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Standing Committee G
Tuesday 24 February 2004
(Afternoon)
[Part I]
[Mr. Edward O'Hara in the Chair]
Clause 19
Charging
Amendment moved [this day]: No. 70, in
clause 19, page 9, line 7, leave out subsection (1) and insert—
'(1) Subject to the following provisions a fire and rescue authority may charge a person for providing a service to them if:
(a) the authority is authorised, but not required, by an enactment, to provide the service to them, and
(b) they have agreed to the provision.'.—[Richard Younger-Ross.]
2.30 pm
The Chairman: I remind the Committee that with this we are taking amendment No. 71, in
Richard Younger-Ross (Teignbridge) (LD): The table that the Minister provided entrances me. I am sure that we will come back to it. I might have spotted an error, and I will look at it in a minute.
We were dealing with charging and seeking to establish a more liberal regime. Perhaps the Minister and his staff have to work until the early hours of the morning dealing with orders to authorise local authorities to charge for this, that or the other. Instead of the Minister burning the midnight oil, it sounds far more reasonable to ask that the fire authority should have the right to charge for something if it decides that it wishes to do so. Our amendment would not affect the exemptions that are clearly stated and with which we do not disagree—that is, an authority could not charge for extinguishing fires or for protecting life and property in the event of fire. Likewise, the other conditions of the clause would still apply—we have not sought to amend those. We are simply trying to free the process and give the power to the authority rather than to the Secretary of State.
To give an example, a fire authority may have particular difficulty with false alarms—burglar alarms going off in industrial estates and repeat offenders—and it therefore wishes to charge for the second or third call-out. The amendment would allow that to happen and give the authority the flexibility to charge.
Mr. Philip Hammond (Runnymede and Weybridge) (Con): I am curious about that example. What would happen if a fire had in fact broken out? The hon. Gentleman is drawing a distinction between an alarm
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that turns out to be a false alarm and an alarm caused by a fire. I expected him to exclude everything related to fire from the capability to charge.
Richard Younger-Ross: That is not what the authorities and senior officers have advised us. They would like some flexibility to deal with the cases in which there is a continuously faulty fire alarm in a building, yet the owners take no action to put it right. Schemes might be introduced to ensure that such charges are not made, such as regular maintenance being carried out on the alarm. Of course the fire brigade would always attend if an alarm went off—the brigade would respond to that as normal—but if it repeatedly transpired that it was turning up and there was nothing but an alarm going off, with no smoke or fire in sight, the authority should be allowed to charge. I am not saying that it should charge; simply that it should be free to do so.
Mr. Hammond: I am broadly sympathetic to the thrust of the amendment, but it requires that the person paying has had to agree to be provided with that service at a charge. It seems to me that the owner of premises who knows that the fire brigade will turn out anyway for an alarm—because it has to, as there might be a fire—is unlikely to agree to pay a charge in the event that it turns out to be a false alarm, and would be foolish to do so.
Richard Younger-Ross: I take the hon. Gentleman's point. I should have prefaced my argument by saying that the amendment is a probing one. From the amendments the hon. Gentleman proposed earlier, I know that it is often possible for an amendment to have unintended consequences. We do not want any unintended consequences to result from an acceptance, which is why I am sure that I shall withdraw the amendment once we have heard the Minister's response. I hope that the Minister will accept the main thrust of what we are saying—how we can free authorities to charge, rather than putting everything through the Secretary of State.
Mr. Hammond: The clause deals with the ability of a fire and rescue authority to charge for services. I will confine my remarks as narrowly as I can on all the groups of amendments in the hope that we might have an opportunity to discuss the broader issues and the compare-and-contrast exercise between clause 19 and the provisions of the Fire Services Act 1947 in a clause stand part debate.
We are broadly sympathetic to the Liberal Democrat amendment No. 70, which largely reflects the intentions of our amendments Nos. 46 and 47, to which we will come in due course. I do not, however, believe that the hon. Gentleman's amendment goes quite far enough, and I think our amendment No. 48 will underline the requirement to go a little bit further than he is suggesting. We have no argument with the principle of limiting the power to charge to discretionary services only, except for one issue—that of medical co-response—that we need to address. We also strongly support the removal of the process of order making by the Secretary of State. However, the
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local freedom to charge can only work if it is strictly limited to the non-statutory, non-core functions of a fire and rescue service.
The Minister for Local Government, Regional Governance and Fire (Mr. Nick Raynsford): May I ask the hon. Gentleman why?
