Page 94, The Private Eye Podcast

Hello and welcome to another episode of Page 94.

My name is Andrew Hunter Murray and this week we are going to be talking firstly

about the House of Horrors that is the UK Ministry of Defence's housing stock,

which is dilapidated, crumbling and not actually owned by the Ministry of Defence.

That's coming up first.

Then after that we're going to be taking a quick whistle stop tour over to Qatar,

which is of course hosting the World Cup.

We're going to be talking to the eyes sporting hack Sarah Shannon

all about the other countries involved in the World Cup, which you might not have been reading

quite so much about so far, but which have been just as involved in their own way as Qatar themselves.

But first, housing.

One of the stories in the latest edition of Private Eye is about the UK Ministry of Defence's

Housing Stock. There are roughly 50,000 homes, which are for both families and single members

of the armed forces, and these homes, it turns out, have not been maintained,

perhaps quite as well as the people who have to live in them could have hoped for.

The maintenance of these homes, the upkeep, is outsourced to a few different firms.

The chief point of contact for troops and their families is a firm called Pinnacle.

Service families contact Pinnacle to book repairs through their call centre,

and after that the physical repairs are carried out by two other firms called Amy and Vivo

under separate contracts with the MOD and Defence Infrastructure Organisation.

The contract was signed relatively recently, and already there are some worrying signs that,

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