Sustainable Development Goals

Jim Fitzpatrick Excerpts

Thursday 24th November 2016 Westminster Hall

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

It is a pleasure to see you in the chair this afternoon, Mr Stringer, and I am equally pleased to follow the hon. Member for Congleton (Fiona Bruce), who has established a very doughty reputation in the House defending communities against religious discrimination and intolerance. That was demonstrated straightforwardly and powerfully in her speech.

I congratulate the Select Committee on the production of this very important report. Although it deals with national and global responses to the United Nations sustainable development goals, I want to focus more on delivery. I declare an interest as the voluntary, unpaid chair of Fire Aid, which is an umbrella organisation for fire and rescue services and non-governmental organisations and charities in the UK doing work around the world. I want to discuss their role in the context of two of the sustainable development goals. I make no apology for using this opportunity to unashamedly promote Fire Aid and everything that it does, as I hope colleagues will understand in a few minutes.

There are three basic issues that I want to address, which are relevant to goals 3 and 11: the role of fire and rescue services internationally, the creation of Fire Aid and the connection to and delivery of the UN SDGs, which were considered by the Chair of the International Development Committee, my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, West Derby (Stephen Twigg), in his introduction to the report.

Fire and rescue services have a long history of responding to international disasters. For decades, firefighters have volunteered to go to parts of the world affected by earthquakes and other natural disasters. In the early days, I believe all were volunteers. It was personal, unpaid, informal and sometimes not helped—indeed blocked—by the fire brigade bureaucracy. That has changed. Firefighters now not only attend disasters but are continuously out in countries around the world, being proactive—building safety infrastructure and resilience, and therefore saving lives.

A number of fire and rescue organisations and NGOs emerged from those years of activity and experience and in 2012-13 banded together. I was recruited and invited to assist by Emma MacLennan, director of the charity EASST, the Eastern Alliance for Safe and Sustainable Transport, which works in eastern Europe on road safety matters. I was nominated by Lord Dubs and Lord Robertson from the other place, because of my background of 23 years in the fire brigade, two years as road safety Minister and time as a former member of the Select Committee on Transport, which you served on in a distinguished manner, Mr Stringer, for many years. I was asked to chair that umbrella organisation.

What emerged was the organisation now called Fire Aid. Founding members included the Asian Fire Service Association, whose conference I spoke at in Wembley this morning, Blythswood Care, the Chief Fire Officers Association, EASST, Fire Safety Friends of Russia, Kent fire and rescue service, Operation Florian, Staffordshire fire and rescue service, the United Kingdom Rescue Organisation and the World Rescue Organisation.

We had one-off funding from the Department for International Development to set up our website, which was extremely welcome, in recognition of the vital role carried out by the UK fire and rescue services and NGOs in donating equipment and training for communities and countries in need. We subsequently secured some sponsorship from the Fédération Internationale de l’Automobile Foundation. We have memorandums of understanding with the Institution of Fire Engineers, the Chief Fire Officers Association, and the Fire Brigades Union.

Our founding organisations are working in 30 countries around the world, mainly in Africa, Asia and eastern Europe. Volunteers from our partners deliver equipment donated by fire brigades and fire industry manufacturers. They provide training on how to use the equipment as well as mentoring key staff wherever they go. They instruct on how to build the safety infrastructure, emergency services co-operation and communications that we in the UK take for granted.

Our website provides a clearing house for donated equipment, for which we organise and provide storage. Overseas partners or UK-based organisations can bid for that equipment and we match what is available with identified need and assure transparent and accredited use for those good enough to donate that equipment.

Our organisations have provided the manual for fire safety in refugee camps to the United Nations. Operation Florian was invited to work in the Lebanon for three weeks in August this year to undertake a fire-risk reduction project in a number of informal settlements to improve the protection and safety for Syrian refugees after a series of fatal fires.

That brings me to the UN and the sustainable development goals. The UN declared a decade of road safety from 2010 to 2020, and we have been supporting those objectives. As my hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, West Derby mentioned, the 2015 UN summit adopted a new agenda for the next 15 years. It included 17 goals and 169 targets, several of which directly relate to the work of Fire Aid partners, and therefore we can assist with them. I will mention two in particular. Goal 3 is

“Ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages”,

and target 3.6 is

“By 2020, halve the number of global deaths and injuries from road traffic accidents”—

we call them crashes in the UK, but the language has obviously not caught up yet. The majority of collisions are caused by people making deliberate decisions to use their mobile phone, to speed, to drink drive, not to wear a seat belt or to take drugs. Most crashes are not accidents, because they could be avoided.

Goal 11 is

“Make cities inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable”,

and target 11.2 is

“By 2030, provide access to safe, affordable, accessible and sustainable transport systems for all, improving road safety, notably by expanding public transport, with special attention to the needs of those in vulnerable situations, women, children, persons with disabilities and older persons”.

I attended the UN and World Health Organisation’s second road safety world summit in Brasilia last year. Sadly, no UK Minister from DFID or the Department for Transport was available to attend. The UN subsequently adopted the statement from that summit. The targets are as I mentioned, but in real terms they aim to halve the 1.2 million people who die in road crashes around the world every year and reduce the 20 million people who are seriously injured.

As we all know, our roads in the UK are among the safest in the world, and our fire and rescue service has the ability and motivation to play its part in delivering that great record. We can share our knowledge, expertise and abilities with other countries that are not so fortunate. I thank DFID for the support we have received from it so far. We stand ready to assist in realising the international targets.

It to the Government’s credit that they have achieved the 0.7% GDP aim. We are a small facilitating charity, and we are very frustrated because when we approach our embassies and other organisations overseas to try to tap into the DFID money, we are told that it is not worth getting out of bed for less than £1 million. We have only one part-time member of staff, and £20,000 would sustain us for a whole year. It is difficult to get recognition for the role that we play.

When I spoke at the conference in Brasilia on a post-crash response platform, most of the other speakers were bidding for more investment in medical facilities. They wanted trauma centres, better-equipped accident and emergency departments, more neurosurgeons and MRI scanners. Those are all appropriate asks for casualties, but Fire Aid pointed out that the victims need to be rescued from the crashed vehicles first. Without fire engines, cutting equipment and trained crews, they will not need better hospitals and clinical staff because the casualties will not get to the medical facility. Without joint working with the police and ambulance services, the casualties will not reach the hospitals; therefore, they will not need medical assistance. In some eastern European countries, nearly 80% of road crash victims die at the roadside. In the UK, it is about 30%. Some countries do not have a single 999-type emergency telephone number. There are simple things that we can deliver, such as equipment training and facilities. I would like to take the opportunity to congratulate all our volunteers and membership organisations on what they deliver. I hope we can solicit some more support on their behalf.

We have a solid road safety record in the UK. We have great expertise in dealing with crashes, and we have volunteers who want to help less fortunate countries. That could be viewed as soft diplomacy—clearly it is—but morally it is the right thing to do. Organisations such as Fire Aid need resources. I am delighted that the Minister and my hon. Friend the shadow Minister are in their places, and I look forward to their responses.