Yes, there was loads of good information. Absolutely tonnes. But my understanding of what a townhall should be is much more of a discussion. Lots of Q and A and idea spitballing etc.
What last night was, was a briefing. This is good too I guess, but not a townhall.
I joined shortly before TK started reading off his script about over 18 changes. There was so much information being said that I couldn’t process it, let alone try and formulate questions about it.
There were some great members of the media team answering as much as they could in the chat mind, so compliments to them for that.
I’m my view, the best way to do these sort of things would be the following; A couple of days before the actual Teams meeting, publish all the ‘information’ that is currently being passed over via the meeting. Maybe as part of the weekly brief. Then allow people to pose questions in writing based on that. Then the meeting itself can be all about discussing the questions and issues people have come up with. It would hopefully also leave some time for more of an AOB as part of the meeting. Let people raise questions and problems directly.
If these townhalls are just going to be another way of getting information from the top to the bottom, then we may have ended up going backwards rather than forwards. Especially if there is a lot of stuff said in the townhall that is not published elsewhere.
It probably wasn’t said like this on the call, but I have been told informally (some time last year) that it’s because the big wigs view it as elitest and only supporting a very small amount of cadets for the expenditure it needs to run.
Also, it is lunchtime in the UK, right? Why the hell was the briefing held during most people’s working day?
This doesn’t cover all the travel, multiple travel warrants / 1771 from all over the 3 nations or ammunition, etc - JL use more ammunition than the rest of the RAFAC combined. Our RC said it was the cost of JL was in excess of £350k per course and that was a few years ago.
I believe that because this was using the CACE system, that 76k should include most of that. Note that VA is £37523 and food is £10120, that’s only circa £47k for VA and food. The other £29k is all the incidentals like 1771 and travel warrants etc AFAIK.
I do agree that the ammunition costs are likely not included in there, but are for the most part significantly less important as we don’t see the cost directly, and the MOD produces a metric ass load of 5.56 and pyro.
I understand that we do see the cost of ammunition now and £29k for travel for 105 people over 7+ weekends plus clarity / MT requirements for the same, doesn’t seem right somehow. Anyway thread drift, sorry!
I see transport costs are not included in that total either for staff or cadets. Cadets would have rail warrants and when a cadet from my old unit attended under the old one weekend a month it cost the corps something in the region of £1,300.
It did feel in the past few years that it was diminishing returns & it had had its day.
The cancellation of JL isn’t a big surprise though.
What I base this one is the fact that of the national causes paused, QAIC have been regularly posting on Facebook about how they are developing & reviewing the course, meetings to look at new areas etc.
JL hasn’t had a single post. Now this may mean that their social media bod is a bit behind the times & they have been having the meetings but to all intents & purposes it looks like when the pause to JL was announced those on the team exec took it as it wasn’t coming back & quietly melted away rather than come up with options……
If they’re replacing it with a better course that’s more cost-effective then it’s a good decision. I suppose we’ll have to wait and see if the new course will include the ‘field-based’ elements that was JL’s USP, but maybe that can be picked up by the new fieldcraft syllabus.
