Emergency Services: Closer Working

Flick Drummond Excerpts

Tuesday 9th February 2016 Westminster Hall

[Mrs Flick Drummond (Portsmouth South) (Con)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship yet again, Mr Bone. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Bedford (Richard Fuller) on securing this debate. It is a great pleasure to praise the example that we have in Hampshire of how the emergency services and the local authority—Hampshire County Council—can work together. We already have some of the finest services in the county, with Hampshire constabulary leading the way in efficiency and focusing on the priorities of policing. I was sad to hear of the departure of Chief Constable Andy Marsh, and I know other Hampshire MPs will want to join me in paying tribute to him. His successor will inherit a strong and effective force, which I will be pleased to support in Parliament.

However, I must sound a note of concern about the plan that the police and crime commissioner has unveiled to close police stations in Portsmouth. I am going to be parochial for a couple of minutes to illustrate a point. The city faces unusual challenges of geography. We have only three main roads on to Portsea Island, and they lead into the most densely populated space outside London. It is unthinkable that we should be left without a fully supported police station and I hope that Mr Hayes will reconsider his options. The first that any of us heard about this plan was through our local newspaper, which is no way to manage a service that we all depend on for public safety. In the light of the proposals for the police and crime commissioners to take on greater responsibility, it is a real cause for concern. I know from my postbag that the closure plan is alarming to constituents, and I will continue to oppose it.

However, to get back to positives, in the fire service we have had the recent consultation on its future as a service in Hampshire, and how it can adapt to a changing physical environment and capitalise on a steady improvement in fire safety. We know that over the past 10 years, the number of call-outs to domestic incidents has halved. Call-outs overall are down by almost a third, and Hampshire fire and rescue is in the best-performing quartile in the country for response times.

As has been mentioned, in Hampshire we already have a highly evolved co-operation between the emergency services. It is called H3: Hampshire fire and rescue, Hampshire County Council and Hampshire constabulary. The sharing of facilities between Hampshire fire and rescue service and the police has been achieved without radical surgery to governance; it is all about common sense. The fire service works with the South Central ambulance service as a co-responder, and they share buildings in parts of the county, too. There is a genuine willingness to co-operate in Hampshire, which is perhaps at a more advanced stage than that assumed by the proposals to legislate. So I hope that any legislation does not impose unwieldy structures where there is flexibility at present. I know from the Hampshire fire and rescue service consultation response that that is of concern. It also makes the excellent point that there is the potential for co-operation nationally in bringing ambulance services into the mix. That is a very powerful argument from a service that already knows so much about collaboration.

Indeed, it is important that the differing roles and competences of our emergency services are respected when it comes to matters such as accountability for complaints and personnel. There are plenty of areas for potential integration, such as communications and service planning, and in outreach and safety issues of all kinds. Let us make sure we focus on what is practical first and keep that flexibility for our emergency services to design the best services for their particular region.