Mr. Hammond: Perhaps I should qualify my remarks. The discretion would only work in a way that is satisfactory and acceptable if it were limited to the non-core functions. I certainly do not want fire and rescue authorities to be able to charge for carrying out their core, front-line emergency work, and I imagine that other members of the Committee—I am looking at the hon. Member for Birmingham, Hall Green (Mr. McCabe)—would also be pretty horrified at the thought of a fire and rescue authority turning up at a road accident scene with its invoice pad in hand.
I am interested by the Minister's intervention. I anticipated that his defence of the structure involving the Secretary of State in authorising charging in certain areas would be that he needs to ensure that fire authorities are not able to charge in areas where it is not appropriate, or where the public would be outraged were charges to be imposed. No doubt, we will come that debate in due course.
Richard Younger-Ross: On the point about core services, at the moment the ambulance service charges for attending a road traffic accident. I am puzzled about why an ambulance should be able to charge and a fire brigade should not.
Mr. Hammond: I do not think that the hon. Gentleman was in Parliament when the Road Traffic (NHS Charges) Act 1999 was passing through Parliament. I was deeply involved in consideration of that Bill. We argued strongly that there were dangers in introducing charging in that way. The hon. Gentleman will see, because he will have studied our later amendments, that our aim is to ensure that we do not extend that regime any further, and that we create a level playing field between fire and rescue authorities—or in the case of delivering medical care at the scene of an incident, between fire and rescue authorities and NHS ambulance service trusts.
As I was saying, the local freedom to charge can only work satisfactorily if it is limited to non-mandatory services. We will, I am sure, return to that theme in succeeding groups of amendments. We also agree that, since the amendment, as the Liberal Democrats have tabled it, is limited to charging for discretionary services, it is appropriate that the user should have had to agree in advance. That will create difficulties with the example of response to automatic fire alarms that the hon. Member for Teignbridge (Richard Younger-Ross) gave. Although I had not thought about it, I confess that the automatic fire alarm response issue is quite complicated. Clearly, it is directly related to the possibility of an incident of fire, and it would certainly be wrong to say that the fire authority does not have to respond unless the chaps have agreed to pay if it turns
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out to be a false alarm. However, responding to such alarms must be one of the bigger drains on fire authority resources. Clearly, the matter needs to be considered much more carefully than I have yet had a chance to do.
Broadly speaking, we are sympathetic to the thrust of the amendments. I hope that the hon. Gentleman will agree, when he looks at amendments Nos. 46, 47 and 48, that we need to go that little bit further and deal with the issue of medical co-response.
Mr. Raynsford: Amendment No. 70 is phrased in the same terms as section 93 of the Local Government Act 2003. That provision deals with discretionary services provided by best value authorities. Those are services that the authority is allowed to provide, but that are not obligatory. Section 93 of the 2003 Act allows authorities to make charges in such cases. Although we consider section 93 appropriate in the wider local government context, we do not consider that a similar provision would be a suitable substitute for the charging provisions in section 3 of the Fire Services Act 1947, which is why we introduced clause 19 instead.
The first effect of amendment No. 70, as a mirror of section 93 of the 2003 Act, would be to restrict the services for which authorities can charge to those that they are not obliged to provide. That might well have been an appropriate response had the 1947 Act provisions remained in force. Under the 1947 Act, fire calls are the only calls to which authorities are obliged to respond, although in practice they tend to respond to a much larger range of requests. The Bill makes provision for that to change. We have imposed a number of additional response requirements on the service in relation to traffic accidents and other non-fire incidents, but we gave a commitment in the White Paper that the power to charge for dealing with non-fire incidents would continue. Our proposals fulfil that commitment and continue the prohibition on charging for extinguishing fires or for protecting life and property in the event of fire.
Not only would amendment No. 70 involve a breach of that White Paper undertaking and cut across existing practice on the part of various fire and rescue authorities—if the hon. Member for Teignbridge has been in contact with chief fire officers and representatives of fire authorities, I have no doubt that they have drawn his attention to current provisions—but it would have the possibly unintended effect of frustrating clause 19(3), which is designed to enable authorities to recover the cost of dealing with an incident from a responsible third party in circumstances in which it may not be appropriate to seek to charge the person for whom the service was provided. Let me give an example. The authorities might seek to charge third parties for effecting the release of people from stalled lifts. Many of those incidents arise from a failure to maintain the lift system adequately, which is usually the responsibility of the building management or owner, and certainly not that of the passengers.
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