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Tim Farron (Westmorland and Lonsdale) (LD)
I am extremely grateful for this opportunity to discuss the future of Cumbria’s fire and rescue control centre. The proposal to close the control room and regionalise it in Warrington is of deep concern to my constituents in south Cumbria. It is a threat to public safety and a waste of public money.
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Howarth, and to see the Minister in his place. After our discussions about Cumbria county council’s botched single-status project, he might think that this is the latest in a long line of concerns over which he has no direct jurisdiction that I have brought to him. To add to his consternation, I am here in part to praise his actions and those of the coalition Government in this matter.
The previous Government proposed a centralised series of regional control centres for fire and rescue services, which would have led to a programme of forced closures and amalgamations of fire control centres, but after the coalition formed in May 2010, the new Government called off the project after a Public Accounts Committee report labelled it an expensive white elephant. That wise decision by the Government was welcomed in Westmorland and throughout Cumbria, and it should have been the end of the matter.
Sadly, however, Cumbria county council decided to ignore the Government’s sensible conclusions and proceed with the project anyway, planning to close the excellent control room in Cockermouth and keep faith instead with the white elephant in Warrington. The county council proposes in 2014 to merge all north-west fire and rescue service control centres into a single control room in Warrington, although the plans have received a severe setback after the announcement that the Merseyside services would be withdrawing from the project.
Merseyside’s decision does two things. First, it undermines even further the viability of the regional model and plays havoc with the project’s finances. Secondly, it provides an entirely sensible alternative model. Merseyside has chosen instead to pursue a merger within the county with the control rooms of other Merseyside emergency services. Merseyside has recognised, as must we, that there is a financial imperative. It is completely necessary to make efficiency savings in a time of financial crisis, but Merseyside, unlike Cumbria, has demonstrated a bit of lateral thinking by choosing an option that saves money and keeps the service securely within the area, protecting public safety.
Although many are concentrating on the proposal to set up the regionalised centre in Warrington in 2014, we must remember that the closure of the Cockermouth control room will come much sooner, in June next summer. The county council plans pre-emptively to close its control centre in Cockermouth and outsource its work to the Cheshire fire authority. From next summer, 999 calls from Cumbria for fire and rescue emergency support will be answered in Winsford, more than 100 miles from most places in Cumbria—that is, if we are lucky. The Cheshire service, like many other authorities, has a resilience partner, its neighbouring service in north Wales. However, as hon. Members might be aware, the Welsh services plan to co-operate in a single service, meaning that Cheshire is looking for a new resilience partner. The favourites at the moment are Humberside and Buckinghamshire. That is where Cumbrians can expect their emergency calls to be answered by next summer, unless the county council changes its mind.
That is desperately worrying for all of us who believe that there are extremely good reasons for having a local control centre. I have no doubt that the people and technology in Winsford, Warrington, Wycombe or wherever Cumbria’s 999 calls might be answered will be excellent. I am in no way suggesting otherwise. However, it is also the case that the team at the Cockermouth centre are outstanding professionals who have shown immense dedication to our county week in, week out, particularly recently, when they have made an amazing difference by responding to catastrophic floods in 2009, the Grayrigg tragedy in 2007 and various other tragedies and near-tragedies off Cumbria’s coast, especially in Morecambe bay. It is peculiar for Cumbria county council to say thank you to those who have played a huge part in saving lives by outsourcing their jobs and moving their entire operation to the other end of the region.
The main reason why we must resist centralisation is that it will damage public safety. In more than 90% of cases, the regionalised system will provide an excellent response to people in emergency situations. Capable call handlers with a modern mapping system will scramble the right team to the right address swiftly and with the right result. However, some occasions seriously require local knowledge. For example, there are two Staveleys in my constituency and two Troutbecks and a Troutbeck Bridge in the county of Cumbria. Finsthwaite, where I was on Saturday, has three houses in the same postcode called Rose Cottage. A person sitting in Warrington or wherever, taking a panic-stricken call from someone in one of those places who cannot give an exact postcode or grid reference, will not know to ask critical supplementary questions such as “Which Staveley?” or “Is that the Rose Cottage by the church?” Such questions could save a life.
