As the UK today pays homage to the fallen, this latest Remembrance Sunday unfolds at a challenging time for Armed Forces veterans. Many ex-servicepeople have found themselves falling upon hard times during the pandemic, prompting the government to invest £5 million into Armed Forces charities to provide veterans with the support they need, particularly around mental health.
Nikki Markham MBE is the founder and director of Transferable Skills Training and Battling On, two organisations that support people in gaining confidence, new skills and help with their personal developments. While Transferable Skills works with young people who have fallen outside mainstream education, Battling On is an organisation whose speciality lies in supporting Armed Forces veterans, helping them transition from military to civilian life following their time in service.
Both organisations have faced significant challenges adapting to the Covid-19 pandemic landscape, with Battling On being recognised with a National Covid Heroes Award for its continued work providing services to the vulnerable during the lockdown.
While Markham recently came onto The Leaders Council Podcast to highlight how her organisations were able to continue working through the lockdown, she also took the time to discuss her views on government funding into services for Armed Forces veterans.
Sitting down with host, Joshua Jackson, Markham began the discussion by highlighting how the level of demand for both her organisations’ services has dramatically increased during the pandemic.
She said: “The last couple of years have been challenging to say the least. We have pretty much been fighting a rear-guard action and have seen a huge increase in numbers, particularly in the level of veterans needing support. I have never seen anything quite like it.
“We are based within Plymouth and on the Devon-Cornwall border, and the main veteran support services here, Help for Heroes and the Royal British Legion, actually closed their centres during the Covid period and have since announced that these closures will be permanent, and they’ll now solely be providing outreach support. This meant that our organisation was the only one whose doors were actually open to veterans. So, very quickly we had people knocking on our doors and the phone was ringing day and night.
“We operate in a deprived area anyway, so we were having to juggle this with food poverty issues, increasing mental health struggles within the local population, trying to get equipment into homes to help with online learning for children…it was a very difficult time for us on the ground.”
In order to get around heightened demand and the limitations enforced upon them by Covid, both Battling On and Transferable Skills Training had to undergo a shift in their entire operating models, virtually overnight.
Markham explained: “We essentially had to completely change what we do. Because of where we are, we are dealing with both a rural community and an urban community which presents its own issues. In terms of veterans, we encountered many who were isolated, struggling, and we had to put the friendship groups together very, very quickly for them to be able to confide in each other. We have a lot of services that we have now moved online, and we were able to set those up thanks in large to a huge set of volunteers who joined us.
“We’re able to contact our veterans on a regular basis, at least twice a week, sometimes as much as twice a day depending on their level of need. We also sent out food parcels and over 500 activity parcels so that people could use their time in lockdown doing something constructive. Overall, it was very much a period of adaptation and innovation, moving our services online, taking on the many phonecalls, sometimes even dropping off parcels in person to make sure our service users had what they needed. It was a very challenging time.”
Moving on to address funding, Markham highlighted that while the opportunity to take advantage of the government’s Covid Bounce Back Loans was a welcome one, the £5 million of investment that ministers announced for Armed Forces charities was unlikely to be enough to truly address the scale of the wider mental health issues faced by veterans.
Furthermore, Markham felt that any funds that were reaching charities were wrongly being distributed to larger organisations and being invested into online resources, rather than the face-to-face support that Battling On provides which she believes would have a more profound impact on veterans’ lives.
“We did take advantage of Covid-19 Bounce Back Loans. We needed more staff in and we had to procure equipment to help with our remote capacity. So, there was some help, but in terms of helping veterans, overall resources are woefully lacking. The government announced £5 million of funding into Armed Forces charities to support the mental health of ex-servicepeople, but to give you an example we’ve got a team operating in Plymouth with some fantastic practitioners working on the mental health side of the NHS, but they don’t have a centre or office space to work in. If you are working with people on the streets or with alcohol issues, it becomes very difficult to find physical spaces to actually work with these people. Obviously, pre-lockdown you could meet for coffee and things but during Covid that was made impossible by the lockdown. To give you an idea of the numbers we are dealing with, in an average year at any one time we have between 10 and 12 veterans that we are supporting. Right now, we are assisting in excess of 90 ex-servicepeople, many with incredibly complex needs.
“Unfortunately, many seem to believe that the answer lies in technology. Part of the £5 million is being invested into more user-friendly apps and I can’t help but ask why this is the case. I can tell you from having worked on the frontline with veterans in crisis, they don’t use websites and it won’t help them. They want to be able to look someone in the eye. There is no effort to hold their hand over the whole journey by just pumping money into online, and they need that. Government money needs to be invested at grassroots into people that are actually working on the frontline and talking to these veterans, not going to a larger charity that basically moves everything it does online.
“Just recently, some funding was made available having come down through the covenant. While the focus of funding used to be on small projects to help grow grassroots organisations like ourselves, they are now asking for a more strategic fit for funding and want large charities to come forward for it. So, we are essentially being frozen out of the funding that is so vital to what we do. Meanwhile, the Armed Forces Community Fund Trust has been amazing in their work, but they're not given enough money by the government to support everything they want. The £5 million will be a drop in the ocean in terms of trying to deal with the wider issues we face.”
Photo by Roberto Catarinicchia on Unsplash
