What is the point of the ATC?

Adult Staff The Staff Mess
43

Being tied to the RAF has become a bit like being reliant on something that has passed its best.

There really needs to be a shake up in how we do things. How many squadrons get regular donations from local groups? How many squadrons get ‘sponsors’ for things? Why because they have to engage with the local community and the local community supports the youngsters. Why can’t this be extrapolated to a national level to maybe fund capital projects that the RAF/MOD seems unable / reluctant to? Would anyone care if say gliders or sqn HQs had sponsors logos splashed all over them? If I can think I can get a few quid out of someone to help pay for something, I will offer the cadets for assistance or photo shoot.

Does your squadron not get donations or apply for grants and other monies to pay for things or are you totally reliant on the balance of subscriptions to fund everything?

When you visit squadrons they have computers, projectors and printers, which are not cheap by anyone’s reckoning, Do they get these via the tooth fairy or santa or easter bunny, no it’s putting pen to paper applying for grants and as I say donations, as well as day to day fund-raising. One place returned their indented furniture after a local company did a refit and gave them tables, desks, chairs and cupboards. The only thing they still have on their inventory is fire extinguishers which they can’t get rid of.

I know without £1200 to £1800 pa from local groups we’d struggle. I’ve got a good relationship with the local Rotary and a couple of other community groups who give us regular donations. One of the things they don’t tell you on OSC is that as OC you have to schmooze local groups and as far as I’m aware it’s not in the TORs.

44

I would tend to agree, but I think that we should be looking at this in addition to the RAF angle. Both are still very relevant, and would be great to have exposure to both.

45

So, your uniform bill - who’s paying that in this new vision?
Your utilities bill
Your ground rent?
Your new building when the existing one falls over?
Your land purchase because your a private person trying to build?
Your accident insurance cover for a variety of activities with little “top cover” or governance?
Your staff expenses?
Your payment for training courses? (Shooting?)
Your vehicle leases when you need to go somewhere
Your coach hire?
Your subsidised meals when on a relevant activity?

All before you even stand on parade.

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46

Always problems, eh?

But what does your squadron do to fund itself?

We’ve even purchased uniform from surplus when the RAF has failed for one reason or another.

The model is there and maybe it’s something for the Air Cadet Council (ACC) to do afterall they are supposed to be the ‘senior’ Civ Comm?

Most people fund training courses and I would imagine a chat with a shooting club would get a course to meet the requirements to run a range. Do this privately and you’d get more shooting with far better coaches than we get in the ATC.

As far as I’m aware the GPF is used to pay the insurance. The rising cost of all risks now means squadrons have to purchase that. I wonder what it would cost to insure us for run of the mill activities as a sqn? It would be worth the cost if it meant I didn’t have to faff around with permissions to do everything.
As for top cover / governance do it locally or at Wing level, the control freak nature we seem to have descended into is more of a hindrance than advantage and more about keeping bums on seats than anything else. It’s worth remembering we didn’t get Wings on a formal basis until 1948 and IIRC a HQAC until the late 50s. so do we need HQAC?

Subsidised meals, give me strength. This only affects annual camp and every single parent says how cheap they are, so paying a bit more probably wouldn’t phase them. This extends to everything compared to schools and elsewhere, which parents (and I know because we did) paid,

Staff expenses, we are in a minority of youth groups in terms of giving ‘staff’ expenses. So if we lost it so what? From what I’ve seen in most groups petrol expenses are covered by a mutual agreement. When our kids did things parents shared travelling or contributed to the cost of coaches and so on.

When you look at subscriptions again parents have paid half of what we charge for a month for a weekly session of whatever their kids have been in and are astounded what we ‘charge’.

I’ve heard that all new builds are off the menu for the foreseeable future as some clown has directed the money to accommodation for gliding. So if your building is falling down around your ears, tough. I’ve asked about items flagged as urgent two years ago on a WI, and been told they won’t happen. But we can’t do it ourselves.

All of the things listed are why we need to loosen the reliance. It would only take a 5%-10% cut in money allocated to put some of those things in jeopardy. As said RFCA never have any money or so we are told. Mainly to poor financial management IMO but that’s another thing.

But as I said every single squadron has to finance itself, (except your sqn so it appears) go back to the original ADCC/ATC and you had to have £200(?) ‘in the bank’ before a sqn could form. This can be extrapolated and taken to a national level. I wouldn’t care if we looked like a F1 driver in terms of sponsorship badges if it means we can keep going and not get

The RCAC squadrons IIRC are all sponsored by a local branch of Legion, Rotary etc and have been for years and they still exist.

Overall the MAJOR issue and to my mind elephant in the room is that the ATC is now bigger than the RAF in terms of numbers and I’ve never seen how this has been addressed. The way this isn’t formally acknowledged, it’s like someone with a disease and not seeking medical help.

47

Just to join our local shooting club I see £150 per year per person and that’s before you have considered the cost of weapons and ammo, which I can tell you aren’t cheap. As a Wing we get L98 every 4 weeks and No8 as a Sector every fortnight, the cost of doing that in the civvy market are unimaginable, (and in the case of L98/L86 not even possible since they are Section 5 firearms).