Even the best systems can only pinpoint a grid reference based on the nearest mobile phone mast when someone is out of range, which means that a grid reference given to the fire crew could be up to 18 miles away from the address where the emergency is taking place. I am not sure whether you have visited the Lake district recently, Mr Howarth, but getting a mobile phone signal is not always simple. Having a human being at the other end of the line who knows that there are two Staveleys 20 or so miles apart will save lives. There is no training like on-the-job training. Working in a control room where 100% of work relates to Cumbrian emergencies provides call handlers with the expertise needed to ensure a safe, specific and speedy response.
If Cumbria were to follow Merseyside’s lead and consider creating efficiencies by consolidating the control rooms of Cumbria’s emergency services, it could improve safety by exposing call handlers to the full range of Cumbria’s communities and to the geographical uniqueness of a county teeming with mountains, lakes and mountain passes, some of which are misnamed, being impassable. Meeting the needs of people in distress in our county involves understanding the county, the nature of road communications and the time distances as well as mileages involved.
This week, we started the inquest into the tragic death of Mrs Margaret Masson, who died in the Grayrigg derailment in February 2007. The emergency services’ response to that tragedy was instant, and one reason was that the Cumbria-based control room staff knew the nature of the area and, crucially, that it was right, for instance, to call out volunteer mountain rescue teams, which had the kit and the expertise to respond the most quickly. That is why the mountain rescue teams got there first. Would a call handler in Warrington have pictured the scene in their mind’s eye and have had enough experience of our area to know automatically that it was a job not just for the professionals of the fire service but for the expert volunteers of mountain rescue? I am not sure, but I am sure that that quick response, based on the call handlers’ local knowledge, prevented a worse tragedy and saved lives.
John Woodcock (Barrow and Furness) (Lab/Co-op)
I congratulate my neighbour, the hon. Member for Westmorland and Lonsdale (Tim Farron), on securing this debate. He makes some strong points. Does he agree that part of the problem is the impossible position in which local authorities such as Cumbria county council have been put by the scale of the reductions that they are being forced to make across the piece? They are being forced to consider efficiencies such as the £300,000 saving that the proposals will generate.
Tim Farron
The hon. Gentleman makes a fair point. Without doubt, all local authorities face huge pressure, because of the pressure on public finances. I simply make the case that the situation in Merseyside is no harder than that in Cumbria, and Merseyside has thought of an intelligent way through it. I am sure that all involved are not jumping for joy at having to make a difficult decision—merging control rooms is never easy—but, even at the hardest of times, whoever is to blame, it is possible to think laterally and to try to ensure that the service in the county is protected. The hon. Gentleman makes a fair point, but that does not let Cumbria off the hook, given Merseyside’s rather more intelligent response.
Having spoken to members of the Fire Brigades Union in Cumbria and to other fire and rescue staff, I know that they strongly oppose the proposals, because, as I am sure we all know, it is the firefighters themselves who rely more than anybody else on the accuracy and professionalism of the Cumbrian-based call handlers to get them to the right place, with the right information and at the right time. They know that a control centre 100 miles away, however fantastic and professional it will be, cannot be as reliable or responsible as a centre committed to Cumbria, focused on our county and understanding its quirks.
This is a rare opportunity for me to be critical of the coalition—the Labour-Conservative coalition in Carlisle that runs Cumbria county council. I will qualify that, however, by saying that I am proud to represent a county where six MPs—only two of us are present—from all three parties work closely together, not just on this issue but on others. I know that my colleagues share my deep concern on the issue, even if we might not always come to exactly the same conclusions. I think that there is exasperation across the county—including all three parties and, more importantly, in the community—about the county council’s decision to resist all attempts to get it to rethink.
