Fire and Rescue Services Bill

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Phil Hope indicated dissent.

Mr. Hammond: The Under-Secretary shakes his head, but other organisations are already established, such as the Fire Service College. I wonder whether he intends that charges would be levied under subsection (3)(b) in respect of organisations other than those established under subsection (2). Perhaps he would clarify whether that is the case and either accept the amendment or tell us why it is unnecessary.

Phil Hope: Amendment No. 104 would require the Secretary of State to make an order every time he wanted to charge for the use of equipment or services provided. I remember sitting in this Committee Room to debate a statutory instrument and the hon. Gentleman berating me for wasting parliamentary time on bringing people together to discuss the allocation of community fire safety moneys to fire and rescue authorities. I was roundly berated for dragging parliamentarians into the Room to do so. I therefore cannot believe that he wants to drag parliamentarians into a statutory instrument Committee every time we want to charge for the use of equipment or services provided by the Secretary of State. That is the implication of his amendment.

Mr. Hammond: If I recall the incident in question, my concern was that the Committee was sitting to consider a grant that amounted in one case to £4,000—considerably less than the cost of the paperwork supporting the Committee. In this case my understanding is—the Under-Secretary will correct me if I am wrong—that there would be a regime for charging. It would not be a question of a separate order each time a bill was sent to a fire authority; it would be a regime that would determine the basis on which charges were made.

Phil Hope: Under section 22 of the Fire Services Act 1947, the Secretary of State can make equipment available to fire and rescue authorities to purchase. There was never any suggestion that that price should be set by order. To do so would be unnecessarily bureaucratic. To pick up on the hon. Gentleman's point, if the Secretary of State instituted a monthly charge for the provision of a service, a new order would be required every time the charge was varied. That does not seem a very good use of parliamentary time.

Mr. Hammond: The Minister refers to the 1947 Act. There is no need to address the problem in that Act because it does not give the Secretary of State the power to require a fire authority to buy from him. The Bill does, which is why we need some scrutiny of the charging process. I entirely dispute the assertion that the amendment would require a separate order every month. If a charging regime required fire authorities to

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pay on the basis of full-cost reimbursement for equipment provided, the matter would be covered and a Committee would not be required to sit every month, as the Under-Secretary suggested.

Phil Hope: The hon. Gentleman and I will have to agree to disagree on whether his amendment would bureaucratically clutter parliamentary time—were we foolishly to support it.

We have no intention of charging for any of the equipment that we have committed to providing for resilience purposes, as I think the hon. Gentleman has acknowledged. The Government are funding the procurement of the Firelink radio system and have no intention of charging the fire and rescue service for it. Similarly, we have funded the purchase of new dimension equipment to the tune of £188 million, and authorities will not be expected to bear the cost of its use for new dimension purposes. However, the Secretary of State may need to charge for new services that he provides in future, and the Bill obliges him to consult before doing so.

A number of examples have been raised in debate on this clause and previously. I want to reassure the hon. Gentleman that we do not intend to procure goods and services centrally for the fire and rescue service and then charge for them. He cited the example of fire engines. We have no intention of procuring fire engines for the service and then charging for them. Instead, we are working with the service to improve procurement of specialist equipment and to deliver better value for money and higher standards. We are working with the service, not in opposition to it.

I repeat that we do not have any plans to charge, but if assets that we made available for new dimension work were then used for other purposes, we might need to charge in the event of excessive wear and tear on the equipment.

Mr. Hammond: I understand the point about equipment, which the Under-Secretary has made before, but will he clarify it in relation to the communications network?

Phil Hope: I was coming to that. I just wanted to emphasise that we shall keep our position under review, but our intention is as I have stated.

Were we to consider charging for communications equipment, we would have to discuss the matter in depth with the fire and rescue services. We have no plans to charge for the provision of the Firelink system, and we have made a ministerial commitment on that. Therefore, there is no question of full-cost recovery in those circumstances. I hope that that gives the hon. Gentleman the reassurance that he seeks.

Richard Younger-Ross: A moment ago the Under-Secretary used the words ''excessive wear and tear''. Would the charge be based on the cost of the additional excessive wear and tear or would full-cost recovery relate to the purchase of the equipment as well?

