Considerable progress, continuing challenges and new opportunities for families policy in Defence are the key findings from our five year retrospective review of Living in Our Shoes (2020).

Phase One. Taking Living in Our Shoes as the starting point, in Phase One of our study we looked back over the five years since Living in Our Shoes served as a wake-up call to policymakers and the military. Central to its influence has been the authentic portrayal of the lived experiences of men, women, and children in military families in the twenty-first century – voices that resonated powerfully and could not be ignored in the development of evidence-based policy.

The Phase One report documents the progress made to address the recommendations in Living in Our Shoes and highlights the continuing challenges, particularly those associated with mobility and deployment, as Armed Forces families seek to balance modern family life and relationships with the demands of military life.

Much has changed since 2020 and there are arguably greater challenges now for deterrence and defence than at any time since the end of the Cold War. The current Defence Reform programme aims to strengthen defence with stronger leadership, clearer accountability, faster delivery, less waste, and better value for money. In 2025, the Strategic Defence Review (SDR), suggested changes which aim to increase the Armed Forces’ readiness to fight, and reform its military and administrative structures.

Within this changing context the Phase One report offers convincing evidence for taking a different, stronger, more inclusive and robust approach to families policy within Defence.  Families need to occupy a much more secure place in the Defence institutional consciousness, and to be recognised more widely as a critical component at the heart of the military community, with a key role in supporting operational readiness and effectiveness. Integrating families policy into Defence people policy generally could better meet the needs of the whole Armed Forces community such that Serving personnel and their families feel valued and remain committed to serving the nation.

To address the evidence from Phase One we offer an overarching recommendation for  a new approach to families policy and 15 supporting recommendations which we believe will guide the transformational change that is necessary at this time in UK Defence.

The Phase One report is available as the full report or as a summary

Phase Two. Taking the findings from Phase One as our starting point, in Phase Two we are looking forward to the future of families policy and support within a new era for Defence. For reform on the scale envisaged in the SDR to succeed, families need to be central to the thinking and planning for a different career offer, greater flexibility and better integration. We will focus on in-depth evaluation of the priorities and mechanisms for transformation and integration of families policy. Through a portfolio of activities we will accumulate new evidence from members of the whole Armed Forces community and those working to support them, to understand families’ needs as military careers change and defence reform is implemented, in order to inform people policy integration.

A further update about Phase Two activities and the members of the study team will be provided shortly.  We look forward to continuing discussions and collaboration with key stakeholders as the study focuses on supporting Armed Forces families into the future.