The recent decision of the Merseyside authority to turn its back on this wasteful project seems to have been ignored. Only a fortnight ago, the county council’s own overview and scrutiny committee, chaired by Jo Stephenson, the county councillor for Windermere, discussed the project, objected to it, for the reasons that I have outlined—the objections came from all three parties—and strongly recommended that the cabinet of the county council think again. The cabinet responded in less than 24 hours, without any time to consider the committee’s recommendations, and obstinately proclaimed that it was not for turning. I am sure that the Minister will understand our extreme frustration. There are intelligent, safer and more efficient alternatives, yet the county has so far refused to countenance them.
As someone who believes that decisions such as this should be taken at a local level—not least because it means that voters know exactly who to blame at the next local election—I do not want the Minister to intervene and override the county council. He could not, even if he wanted to, and even if he could, he absolutely should not, in the interests of democracy and localism. I would, however, like him to help us all the same.
The Government rightly withdrew their backing for the national programme of regionalised control centres. The logic behind that decision was right. I would be immensely grateful if, as a result of this debate, the Minister wrote to the leader of Cumbria county council to explain why he feels—indeed, why this Government feel—that such a move is inefficient, wasteful and a threat to public safety. If it wants to ignore his advice, as well as that of many of the county’s MPs and the vast majority of Cumbria’s citizens, it can do so, but it will, of course, face consequences. An intervention by the Minister would do no harm and would be very welcome, especially given that all I am asking him to do is restate what he said about this flawed proposal last year.
We are not saying no to any reform or restructuring, but we want the county to use its imagination and value the unique nature of our county. It is a county where fire and rescue means a lot more even than our excellent fire brigade—it means mountain rescue, such as the teams in Kendal, Ambleside and the Langdales, and inshore rescue, such as the bay search and rescue team in Flookburgh. Ours is a county in which understanding all that is essential in responding to people in acute distress. By all means, let us look at how we can consolidate our emergency control centres in Cumbria, but do not go down a route of regionalisation that will cost more money and could easily cost lives.
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government (Robert Neill)
It is a pleasure to see you in the Chair, Mr Howarth. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Westmorland and Lonsdale (Tim Farron) on securing this debate. I appreciate that the subject is important for his constituents. Indeed, the whole issue of fire control centres is one of real importance.
It is worth setting the issue in its full context. My hon. Friend has rightly referred to the failure of the previous Government’s fire control project, and to the incompetence, inefficiency and waste highlighted by the Public Accounts Committee and the National Audit Office. I have seldom seen a more ringing condemnation of a Government policy than that given to the project that was embarked upon by the now Lord Prescott as part of an enforced regionalisation agenda. There is common ground between my hon. Friend and me in that regard. It is clear that lessons needed to be learned.
My hon. Friend is right to say that, when the coalition Government—by which I mean the Westminster coalition Government—came into office, we discovered that the project was already running 19 months late and experiencing problems. That was the situation that confronted me when I became Minister with responsibility for the fire service in May 2010. As my hon. Friend has rightly said, the NAO report, which was published on 1 July 2011, and the PAC report, which was published on 14 September 2011, highlights a litany of failings. That catalogue of problems led to the project wasting some £469 million of taxpayers’ money on an over-ambitious, over-complex and essentially imposed solution for fire control rooms that, frankly, was not proportionate to the risk faced and that failed the fire services themselves.
Two key failings were identified. The first was the lack of any consultation or involvement with the fire and rescue services at the beginning, which was highlighted by both reports, particularly that of the PAC. It was a top-down, imposed solution, and originally part of a broader regionalisation agenda that was killed off by a referendum in the north-east. The project under discussion was the last bit left hanging around. Secondly, the principal failure related to incompetence in the procurement of the IT—the software and the computer works. Part of the overall scheme involved the procurement of the nine regional control centres, and it is ironic that that was the one bit of the scheme that was actually delivered on time and pretty much to budget—the centres were there, but the properly working kit to put in them was not. That was why this Government took the view that we should negotiate with the suppliers, and we eventually concluded that a pass had been reached whereby we could not guarantee sensibly the delivery of the scheme to time, to budget or to the proper specification. Ultimately, therefore, we terminated the contract.