Subsidised meals is a big deal and doesn’t just affect annual camp, pretty much everything I run as an OC with the exception of DofE we use DTE (around 12 times a year) and being able to feed the cadets at £1.92 a day massively brings the costs down. (Same goes for all Wing/Region residential courses for JNCO/SNCO and for Comms. Now you might be in some nice affluent area but when you run a Squadron in an economically deprived area that makes a huge difference. The majority of my cadets struggle to pay subs let alone pay for camps, if they were paying the going rate for food on camps/courses they wouldn’t be able to go.

Also you talk about Legions/Rotarys sponsoring units, in our borough both have gone bust as have RAFA so good luck getting sponsership on those fronts.

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48

It isn’t. We don’t have insurance, per se.

49

Maybe they used to provide the All Risks which was shuffled to CWC c10 years ago.

50

You must have to seek funding from elsewhere to fund cadets for things. Can you not see when well meaning amateurs like people on squadrons mansge to bring in funding, iof you’ve got people with a bit more clout could do this on a national level?
I’ve had an email from a councillor this morning saying that we could access funding via the education dept for cadets to get help with the costs of doing DofE. How as this come about? By talking to him at a Remembrance Parade. Similarly I’ve spoken to Rotary clubs, Lions and another one which is like the Rotary and got money out of them. You haven’t got to be best mates. As I said one of the unwritten jobs of a CO is schmoozing people.
I’m not in an affluent area, we get several asks for financial assistance, but with sufficient lead time for things parents seem able to afford them and where we do give money a number of parents pay back a proportion. I tend to over cook the costs of things and invariably cadets get a refund.

If we get another round of defence cuts, how long will it be before the bean counters look at the pot of money almost ring-fenced for cadet forces and ask stern questions, especially as there seems to be a financial prudence more akin to a banana republic than a publicly funded organisation at the top and as a result there is greater pressure applied to squadrons to pay more. Or maybe given the sort of financial prudence is SOP for the MoD they don’t notice.
As a squadron we already have running costs approaching £900pa which would be more if people didn’t pay for little things without seeking recompense.

We may enjoys subsidised meals and other things but that is one area that could easily disappear and being reliant on this sort of thing could sound the knell in the not too distant future.

51

£900 per year?

We probably pay that in minibus insurance…

52

But we haven’t got a minibus and won’t as it would mean 2 of us driving the poxy thing as no one else is old enough to have D1 by right and then D1 courses are rarer than hen’s teeth in rocking horse poo.

53

Off topic but why do you think D1 courses are rare? They run one a week, just apply!

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54

If you got a permit 19 and a 15 seater perhaps more staff can use it without the D1

55

Utter rubbish which shows you are talking out of something other than your mouth. D1 courses are constantly undersubscribed.

In fact you have totally missed the point. All that public money which pays for things which you seem to ignore in your response, would have to be obtained from other sources and since sqns struggle now in getting money over and above subs, where do you think it’s going to come from?

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56

We are like dole scroungers hanging around expecting the MoD to pay for us. We have become it is clear, so dependent for the military to supply and pay for everything, that any other model for funding is seen as won’t happen, can’t happen. How many local youth groups successfully provide progressive activities and interest but don’t have our fall back? What do they do for funding? As I have said we need to strengthen links with the civilian aviation industry in all its guises and if we were producing good level employees (like the ADCC/ATC did for the RAF in WW2) then there is the ‘in’ for sponsorship/funding. I imagine we could prove this has happened for decades, I would imagine that airlines and manufacturers have benefited from Air Cadets coming in with a degree of knowledge or interest that they have been able to tap into.

Maybe I watch different news and read different papers, but I don’t see one which says the MoD is awash with money and (although it does) able to waste money left, right and centre. The Navy doesn’t have enough ships, the RAF doesn’t really have enough aircraft and the Army won’t have enough kit. Yet there is a mindset that we are untouchable. They have been and are selling off sites that we have used for years for gliding and other things to save what is in effect peanuts and at some point we as an organisation along with the ACF will find ourselves in the frontline for reorganisation and reduction of funding.

With the right selling points the money would be there, not all from one ropey source like it is now. If a local fund raising manager can raise enough to keep a hospice running and grow why can’t a similar set up do the same for us nationally. These are not getting money from medical suppliers it’s all sorts. Although on reflection I can see your point, that we are not important enough for people outside the MoD to sponsor us.

I think the problem is lack imagination in the organisation more than anything else. Take our honorary Gp Capts at no point have I seen them extol their position. I’m sure turning Carol out for a glad hander in a flying suit or uniform could be used to our benefit. As it I don’t see the point of her or Chris Hoy previously if they aren’t going to be used. One of the funniest things was a news report on You Tube from the 75th bash at St Clements Dane, where a blonde female officer’s place was put into perspective in the presence of the Duchess of Cambridge and Carol.

57

Please name me some other than the ACO, ACF and SSC which provide activites on the same level that we do, on the scale we do, to the size of audience we do, to the age range we do.

