The new Second Sea Lord has assumed control of the Navy’s complex personnel machinery – but the self-styled ‘ultimate Divisional Officer’ recognises the importance of looking beyond the statistics to the individuals who make the whole thing tick.

Indeed, as the Royal Navy continues to market itself under the slogan ‘The Team Works’, Vice Admiral James Burnell-Nugent is at pains to point out that a team works most effectively when each member is valued and encouraged.

“The Second Sea Lord is the ultimate Divisional Officer in the Royal Navy and Royal Marines, and that is a hugely important responsibility that I take very seriously,” said Admiral Burnell-Nugent, who has over 30 years personal experience of looking after the welfare of seamen as a Divisional Officer and a Commanding Officer.

The Second Sea Lord and Commander-in-Chief Naval Home Command (2SL/CNH, to give him his full title) is responsible for ensuring that the right number of high-calibre people, trained to the appropriate standards, are available for deployment with the Royal Navy in peace, crisis or war.

2SL is therefore responsibility for recruitment and training, as well as pay, conditions and welfare support, which affects both serving personnel and their families

The Admiral, who took over from Vice Admiral Sir Peter Spencer on January 28 in a ceremony on board the Second Sea Lord’s flagship, HMS Victory, has identified his three main priorities as:

• Treating people as individuals

• Making sure those in positions of responsibility concentrate on problem areas

• The continued roll-out of the Topmast manning programme

and in his view, many problems in the Navy need to be addressed at grass roots level.

“The first area where I want to have a major influence is in the dialogue between ratings and officers with the various personnel authorities, to make sure that we here in Victory Building and other parts of the personnel world treat ratings and officers as individuals, rather than as a collection of statistics or categories,” he said.

“This is an area where a lot of progress has been made, particularly with the formation of the Waterfront Manning Offices and the RDCAs, the Regional Drafting Career Advisory centres, where a rating can go and get personal advice about his career and drafting opportunities.

“So we are moving in the right direction, but I am convinced there is a lot more we can do in the dialogue between the personnel machine and individuals.

“In policy terms, to some extent you have to think about people as categories – you’ve got to start by doing some arithmetic of the categories that different people would fall into and the structures that are needed – but when it comes to an individual’s issues that are important to him or her, and their family and friends, and aspirations, then we must all try harder to treat them as individuals.

“I’ll lay down a challenge here. If anybody – officer or rating or Marine – feels they are not being given the due consideration appropriate to an individual, on personnel matters, they should see their Divisional Officer, and ask their Commanding Officer to write to me and I’ll follow it up, because this is a really important issue.”

By getting this right, the Admiral believes that there may be a significant effect on the Navy’s “number one challenge” – retention. Encouragement at the right time could be enough to retain someone for one more draft, and collectively that might just tip the numbers in the Navy’s favour.

The retention issue is confused by current operational needs, as the Admiral is all too aware.

“I think the situation we are finding ourselves in now is going to be a real challenge for retention, because what’s happening is a number of different communities or groups of individuals are emerging.

“There are those who are deployed with a prospect of operations in the Gulf, which is about 10,000 people; there are those who are firefighting – about 3,500 – who have been doing so for some months now; there is another group of people who are left behind – the non-firefighters, who are left looking after their ship, unit or establishment, who have got seriously shortened watchbills as a result of the number of people who are away; and then there are other people who may actually be in the DLO or other parts of the Service who have been called forward as augmentees or reservists, and so their lives are being affected – and so are the people who are being left behind in those areas, because maybe they had a deputy or an assistant and that person has now gone.

“All corners of the Navy and Corps are being affected by current operations, and it is difficult to predict what effect this is going to have.

“Some people will be hugely enthused by the prospect of operations, and it will encourage them to stay on; others might find they have had enough of the separation that goes with it.

“That is why I place such importance on treating people as individuals, because this is what we are going to have to do this year in particular – everybody will have a slightly different story, slightly different effect on their personal life, slightly different effect on their career aspirations, and we have got to really look after people and give them all the consideration they deserve.”

The Admiral’s second priority is to make sure senior staff are focusing on the problem areas.
Blunt overall statistics tend to conceal the fact that there are some “serious shortages” of categories, such as submariners and LOMs; planners need to continue coming up with the answers.

