Policing and Crime Bill

Jim Fitzpatrick Excerpts

Monday 13th June 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mike Penning]

I understand exactly where my hon. Friend is coming from, especially on the point about audit. However, at the moment, we do not feel that there is a need to use external specialists in that way; if we find out later that there is, the inspector could ask the Home Secretary for those specific measures. The fire service has enough expertise to ensure that the regime works. It will be completely different from the current regime.

[Jim Fitzpatrick (Poplar and Limehouse) (Lab)]

I am grateful to the Minister for giving way to another former Fire Minister. There used to be an honourable tradition that Fire Ministers were West Ham United supporters, but sadly that was broken by the right hon. Gentleman.

We have gone from the fire services inspectorate to the National Audit Office and then to nothing, and we are now going back to the fire services inspectorate. Has the Minister taken into account, for example, the United Kingdom Accreditation Service, which could give external advice to the new inspectorate, very much along the lines suggested by the hon. Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Robert Neill)? Will the new chief inspector also be the national adviser for fire? I would be grateful if the Minister explained a little of the background.

[Mike Penning]

I am conscious that I am in the hands of experts who were Ministers long before I was, but as an ex-firefighter, I was really quite surprised to see how the inspections took place when I came into the role. They did not take place as envisaged by my hon. Friend the Member for Bromley and Chislehurst (Robert Neill) when he introduced the relevant legislation. There was a genuine feeling that we had to address the costs and how the inspections were done. To be perfectly honest, the system has not worked. We cannot continue with the situation where one fire and rescue force inspects another and they tell each other what they can and cannot inspect.

This proposal is separate, which is why we have put the new inspector alongside Her Majesty’s inspectorate of constabulary. They will tell us exactly what expertise they require. As ex-firefighters, the hon. Member for Poplar and Limehouse (Jim Fitzpatrick) and I can assume what they will need to look at, but I accept that some fire and rescues services will need to draw on financial expertise from other areas.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Jones]

I should not be the only one taking credit for that. The hon. Gentleman should do so as well, as should many other people in the House. To give credit to the Government, they have taken this issue seriously and both the Ministers who served on the Committee are committed to ensuring that we get the best outcomes for people in mental health crisis in the criminal justice system.

We should soon have a situation in which police cells will not be the first resort, as they have been in the past. I am not criticising the police for taking people to the cells; they were often the only places available. However, we need to monitor closely what happens to people when they are detained under sections 135 and 136 of the Act. I would not want keeping people at home to become the de facto position. That might be helpful for the statistics on keeping people out of police cells, but people’s homes might not be the best possible place for individuals in crisis. The hon. Member for Halesowen and Rowley Regis made the point that they do not necessarily have to be placed in a health facility. The hon. Member for Broxbourne has said on numerous occasions that this country needs a network of places of safety for individuals in mental health crisis. Those places could be run by health authorities, by charities or by others, but we need such a network because neither a police cell nor, in some cases, a hospital is the best place for certain people in crisis.

I am glad that the proposed changes to the Bill are being taken seriously by the Government. I pay tribute to the way in which both Ministers have addressed these matters in Committee. Even though some of the proposals are not going to be put in the Bill, I believe that the Ministers, working with colleagues in the Department of Health, will be able to achieve a situation in which people in mental health crisis do not end up in the criminal justice system. That should be our aim.

[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.

[Sir Edward Leigh (Gainsborough) (Con)]

May I first apologise, Mr Deputy Speaker? Although I was in the Chamber for the Minister’s opening speech, I had to chair a Delegated Legislation Committee—you were kind enough to put me on the Panel of Chairs—so I am sorry that I have not been present for the whole of this debate.

I want to speak to new clause 23, which was so ably introduced by my right hon. and learned Friend the Member for Harborough (Sir Edward Garnier). I understand that it will not be pushed to a vote, that there will be a review in relation to PACE and that the Minister has listened carefully to all the arguments that have been made. If we are to have a review, there is an opportunity—I will use my brief remarks to talk about it—to have a debate in this country about face coverings generally. Many people in our country feel that it is quite un-British, and is not necessary for any reason, except in exceptional circumstances.

I do not want to suggest that we should take heavy-handed, universal action to prevent people from covering their face in this country, because that is also in a sense un-British. Fundamentally, as a nation, we actually believe in the freedom of people to live their lives in the way that, for whatever reason, they want, so long as they do not alarm or intimidate others. I know that other countries—for example, France and I believe Belgium, which are perfectly moderate, sensible, freedom-loving countries—have decided to ban face coverings in public, but we probably do not want to proceed in that way in this country.

If we are to have a review, I believe that this is an opportunity to have a debate. I certainly join my hon. Friends who have expressed concern about certain situations in which people feel intimidated, such as in the environs of a hunt, an animal research laboratory, or a demonstration outside Parliament. People are of course entitled to demonstrate—nobody is denying that—but it is very intimidating for the police and the public to see people engaged in demonstrations with any kind of face covering.

I understand that it is perfectly possible under present arrangements for the authorities to issue written instructions so that a police constable can require people to remove their face coverings and all the rest of it, but I would like us to go further. I suggest that the way to deal with this problem is to say—in a particular situation that might be threatening, intimidatory, violent or confrontational on both sides—there should certainly be a right for a police constable to require somebody to remove a face covering. It should be possible for a chief constable to have such a right, as well as to lay down general prohibitions against face coverings.

It should also be possible—there should be a public debate about this, because I know that there are different points of view—for the Home Secretary to issue a ban against face coverings in certain situations or in particularly sensitive geographical places, such as the central areas of the cities of London and Westminster, the central part of our capital city, which is sensitive for all sorts of reasons, or in hospitals, schools, law courts and doctors’ surgeries. I know not everybody in the House will agree, but many members of the public are concerned about this.