Policing and Crime Bill

Baroness Hoey Excerpts

Report stage: House of Commons
Tuesday 26th April 2016 Commons Chamber

[Lyn Brown]

I say gently to the hon. Gentleman that the turnout last time for PCC elections was dismal. I hope it will be significantly better this time, but when I was on the doorsteps last year, in parts of the country other than my own little patch in London I did not find that people knew who their PCC was. I say gently to him that our constituents do not know that when they go to the polls next week they will be electing a PCC who might be taking over their fire service. The Bill will not have been enacted by then.

I think that the timing and, as I will explain, the way we have done this has been wrong. The consultation preceding the Bill did not seek the views of experts and specialists on the substance of the proposals. It set out how a PCC could assume control of a fire and rescue service and then asked consultees what they thought of the process. It did not ask them what they thought of the proposals themselves, and it did not ask whether the proposals would increase public safety or lead to better governance.

It is not in the impact assessment—that very thin impact assessment, which I am sure that the Members who sat on the Bill Committee will have read—but the Knight review of the future of the fire service recommended that PCC takeovers be attempted only if a rigorous pilot could identify tangible and “clearly set out benefits”. The Government chose to ignore this key recommendation and are instead proceeding before any evidence has been gathered about the likely benefits, costs and threats to the plan. It is utterly reckless. The impact assessment is threadbare. The only rationale offered for this intervention is the Government’s belief that there needs to be greater collaboration between emergency services. No one thinks otherwise, but the Government have not provided any justification of why it is more likely to occur under PCCs or any analysis of the current barriers to collaboration. It is policy without evidence or clear rationale.

[Kate Hoey (Vauxhall) (Lab)]

I agree with everything my hon. Friend is saying. She knows—and surely the Government know—how much co-operation already goes on. It does not have to be prescribed in this top-down way; it works organically and it works really well.

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The amendment is meant to be probing and might not be made to the Bill at this stage, but when the Minister comes to the Dispatch Box, it would be helpful if he could provide clarity about the discussions he has had with the Department regarding the title change and about his views and intentions as the Bill continues to progress through the House.

[Kate Hoey]

I rise to support new clause 20 in particular. I declare an interest as chair of the Fire Brigades Union parliamentary group. Giving fire and rescue services a statutory responsibility for leading the emergency services in response to flooding is something on which we have had meeting after meeting over the years with Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Ministers, who have all said that they supported it, and with Ministers from different Departments. It goes so far, but then it stops. There is clearly a Treasury argument here somewhere, but I feel strongly about the matter. There has been an increase in floods over recent years, and we have seen how our fire and rescue services have responded. What is happening seems wrong when we rely on them.

Let us look at the data from last year. Thirty-four fire and rescue services provided assistance in the worst-affected areas. Data collected by the FBU, which does a good job in getting it, from individual fire and rescue services found that firefighters responded to at least 1,400 flood incidents across north-west England and 450 incidents in Yorkshire. As we saw on our television screens, with politicians lining up to thank them and say how brave they had been and how wonderful they were, firefighters rescued people from a wide range of hazardous situations, evacuating people in advance of coming floods and making various other emergency interventions. It seems strange that we give our firefighters great praise for doing something that we and local people automatically expect them to do, yet we do not make their leading of the emergency services a statutory responsibility. I can only assume that the Government do not want to spend what might be some extra resources on ensuring that firemen and firewomen and all the rescue services are properly equipped.

We have seen terrible examples of when firemen and women have not had the right safety or protective equipment and have had to do things without the correct clothing, with things running out in some areas. They still did those things, but that is wrong and I genuinely do not understand the situation. I am sure that the Minister supported the proposal at one time. Many Ministers have supported it, but when they get into a position in which they actually have to make the decision or are allowed to get involved in it, they seem to change their mind. I hope the Minister will respond to that and that we will get the opportunity to support the change in a vote today.

I now turn briefly to the other issues. I share the position of the shadow Front-Bench team on police and crime commissioners. There is no public appetite for change. Wherever I have been around the country, no one has been clamouring for reform of how we govern our fire services or for any responsibility to be transferred to PCCs. I have not heard any evidence today—we may hear it from the Minister, but I doubt it—that there is a problem with the current governance arrangements. No one has convinced me that the change would deliver an emergency service that is more economic, efficient and effective or would help to improve public safety. We all want co-ordination, and I welcome that co-operation and co-ordination have gone further in some parts of the country than in others. As my hon. Friend the Member for West Ham (Lyn Brown) said from the Front Bench, we want to see more of that, but we do not need to bring it in this top-down, totally anti-democratic way.

I am not at all ashamed to say that I believe that firefighters and police officers perform different roles. That does not mean that we do not value equally the roles of both, but they perform different roles and have different remits. A police officer is seen as a legal person and someone who is there to uphold the law. A fireman or firewoman, or anyone involved in the rescue services, is seen very differently. Having a single employer will begin to confuse that in the public mind. The preventive work that firefighters do and the way that they are trusted, implicitly and completely, by the public could well be jeopardised if the changes go through.

The Bill and this change would do nothing at all to invest in fire and rescue services’ resources. I have already mentioned the work that goes into responding to large-scale flooding incidents and providing emergency medical response. The Government should focus on putting extra resources into initiatives that will actually lead to the changes and to co-ordination.

[Mr Jim Cunningham (Coventry South) (Lab)]

I am sure that my hon. Friend would agree that this is frankly more about saving money than improving the service. She probably noticed that the burden has been shifted on to local authorities, with the 2% increase. Eventually, the entire burden for fire and police will be shifted on to local authorities. Then we will have a situation of profligate spending—we have been here before—and local authorities will get capped.

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[Kate Hoey]

Absolutely; there is no doubt this is a cost-cutting exercise. I accept that these days everybody has to have constraints on the public purse, as far as is possible, but there are ways of doing that and this bureaucratic way seems to have been brought in by people who have had the idea for a long time and now have seen an opportunity to push it forward. The Government should not be pursuing these almost ideological ways of trying to save money. They should be looking at ways of improving our emergency services and ensuring that they co-ordinate well together. It would be wrong to transfer this responsibility to a PCC. We have a valuable, popular fire service that has the confidence of the public, and we should be very wary of making those changes, which I think will have a really detrimental effect on not only how the public see the service, but on its effectiveness out there in the country. I hope we will be able to make some changes to this proposal and that when Members get the opportunity they will vote to put a stop to something that is very wrong indeed.

[Several hon. Members rose—]