Greenock Coastguard Station

Eilidh Whiteford Excerpts

Wednesday 8th June 2011 Commons Chamber

[Katy Clark]

I agree with my hon. Friend. I am trying to get the Minister to provide more detail on the reasoning behind the proposals. I am strongly of the view that we need a geographical spread of coastguard stations and that we need more than one in Scotland. I have not necessarily looked at the detail of every coastguard station, but I suspect that some hon. Members in the Chamber have.

[Dr Eilidh Whiteford (Banff and Buchan) (SNP)]

Perhaps the hon. Lady’s concern about stations on all parts of the coastline echoes her comments about the transferability of staff. Does she agree that local knowledge is critical to the successful operation of coastguard services?

[Katy Clark]

I agree with the hon. Lady. I am in no way trying to set one coastguard station against another; what I am trying to do is put points on behalf of the Clyde coastguard station that I do not believe will be put in any other forum. There is huge frustration about the fact that it has not been possible to make those points, and we know that very few reasons were given for the proposals.

In every debate about the issue that has taken place in the House, members of all political parties have strongly made the case for local knowledge. There is a considerable distance between the constituency of the hon. Member for Banff and Buchan (Dr Whiteford) and mine. At present that local knowledge is held in the Clyde coastguard station, and if Aberdeen were to take on the work, the acquisition of such knowledge would take a number of years. That point has been made to the Minister a number of times.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mike Penning]

I hope that there would not be compulsory redundancies, but I cannot give that commitment and I am not going to stand at this Dispatch Box and mislead people. The PCS has known that all the way through. It is important to understand that there will be job losses if we reduce the number of co-ordination centres, although I hope that such job losses will not be compulsory. I have gone through redundancy, despite my union fighting to help me, so I understand where people are coming from. However, if I am going to increase salaries, training and career prospects, I have to find that money from somewhere and that money will come from the savings we are finding. There are quite significant costs up front, particularly for the resilience we want to put into the system. The Treasury has been generous and I have money, but I cannot carry that forward—I must make savings. To be fair, the union—

[Dr Whiteford]

Will the Minister give way?

[Mike Penning]

I want to clarify the point that the hon. Member for North Ayrshire and Arran mentioned in her intervention, because if I am not careful I will not finish one intervention before I take another. I know we have a few hours, but everybody will understand if we do not speak for the whole time.

It is really important that we do not get bogged down by the fact about the Select Committee because, as anyone who has been a Minister knows, a civil servant cannot go before a Select Committee and criticise Government policy. That is not the protocol; it is not what happens. The job of a civil servant, if they go before a Select Committee, is to support Government policy. That is why civil servants at the grade of those we are talking about do not go before Select Committees. I took advice from the Cabinet Office and I ensured that we were in absolutely the right position. I bent over backwards to ensure that the Select Committee could go to any station it wished and talk to any member of staff, but I could not have uniformed staff criticising Government policy. They are fully entitled to fight through their union representatives for what they think is right, but a Select Committee is not the right and proper place to do that. Anybody who has served as a Minister knows that. We can go back through Westland if we want, and see those differences.

[Dr Whiteford]

I agree with the Minister that it is very important that we have a coastguard service that is fit for the 21st century, but I would put it to him that all the other emergency services in Scotland are devolved and one way to protect smaller stations, such as Inverclyde, might be to amend the Scotland Bill to devolve the operation of the coastguard agency in Scotland. That would mean that the services could properly address our vast coastline, in line with people’s expectations in Scotland.

[Mike Penning]

I do not want to disappoint the hon. Lady, but the Scottish National party has absolutely no chance of my breaking up a national emergency service such as this one. That will not happen. If we go down the avenue of saying that we can break up the service and that it can be operated in a completely independent little station, we will move completely away from the needs of the service. The service needs national resilience. If we do not have that, we are not offering the service that our constituents—including the hon. Lady’s constituents—deserve. It cannot happen.

When I visited the Western Isles, I saw that when the power goes down—I understand that it does so on a fairly regular basis—volunteers go up to the wireless towers on the hills and operate them manually. That is the situation we are in in the 21st century. There was a lightning strike at Falmouth and they luckily managed to keep going, but there is no proper resilience to lock in the service. In our part of the world, the police love the VHF system we operate because they operate on Airwave and although we use some of it we have a very good radio system. However, what we need is networking.

I am sure that the hon. Member for North Ayrshire and Arran is aware that at Clyde we have a hub that comes into the existing building, but we cannot stay in that building. That is one reason for the decision. We have talked about costs, and of course costs are involved—there is no illusion about the fact that costs are involved and there would be significant costs if we had another station in Clyde that was not in that building. Even if we stayed in that building, there would be considerable costs, and we cannot do so, as the Ministry of Defence has decided that it wants to be gone from that building in Clyde by 2013. We will have to move from that building. There are significant costs that we will publish and put out there, but I am in the middle of the consultation and I will not jeopardise that. Judicial review or something similar could be pushed against me if I broke into the consultation in the middle of it. I am trying to be as open as possible.