Policing and Crime Bill

Debate between Lord Jackson of Peterborough and Jim Fitzpatrick

Monday 13th June 2016 Commons Chamber

[Jim Fitzpatrick]

It is a pleasure to follow my hon. Friend the Member for North Durham (Mr Jones). I shall not be referring to the mental health provisions in the Bill, but I commend colleagues who have already spoken about that and who have been personally responsible for taking this issue so far and for encouraging the Government to listen to the arguments that they have been putting forward for years. I also commend the Government for their response to the debates that took place in Committee and, more generally, for their attitude towards mental health. I also want to commend the shadow Home Secretary, my right hon. Friend the Member for Leigh (Andy Burnham), for the way in which he spoke to his new clauses almost as part of the campaign on Hillsborough. He spoke passionately and powerfully and I hope that the Government will respond positively to his requests for the new clauses to be accepted, if only in principle. I look forward to the Minister’s response to the debate.

I want to speak briefly to new clause 48 and new schedule 1, which propose the re-creation of a national fire service inspectorate in England. My friend the Minister is, like me, a former firefighter. When I ask him to do things in our exchanges on fire brigade matters, he sometimes throws back at me the fact that I did not do them when I was Fire Minister and asks why should he do them now. I want to ask him why he is recreating the fire service inspectorate when we did away with it and put other arrangements in place. I will be interested to hear his explanation. I welcome the fact, as the hon. Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Robert Neill) and others have done, that the Government recognise there is a vacuum and that something has to be created to fill the gap. Whether that is an inspectorate as set out in the new clause or whether that wording changes when the Bill goes to the House of Lords, the fact that the Government are moving in this direction is welcome.

In Westminster Hall last week, we discussed with the Minister the increasing number of calls related to flooding that the fire service now deals with, the transition towards dealing with more medical emergency calls and the arrangements with the national health service for the fire service to do more social care visits alongside fire safety visits. These changes all demonstrate the fact that the fire service is moving into different territory, and that different skills are being developed which require different resources as well as the staff to carry them out.

As I mentioned in Westminster Hall, criticisms are being levelled at the fire service, parts of which are being blamed for the reductions in the service. The fire and rescue service has been a victim of its own success in recent decades, having cut the number of calls and fires and reduced the number of deaths and serious injuries. That has resulted in the loss of fire stations, fire appliances and firefighters. The Minister will remember that I stated in that debate that there are nearly 7,000 fewer firefighters in the UK now than there were in 2010. That fact has raised a number of eyebrows, and questions are being asked about attendance times being met and resources being available. People are now asking whether the service is still equipped to do the job that it needs to do.

[Mr Stewart Jackson (Peterborough) (Con)]

The hon. Gentleman has great experience in the fire and rescue service in a number of capacities. The operational issues that he is rightly raising are important, but will he acknowledge the Public Accounts Committee’s finding that in the wake of the abolition of the Audit Commission, the governance, scrutiny and oversight of many fire and rescue services and the cosy relationship between the authorities and those services were unsatisfactory in terms of providing value for the taxpayer’s pound?

[Jim Fitzpatrick]

Absolutely. I agree with the hon. Gentleman. That point was also raised by the hon. Member for Bromley and Chislehurst, and I am sure that the Minister will also put forward an argument for putting in place a means of making those measurements.

Having said all that, I am curious about the lateness of the arrival of the new clauses. The Minister referred positively to the consensus in Committee and to the ability of both sides to help each other out to make progress on the Bill. I commend the shadow Fire Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for West Ham (Lyn Brown), for arguing for a provision to assess the ability of the fire service to carry out its functions. To the Minister’s credit, he has now tabled the new clause and the new schedule to address that issue.

I mentioned in an intervention my curiosity about whether the Government had considered the United Kingdom Accreditation Service as a potential vehicle to carry out the function that is being proposed here. The Minister knows that I had 23 years in the fire service, 13 of which were spent as an operational firefighter, and I participated in drills in the fire station as set out by Her Majesty’s inspectorate. I have to question the value of those drills, because we would train for weeks to get them right but they still did not always go entirely right. I question the value of putting in that amount of rehearsal. I wonder whether all that practice actually made the whole exercise worthless.

We decided to abolish Her Majesty’s inspectorate because of the scepticism and cynicism surrounding it—the hon. Member for Bromley and Chislehurst referred to an old boys’ network earlier—and I would have hoped that the Government would now be proposing something new. However, they seem to be proposing a re creation of what went before. Having moved it to the Department for Communities and Local Government and then back to the Home Office, there seems to be replication so that, along with Her Majesty’s inspectorate of constabulary and Her Majesty’s inspectorate of prisons, we will now have Her Majesty’s inspectorate of fire services.

I look forward to hearing more from the Minister and to listening to the debates in the other place, where I suspect the Bill will get more scrutiny than it has in this place. Public confidence in the fire service is high and has always been high, but the fire service needs professional underpinning and validation not only for public confidence and value for money, but for the safety of firefighters who put themselves on the frontline to protect the public. I look forward to a more extensive debate when the Bill goes to the other place, and to some comments from the Minister when he sums up. This is a positive step forward, but we need to make sure that the fire service can demonstrate to its own satisfaction, to our satisfaction and to that of the public that it is equipped, resourced and able to do the job we all admire it for doing and want it to carry on doing in the future.