Fire Service (Metropolitan Areas)

George Mudie Excerpts

Wednesday 7th March 2012 Westminster Hall

[Mr George Mudie (Leeds East) (Lab)]

I am grateful for a late opportunity to speak in this debate. I think I am on the third version of my speech, and you will be delighted to know that it is down to one page from seven.

I would like to add my thanks to those expressed to my hon. Friend the Member for Bolton South East (Yasmin Qureshi) for securing the debate and to my right hon. Friend the Member for Wentworth and Dearne (John Healey) for liaising and bringing the mix together, and for arranging a meeting with the Minister.

As the only Member from south Yorkshire in the Chamber, I would like to place on the record the financial situation that is hitting West Yorkshire fire authority. For the first two years, the cut in grants equalled 11%, amounting to £13 million, under the unequal grant distribution introduced by the Minister. Even with an equal distribution, the cut would have been 6.5%, or £6.8 million. The difference between the two distributions underlines the task that the Minister is pushing on the fire authorities. It indicates that the fire authorities do not live in an unreal world. If they were facing equal cuts, there would be a different attitude, even though the cuts are particularly tough.

The next two years raise questions for the Minister. I join my right hon. Friend the Member for St Helens South and Whiston (Mr Woodward) in pleading with him to speak quietly but firmly to his Secretary of State about the position facing fire authorities and emergency services in the final two years of the spending review. If firmness and quietness do not work with the Secretary of State, and if nothing else works, the Minister should point out to the Secretary of State that the second and worst year of the spending review is the year of the election. In view of what the fire authorities are saying to Members about the effects of the cuts, it will not be a nice position from which to fight an election.

One year of cuts is severe, but there will be two and even three years of cuts. What happens when it hits four years? There will be 13% of cuts for West Yorkshire fire authority over the next two years. If the sacrifice were shared equally across the country, the cut would be 5%. In money terms, it would be £19.8 million over the two years instead of £12.8 million. The figure of £12.8 million is formidable on its own, and it would be that figure only if there was an equality of sacrifice.

The first set of cuts cost 170 firefighters. It caused crews to be cut and cost many support services. We are speaking about grants, but they are only one part of the picture—the revenue part. There is the expenditure part, where even after cuts, the fire authority will have to look for £9.1 million in 2013-14, and £13.7 million in 2014-15. That is after the authority has made what it—not politicians—regards as cuts that will still allow it to look the public largely in the eye and say that safety has been taken into consideration; I emphasise “largely”. We are facing those sorts of budget difficulties. On top of the 170 firefighters in West Yorkshire who will go by the end of the second year of the spending review, 380 firefighters are pencilled in to go in the next two years.

[John McDonnell]

The Fire Brigades Union regional secretary, Pete Smith said:

“This will reduce our ability to respond to major outdoor fires which have damaged our moorlands and major flooding which has hit this region in recent years…There are times when we have been seriously stretched even with our current resources. These cuts risk tipping us over the edge and that will have a very serious impact on the public.”

That, from the front line, reflects exactly what my hon. Friend is saying.

[Mr Mudie]

I welcome my hon. Friend’s intervention. I have been critical of the present cuts. I have questioned the fire chief seriously and challenged him regarding the safety of my constituents. We have a lot of back-to-back houses. The chief is closing the fire station in the area, and I worry about the safety of our constituents, in terms of the time that vehicles need to get to a fire. My hon. Friend makes a good point: faced with the final two years of the spending review, the Minister has to look seriously at this issue, including an equality of sacrifice—my hon. Friends have already referred to the strange and distorted distribution of cuts.

Thanks to my right hon. Friend the Member for Wentworth and Dearne, I was able to meet the Minister. I went further than my right hon. Friend, however, in saying that I did not accept the spending envelope with which the Minister was working. The spending envelope is acceptable only if it is the Government’s will for every service to be cut by a certain amount. Because of the nature of the emergency services, provision cannot drop below a certain level without danger to the public, and to say that the emergency services are the same as libraries or other services shows a distorted set of values. I challenged the Minister about the spending envelope, and urged him, as the person who would be responsible for the consequences of any serious fires due to the cuts, to go to the Secretary of State and spell out the dangerous position that we are in.

At the meeting, the Minister agreed that his officers would meet representatives of the metropolitan fire authorities to go through the details and see whether they could accept any of the points that have been made. Let me say quietly to the Minister that I hope he will take that seriously, and that it results in a changed distribution of cuts to deal with some of the problems faced by the metropolitan fire authorities. In view of the serious points raised in this debate by representatives of big metropolitan areas, I hope that the Minister will go to the Secretary of State and say that the policy that is being pursued is unsafe and could put a lot of innocent people in serious danger.