“We haven’t got time to wait until the next generation of sailors joins – these are here-and-now issues, particularly for people in the shortage categories, and we’ve got to find solutions,” said the Admiral.

“My third priority is Topmast – the system that has been introduced for ABs is part of Topmast, but isn’t by any means the full story,” he said.

“Topmast is a project that will be with us from now on, designing and implementing manning arrangements for the Navy and the Royal Marines to put us in the right configuration for Type 45 destroyers, the future carriers and beyond.”

Admiral Burnell-Nugent said the scheme had been given renewed impetus by the ordering of these ships, and that the “good work” that has been done with ABs should benefit all ranks and rates in the seagoing part of the Navy.

Topmast is intended to have a beneficial effect on the work-life balance both now and for future recruits, and the next issue will be adapting the mechanism for senior rates and officers.

Two more areas of interest are diversity and communications.

Admiral Burnell-Nugent said diversity is an old tradition in the Navy: “I’m sure if you asked the Commanding Officer of HMS Victory he would have told you about the diversity of the people on board a ship like his 200 years ago.

“Diversity is a hugely important area,” he said, noting that the Navy continues to “move forward on a broad front, doing our level best to recruit people from as many and diverse as backgrounds as we possibly can.”

The Admiral remembers all too clearly returning from long Cold War submarine patrols, and having to queue on a rainswept jetty to use a phone – memories which have made the Admiral a keen campaigner on the issue of keeping in touch.

“The whole business of communicating with families from sea has been a hobby horse of mine for a number of years, and we had fallen quite a long way behind people’s expectation,” he said.

“We have made a lot of progress through the NavyStar and Navy-Link system, but it is still patchy.

“The issue is that aspirations move ahead all the time. We will probably not be able to keep up with the very latest technological wizardry, but we do need to keep moving on this topic, and make communications with families in particular, with friends and families as easy as it possibly can be.”

On morale, the Admiral reiterated that there are a number of different groups, who are being pulled in different directions.

“Any generalisation about morale is extremely dangerous in those circumstances, and again it goes back to my point about treating people as an individual,” he said.

“Each individual’s morale may or may not need addressing depending on how they feel about it, so I wouldn’t presume to make any generalised comment about morale, because I think that is just sweeping any morale issue under the carpet. Morale has to be tackled at the individual level, and by looking at each individual’s circumstances.”

Admiral Burnell-Nugent said his predecessor, Admiral Sir Peter Spencer, had travelled extensively as part of the job, and he would try to follow suit, while his Personnel Liaison Team will, as usual, visit some 7,000 people annually and cover every unit on an 18-month rolling programme.

Admiral James Burnell-Nugent joined the Royal Navy in 1971 after reading Mathematics at Cambridge.

He has commanded in every rank from lieutenant to vice admiral, and has flown his flag in all three of the Navy’s aircraft carriers.

He commanded the conventional submarine HMS Olympus in 1979-80 and the nuclear-powered submarine HMS Conqueror in 1984-86, carrying out numerous Cold War patrols.

He was involved in the early stages of the Bosnian Crises when he commanded the Type 22 frigate HMS Brilliant in 1992-93, and was in command of HMS Invincible when she made two operational deployments to the Gulf for air operations over Iraq and then conducted further air operations during the Kosovo Crisis.

As Commander UK Maritime Forces 2001-02 he was Maritime Commander of the UK Joint Force and Deputy Maritime Commander of the Coalition for the first six months of the War against Terror – a force of more than 100 ships and 40,000 people.

He has also had a number of Whitehall appointments, both Naval and Central, and was seconded to the Treasury for a year to gain cross-Whitehall experience. From 1999-2000 he was on the Navy Board as Assistant Chief of the Naval Staff, adding to his considerable experience in leadership and management of change issues.

Admiral Burnell-Nugent’s wife Mary is a consultant in palliative medicine, and Medical Director of St Luke’s Hospice in Plymouth. The couple have four children, the eldest (Etta and Anthony) both working in London while Rupert is at University and Tom is still at school.

They have a smallholding in Devon which is home to a host of animals, including a flock of pedigree Black Welsh Mountain sheep.