John Woodcock
Will the Minister put on record how much public money was wasted by that decision to terminate the project part way through?
Robert Neill
Although the matter was subject to commercial confidentiality, the hon. Gentleman should be made aware that damages were paid to the Government by the suppliers of the scheme, so we in fact recouped some money as a result of our actions.
Robert Neill
The figure has been put in the public domain at about £22 million. The Government respected that confidentiality agreement, but since the figure is now in the public domain, I will not shirk from it. The Government got some money back. I say to the hon. Gentleman that his Government poured £469 million down the drain before we could prevent it from happening, so I do not accept any criticisms whatsoever of the decision to terminate the contract.
What we now have to do, sensibly, is find a solution that deals with the ongoing needs of the fire service for their control centres—that will vary from place to place—and that finds uses, as far as practically possible, for the nine control rooms that are left and in which a certain amount of public money has been invested. To that end—this is the background to the decision that Cumbria has taken—we determined that we would not go down the route of imposing a centralised solution. That is what went wrong before and is where I have common ground with, for example, the Fire Brigades Union, which is also very critical of that scheme.
We have decided that decisions on improving the efficiency and resilience of local control room systems are best made at a local level because, as my hon. Friend the Member for Westmorland and Lonsdale fairly says, that is where the risks are best understood. In addition, if it is practical to do so, we want to make good use of the buildings that are available. Frankly, it is preferable that fire and rescue services should take them over because they are purpose built for that service, but if they do not do so, other emergency services could also be appropriate users. We have said that we will not force fire authorities down such a route and that it is a matter for them to decide. If there is no fire and rescue or emergency service use for a particular centre, we will consider other uses to try to minimise the damage incurred to the public purse by past failings.
To that end, in July this year, I announced an £83 million scheme to build the national resilience that we all want to encourage through locally determined solutions and collaboration and innovation. Every fire and rescue authority—in Cumbria we are talking about the county council and in other places about stand-alone or combined fire authorities, for example, Greater Manchester and Merseyside—can apply for up to £1.8 million to improve the resilience and efficiency of their fire and rescue control services. The funding will cover the installation of improved communication equipment to give the enhanced voice and data services that are a priority for the sector. We consulted widely with the sector before introducing the scheme and the people we spoke to said that the ability for fire and rescue services to talk to each other—the transfer of voice and data, so that they can mobilise across boundaries and so on—was a key priority. We have therefore concentrated on that.
Fire and rescue services can either apply for the funding individually or collaborate by pooling their funding and providing further enhancements across a group of fire authorities. That is a decision that four of the authorities in the north-west have decided to take. As has been rightly observed by my hon. Friend, that area is not the same as the old north-west region because Merseyside has decided it does not want to be part of it. The scheme is not steered by the Government: it is a collaboration of sovereign authorities coming together to decide that they want to go down that route. Those authorities have been advised by their chief fire officers, who are their principal professional advisers.
Cumbria will be able to use its pot, either jointly or alone. As well as enhanced voice and data services, some of the things we want the funding to be used for include common standards to underpin collaboration and interoperability, and the facilitation of improved overload and fallback arrangements. My hon. Friend referred to the catastrophic floods in Cumbria. There are circumstances in which an individual control room can become heavily weighed down with the burden of such matters and it is sensible to have some resilience not necessarily physically in the same area. In fact, there are occasionally some advantages in having what is called a remote buddy system, whereby one control centre is able to rely on the support of another that is not affected by the same physical events. All those things can be in the mix. The Chief Fire Officers Association has indicated that it intends to apply for funding under our scheme to disseminate that sort of good practice.