Like i said before, if you don’t want to be part of the MOD, go join the Air Scouts, i’ sure they will appreciate your forward thinking and new visions on how to improve things with all that funding just waiting for you to go an ask for.

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58

sorry mate, but you’re thinking out of your hoop if you think non-MOD sponsored youth groups have it better than us - they don’t, they live a hand-to-mouth existance with every expence being a major, show-stopping, time consuming drama.

none of them get within a million miles of what we do, even with gliding and flying so compromised and shooting so difficult, and i promise you theres not one who would turn their nose up at the security that MOD funding means in terms of merely having somewhere to meet, even if the price was having to deal with our sub-optimal management structures and people.

if you want to know what they do for funding, the answer is ‘about 85% of their waking life’ - a bloke i know who helps at a community youth club in Shrewsbury (not the most deprived place in the world…) reckons that it would take them about 4 months to raise the money required to do a weekend for two minibuses full of kids at a campsite/village hall in the same county.

on this one, give your head a shake.

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59

Expect the response: “You just are tied to the apron strings of the MoD and we would be better off witthout them, and the money could come from aerospace… then another four paragraphs of tosh”

60

Haveing some link to aerospace and funding for youth activities, i can tell you that there is very little they are willing to spend on things without a direct link back to what they need, and when they do spend the money let me tell you, they OWN (yes big letters) the product they spend for. They are certainly not going to fork out for masses of kids to go on a jolly to the woods one weekend, nor pay for a load of flying at a local aerodrome. If anything what they do fork out for, outside of the usual STEM stuff, is basically small things which look good in the paper. They say communitiy improvement, it’s actally coroporate vision. Cheap and big impact items. If anything would happen in this vision of Teflon’s it would end up being more alligned to a couple of units as they manage to get their hooks into them, and you would see the mass closue of units nationally as they fell by the wayside. In fact i’ve spend more than enough time typing this response than the suggestion deserved. Utterly silly idea.

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61

If you buy a minibus lite and get a Permit 19 you can have a 17 seater on a car licence.

62

sorry mate, but you’re thinking out of your hoop if you think non-MOD sponsored youth groups have it better than us - they don’t, they live a hand-to-mouth existance with every expence being a major, show-stopping, time consuming drama.[/quote]
Our son played football and all were in an athletics club.
These relied and still do on parents doing a lot more than the average parent in the ATC, registration fees, subs, match fees, donations and sponsorship. It amused us that McDonalds of all people sponsored athletics, when the burger haters were in full flow, but they provided loads of kit.
I’ve run the line, time kept, measured, been a record keeper and the man with a sponge and bucket.
The athletics club had success and the kids had a bloody good time and the football team won competitions and several of the lads got onto the books of lower league teams.
Both were progressive as the klds grew and competed.
One of our nephews played cricket upto senior county level and he started doing Sunday mornings when he was 9 at a local side. One of our nieces did drama and dance and now does am dram with theatre group. They do it all and get little funding. My brother, sister in law and brother in law and sister in law, spent, like us, probably thousands over the year of involvement. Being in a soft, easy, cheap organisation like the ATC and seeing what others have to do, I fully appreciate the easy money we access. Public money has to be the least scrutinised money in the world, once it’s been doled out.
But for this reason and with public spending comes under closer scrutiny, I think that our senior people are far too complacent about money, just look at the £15000000 seemingly frittered away by OC 2FTS and time it has taken to get gliders operational, anywhere outside the public sector and he’d have been long gone. When he does go he’ll get a knighthood as a reward for doing little, like seems to happen in the armed forces. Complacency and incompetence has no place in any sphere, but does seem rife in the places where public money is spent. The reason we got into the financial mess we did 8/9 years ago and companies went to the wall was due to complacency.

All I’ve said is we need to get other funding streams if we want to see our cushy existence continue and being what was once the premier youth organisation, we have a product that should be easy to sell. We all sell it locally to our advantage. We may need to retain the RAF / military link for access and some funding, but not for management. It’s easy to sit there and say it’s a stupid idea and without the easy money we won’t be able to do / have x/y/z, but if it comes to not having the easy money due to cuts and some sort of contingency is in place, what then? We all know how HQAC work they’d tell us 6 months later that there are problems.

As you can see I am more than aware of the problems faced by other groups, due to being involved in them via our kids. Plus I’m involved with local groups where the only way to get money is the really hard way.
LA rates and hiring fees for pitches and the athletics stadium were a major headache as was the LA ditching parks where football pitches are. One of my mates is a ref and coach at a local rugby club and he regales me with their financial problems and that their ground is on parkland and under constant threat. Where our hut is could easily become a block of flats or executive The athletics club invites local businesses to their annual awards evening and invited a ‘star’ (which was a cost) but this was offset by the donations and sponsorship. Where is our celebrity Gp Capt (apart from a wood at the moment)? I can’t see execs not wanting the potential of photo with Carol Voorderman for the company website, personal social media etc. These ladies and gents could then be touched up for a few quid. I invite local organisations to our annual awards night, which realises a few quid. I don’t have anyone with quite the appeal or glamour of Carol locally.

Personally why should we be worried if as I say we look like an F1 driver?