Phil Hope: If I may illustrate the point, perhaps we can get beyond it. If a fire and rescue authority uses some new dimension equipment—for example, high-volume pumping equipment—for a non-emergency

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such as pumping out a village pond, it could be charged for that use. As we know from previous discussions, the fire service can charge for the use of such equipment in a non-emergency. I do not want to revisit the charging debate, but I hope that that illustrates that there will be common sense in the system.

Clearly, scrutiny is a concern in amendment No. 104, but scrutiny is implicit in subsections (4) and (5). Fire and rescue services will be required to use and maintain equipment and there will be an order and a requirement on the Secretary of State to consult. Therefore, the system contains sufficient safeguards to make it unnecessary to lay an order in the House—notwithstanding all the arguments about how bureaucratic it may be. The clause contains the reassurance that there will be proper consultation and that we have no plans to charge for the provision of the communications equipment, so there is no question of full-cost recovery. We want to discuss all the measures in depth with the fire and rescue services to ensure that the regime is sensible and that the charging of equipment makes sense to the Government and the authorities.

The intention behind amendment No. 105 is implicit in the clause, in that charges may be imposed in relation to subsection (2). It is therefore not necessary to include such a provision in the Bill.

11 am

Mr. Hammond: I do not believe that the effect of the amendment is implicit in the clause, but the Under-Secretary has read into the record that that is the way in which the clause will be applied. That was extremely helpful and renders the question of whether the amendment is implicit in the clause somewhat academic. I am grateful to him for that.

As expected, I am reassured by what the Under-Secretary said. One problem of very broad drafting of Bills is that we have to work to the exasperation of Ministers. We are obliged to look for the most extreme possible use of the very wide powers that Ministers are being given and then, in order to reassure ourselves, use debates in Committees to persuade them to constrain their future use of such powers. I am glad that the Under-Secretary has confirmed that the Government's intention is strictly limited to the acquisition and provision of specialist equipment and that, in the interests of standardisation or procurement efficiency, they will not procure standard equipment such as routine fire appliances for issue to fire authorities.

I am also grateful for the confirmation that there is no intention to charge for the communications system. The Under-Secretary has very cunningly worked out how to defuse resistance among fire authorities to their having a communications system imposed on them. I am sure that some of the initial reaction will melt away when they find out that it will cost nothing, because something that is offered for nothing is usually more attractive to the recipient. I am grateful for the clarification given and beg to ask leave to withdraw the amendment.

Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.

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Clause 28 ordered to stand part of the Bill.

Clause 29

Directions for public safety purposes

Mr. Hammond: I beg to move amendment No. 107, in

clause 29, page 12, line 37, at end insert—

'(1A) An order under subsection (1) may only be made where one or more fire and rescue authorities is or is considered by the Secretary of State to be likely to become, unable to discharge its functions under sections 7, 8 or 9.'.

Clause 29 re-enacts in slightly different wording a major chunk of the Fire Services Act 2003, not including the most controversial section 1(1)(a)—the sunset clause. The clause gives power to direct

''the use or disposal of property or facilities''

of a fire and rescue authority.

In general, we agree, as we did during passage of 2003 Act, that it is sensible to have such a power for use in an extreme situation—for example, in a strike or industrial dispute situation—so that we never again see troops struggling to manage with grossly inadequate and, as some would say, even dangerous 50-year-old civil defence fire tenders when perfectly good, ''state of the art'' red fire engines are locked up, apparently under the control of the people who are on strike. It raised the gall of many during the dispute—I believe from comments that I heard that the Deputy Prime Minister was among them—to see red fire engines behind locked doors and firefighters warming themselves on fire authority premises while troops had to make do with draughty Territorial Army drill halls and the like as a base for their operations. It has to be acknowledged that during the dispute some authorities clearly lacked either the political will or the backbone to confront the union over access to equipment and premises.

I debated the subject with my own chief fire officer during the dispute to find out what was going on on my patch. As the Under-Secretary will know, the situation is a little more complicated than the knee-jerk reaction of passing motorists to seeing firefighters in possession of publicly owned fire stations while on strike. During the strike, the practical consideration in many areas—in fact, I think, in all areas without exception—was that firefighters turned out for real emergencies. The judgment of the chief fire office in my area was that if firefighters were not allowed to congregate on fire authority premises and, effectively, to keep possession of their equipment, they would not be in a position to turn out.