Of course, my hon. Friend is right: the Merseyside fire authority decided that a north-west consortium was not an option that it wished to pursue. That is entirely its right and it will therefore pursue its own arrangements. However, I understand that the chief fire officers of the remaining authorities—Greater Manchester, Lancashire, Cheshire and Cumbria—have indicated that they are keen to proceed. That is the professional judgment that the chief officers have made, which I respect and do not seek to second-guess. They are also accountable to the elected members of their fire authorities, which in the case of Cumbria is the county council. As my hon. Friend indicates, the county council must ultimately make a decision on the matter. I will not second-guess its decision because it is on the ground and the decision is a local matter. What it is doing is not out of line with decisions being taken elsewhere in the country as a number of collaborative arrangements of one kind or another are taking place.
My Department is determined to be supportive and work with consortia where that is what people on the ground want. Where people think that a stand-alone solution is appropriate, again, they can bid to enhance on that basis. Inevitably, there are local concerns when such changes are made, but it is worth saying that whatever arrangements any fire authority makes with its control room, that does not alter the fact that it is the local fire crews on the ground who will be responding to the emergency calls, wherever they are directed from. Their local knowledge remains available. I just observe that the arrangements for a collaborative approach going beyond one county are not unique to the fire service. It is fair to say that the North West Ambulance Service mobilises on a much more regionalised basis from a control room in Preston. So the fire authority is not going out on a limb in that regard.
Tim Farron
The Minister makes some very good points. I thank him for mentioning that matter because it takes us down the road of where we might end up if we have a regionalised fire control room. Since the North West Ambulance Service went to a regionalised system based in an urban area, at least initially the number of times the volunteer first responder unit in Cumbria and north Lancashire was scrambled by the call handler dropped significantly. The urban-based call handlers did not have experience relating to first responders. The analogy I would make is with the mountain rescue teams. If somebody—wonderful as they may be—has no direct experience of the quirks of living in a rural area, those volunteer services will not be scrambled when they could save a life.
Robert Neill
With respect to my hon. Friend, I would not go down the route of saying that that is automatically the case, because much depends on the briefing and the knowledge of the people in the control centre. At the moment, within the large county of Cumbria, calls are taken at a county-wide level. That is not as local as doing something at a fire station level, which we know would not be practical. Frankly, the appropriate level is a matter of professional judgment. It is also fair to say that a number of other fire authorities have similar arrangements. Suffolk and Cambridge, which cover a very large geographical area, are due to merge their control rooms. I have not seen evidence to suggest that that would pose an enhanced risk.
The key thing is that there is proper input from the fire authorities. The north-west consortium is being overseen by a project board and has very straightforward governance arrangements. The project board is led by a chief fire officer—a professional—as project director and there are senior representatives from each of the fire services in the consortium area on the board. Ultimately, they have reported to their authority. The decision has been scrutinised through the county council’s scrutiny procedure and the cabinet has concluded that that is the route it wishes to go down.
Tim Farron
The Minister pointed out earlier that the Government kyboshed the previous Government’s regionalised programme for two reasons, one of which was the lack of consultation. The consultation across Cumbria has been absolutely appalling. The Minister talked about the overview and scrutiny committee. It considered the proposals and rejected them, and the cabinet ignored that. Will he make a comment on the failure of consultation in that respect?
Robert Neill
The Government do not run those consultations centrally; it is for the county council to use its processes. I say again that the county council was advised by its chief fire officer. Often support for collaborative arrangements comes from professional fire offices, who frequently take the view that a modern and viable control centre can work well.
We are talking about a matter for local decision, which is why, with every respect to my hon. Friend, I will not be tempted down the route of telling the county council how to run its business. I have made it very clear already that we thought a centrally imposed solution was wrong, but that a locally developed solution—whatever it may be; it will vary from place to place—is the right one.