Sailors and Royal Marines from south Hampshire who have started their tour of duty in Afghanistan will miss out on surprise Christmas gifts because the MoD says they swamp the post system. Only named parcels will be accepted by the British Forces Po ADVERTISEMENT st Service. Mike Hancock, Defence Select Committee member and Portsmouth South MP, said: ‘There is no doubt that this will affect the morale of troops serving abroad.
It is a really bad decision, underestimating the vital importance of communication between service personnel and their homes.’ Last year the British Forces Post Service received thousands of requests to pass festive parcels to service personnel in combat zones. The Army received 21,000 sacks of mail for troops in Afghanistan alone. But the MoD said the popularity of the scheme had stopped personal letters and gifts from friends and family arriving in time.
Vice Admiral Peter Wilkinson, Deputy Chief of Defence Staff, said the military’s ‘logistics chain’, which was there for ‘operational effectiveness’, was hampered by the amount of Christmas post it received. He said: ‘We need it to move supplies, ammunition, food out to the troops, and there has to be a question of priorities.’ The MoD says it will not accept any post sent through their system that is not from a soldier’s friends or family.
It wants the public to donate instead to charities such as the British Legion and Help For Heroes. But a serving infantryman from Gosport, 23, who did not want to be named, said: ‘It’s really not gone down well, because those surprise packages were a great boost.