With the 2023-24 pay award still awaited, Sky News reports that some military personnel and their families have been forced to use food banks as high inflation and rising costs tip members of the Armed Forces into crisis.
Internal RAF documents seen by Sky News - as well as interviews with military sources and charities - offer a sense of the wider impact of the cost of living crisis on defence, including:
- The need for a number of service personnel to choose between "food or fuel", with some unable to afford to drive home from their base to see family
- One aviator, a single mother, was forced to go without a hot meal for four days because she had spent her last money on baby milk formula
- The volume of enquiries to a key charity from or on behalf of military personnel seeking financial support has more than doubled
- There are individuals who can no longer even afford the price of the subsidised meals at their mess
- A sense of "discontent" at covering for striking public sector workers on better pay deals when the Armed Forces are not permitted to take industrial action themselves