David Cameron has called for more to be done to help forces families.

The Conservative leader was speaking after a senior solider said too much military accommodation was of a "poor standard".

The Army's personnel chief, adjutant-general Lt Gen Freddie Viggers, told the BBC: "It's one of the key issues for me in what we call the military covenant - giving our soldiers and their families what they deserve in return for what they do for us."

The wife of one serviceman, interviewed on BBC Radio 4's Today programme on Thursday, said the state of accommodation at RAF Brize Norton in Oxfordshire was one of the reasons her husband was leaving the military.

Brize Norton is in Cameron's Witney constituency, and he spoke on the subject of forces' housing in the Commons before becoming party leader.

And the Tory chief himself told Today: "I said in my conference speech in October that we should be having a real manifesto for forces families, it's not just the housing issue, its also the issue of schooling.

"When men and women go away to war they leave behind them single parent families with children often under quite severe stress and pressure at our schools and those schools need extra help.

"The Conservative Party with [shadow defence secretary] Liam Fox is going to bring together a whole forces families' manifesto to make sure we do better for our families, because they do so much for us and, frankly, we should do more for them."

Defence minister Derek Twigg said the government had put in place a "sustained programme of investment in accommodation".

"We've spent £700m last year in improving service accommodation," he said.

"We recognise there is a challenge, we recognise that the accommodation is not perfect and we need to improve it."