Such matters are easier to discuss in the cool light of day than they were in the heat of the dispute. Then, there was a feeling that the unions were being allowed to gain a propaganda victory by retaining possession of their equipment—I have slipped into the terminology myself; I should have said retaining possession of the fire authority's equipment—and then turning out as heroes if required to effect a rescue or put out a particularly serious fire.

Ministers' first duty must be to secure the safety of the public. However galling it is, the Minister must consider carefully whether public safety would be

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better protected by allowing striking firefighters to retain control of equipment on the basis that they will turn out when it is absolutely necessary. I am slightly nervous that, in the hothouse atmosphere of a dispute, the powers under the clause might be used as a knee-jerk reaction in a way that could damage public safety.

One issue that inevitably comes up is that, as the draft framework makes clear, the 19,000 military personnel who were available during the last dispute would almost certainly not be available again, owing to military overstretch, cuts in numbers and even—possibly—privatisation of parts of the defence fire services, denuding it of the specialist skills required. So, the issue in another industrial dispute might not so much be access to red fire engines but who the heck will drive them.

I think that the 2003 Act was sabre rattling with a purpose; the dispute had still not been resolved. The outcome of the strike vote was, to some extent, secured by the expression of determination to draw a line under the issue in the form of the 2003 Bill. The Minister of State, however, went to great lengths during debates on that Bill to emphasise the temporary nature of the powers that he was taking. Time considerations mean that I will not reach into my pile of papers and quote the numerous times when he referred to the time limit that the Government accepted on the powers in the 2003 Act.

It is technically true that nothing that the Minister of State said during the 2003 debate precluded a re-enactment of precisely the same powers in a new Bill. It is not often that I would spend much of my time defending the position of the hon. Member for Hayes and Harlington (John McDonnell), but when the Minister sought to reassure him and other Labour Members who rebelled against the Government in the vote on that Bill, he conveyed the impression that the matters subject to the 2003 Act would be reviewed and that new, permanent proposals would be made in the White Paper and this Bill. Nothing that the Minister said would have prepared the reasonable, independent observer for the wholesale re-enactment of those time-limited powers—except for very minor changes in the wording. A question of openness arises about the intention that the Government had. The clause will be accepted by the Committee with only a little probing now, but I suspect that the Government will find that their back Benchers will want to express their sense of betrayal that measures that were said to be time-limited in 2003 have been brought back as permanent legislation.

Amendment No. 107 would limit the use of the powers to the circumstances in which Ministers say that they are needed. It provides for the use by the Secretary of State of the powers in the clause when either a fire authority cannot, or he reasonably expects that it will not be able to, discharge its functions under clauses 7, 8 and 9 covering fire, road traffic accidents and other emergencies—typically, a situation such as an industrial dispute or some other paralysis that affects the fire and rescue authority.

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Including such a provision would allay the fears of those who spoke during the 2003 debate about the possible use of the powers to privatise fire service facilities and to require the disposal of property and the passing of equipment and facilities to other service providers. As the Secretary of State intends to use the clause only in the case of an industrial dispute or similar emergency when a fire authority cannot discharge its functions, I urge the Under-Secretary, regardless of whether he accepts my amendment, to tighten the wording to reassure a sceptical micro-public on his Back Benches that that is the intention—making the wording fit the stated intention. If the Under-Secretary will not accept such a restriction, he will need to tell us when a fire and rescue authority would be discharging, and would be expected to be able to continue to discharge, its statutory functions but it would be considered legitimate to use the powers in the clause.

Once again, I emphasise the Opposition's belief that fire and rescue authorities must have the primary responsibility for the discharge of their functions. It is right and proper that the Secretary of State should have the power to intervene when they fail to discharge those functions either because they are incompetent-—that is dealt with elsewhere in the Bill—or because something such as a strike prevents them from doing so. It is also proper that he should be constrained not to interfere in that way if they are discharging their functions fully and effectively. The Bill, with the clause but without the amendment, gives too wide a power of intervention. I look forward to hearing how the Under-Secretary will respond to those concerns.

 

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Prepared 26 February 2004