (where time is limited) both organisations “hobbies” are closely aligned. It might not work for all areas however you could end up merging RAFAC Sqns and ACF Detachments and adding in a 3rd parade night. For example Tues, Thurs, Fri as your weekly parade nights. However you could then be recruiting an additional 4-5 staff and 20 cadets. It’s amazing how many small towns are supporting both RAFAC and ACF within the same building on different nights but don’t speak with each other unless RFCA get involved because of a building problem. One of those nights could be a shooting night, or a shooting night every other week. Having a similar structure in both organisations we should be able to tap into resources, as sustainability wise we could have around 90,000 combined cadets (not CCF) and 18,000 CFAV
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So it seems that the government is counting University schemes as cadets now! That’s one sneaky way to boost 30 by 30 numbers!
To be fair to the politicians it’s a good political pivot
Minister - “How’s the cadet 30 by 30 expansion going”
Civil servant - “Sir, we’ve closed a bunch of units due to contractor paperwork”
Minister -
“ 
okay what is expanding”
CS - “the university schemes”
Minister - “right let push them then”
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Calling URNUs “air cadets” aswell
good god BBC, get a grip of yourselves
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Yeah I know, I winced reading the whole article with the amount of inaccuracies and general shoddy reporting
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