Emergency Services: Closer Working

Lyn Brown Excerpts

Tuesday 9th February 2016 Westminster Hall

[Richard Fuller]

That is right, but sometimes there is no will; what is the way then? PCCs are democratically elected figures, and they have a responsibility to the people who elected them to maintain their range of services. The proposals in the legislation are not clear about how that will be managed. It would be helpful to hear that from the Minister, because it will not apply to the vast majority of places across the United Kingdom. The number of places affected is small, but they are important. The people of Devon, Cornwall and Somerset will want to know the Government’s intentions, because in a few weeks’ time, they will be voting for someone who may well have that responsibility if Parliament passes the legislation.

I would like to make a few points about PCCs, starting with finance. All Members of Parliament will be aware that chief constables have made the case for a number of years now about the financial pressure involved in maintaining the desired levels of policing. Many of us on the Government Benches have pressed chief constables and others to look for savings and, sometimes reluctantly and sometimes positively, they have engaged with us. Guess what? Effective policing can be delivered with lower budgets. Who would have thought that possible? However, there is admittedly still pressure across the board on public and police financing, which is why my right hon. Friend the Chancellor was right to maintain police budgets in the autumn statement.

I am sure that we all look forward to that maintenance of funding, but I was concerned, not for the first time, by comments made by the police and crime commissioner in my county of Bedfordshire. Just last Sunday, the Bedfordshire on Sunday led with a story headlined, “Takeover threat for fire service”. It began:

“‘Help us with our funding or be taken over’, is the warning to the fire service from the county’s cop boss.”

The PCC may well be jumping the gun, because he does not have those powers yet, but I think that many of us would be alarmed to hear such an aggressive statement from a PCC who might be given responsibility for the fire service. The fire service is not a piggy bank for police and crime commissioners to raid for their budgets.

[Lyn Brown (West Ham) (Lab)]

But it is.

[Richard Fuller]

The PCC ought to know, and have responsibility for knowing, that he must—

[Richard Fuller]

I am not sure whether the shadow Minister was speaking out in support of the PCC raiding fire service budgets. Perhaps she was; perhaps that is new news. Who would have known? Perhaps she would like to clarify.

[Lyn Brown]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for allowing me to clarify, and I congratulate him on securing this debate and on the tenor of his contributions. I was merely agreeing with his suggestion that some PCCs may well see the fire service as a piggy bank from which to fund the police service, and I wonder whether that was the Minister’s intention.

[Richard Fuller]

I am grateful to the shadow Minister, who came to my constituency last year just before the general election. She was very welcome in Bedford. The issue is not so much that some PCCs may be incapable of managing their budget effectively and who therefore think that this is an opportunity to take money from our firefighters—as the Bedfordshire PCC appears to think—but that they should not be permitted to do so. On that, I think she and I agree. We want to ensure that the funding for our fire service cannot be raided by PCCs such as the one for Bedfordshire, who wishes to get his hands on it.

--- Later in debate ---

[Lyn Brown (West Ham) (Lab)]

It is a genuine pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Bone. We have had an excellent, well-informed debate and hon. Members have made many good points.

Labour supports close collaboration among the emergency services, but we fear that these proposals come with significant risks and are being carried out in a cavalier fashion. The consultation exercise that preceded the proposals gives us the distinct impression that the Government decided that they would make radical changes before they spoke to the key stakeholders. In any serious consultation, stakeholders would be asked what they think of the substance of the proposals. Instead, they were merely asked to comment on the process by which PCCs will gain control of their local fire service, not on whether the process has any merit, and they were asked a litany of leading questions.

The proposed process by which a PCC takes control of a fire service is rather authoritarian. Although they must seek agreement from the local fire authority, if agreement is not forthcoming the matter will be arbitrated by the Home Secretary, who will decide whether a change is

“in the interests of economy, efficiency and effectiveness or public safety”.

That is a recipe for hostile takeovers.

[Ian Lavery]

In Northumberland, the police and crime commissioner was opposed to further integration with other blue light operations. Will my hon. Friend comment on the position there?

[Lyn Brown]

That one passed me by, but I will come to Northumberland and have a conversation about it. I am sure the Minister has an answer.

The Government are ignoring the advice of the 2013 Knight review. When Sir Ken Knight considered expanding the role of PCCs, he recommended that, if such a policy were pursued, it ought to be trialled through a pilot, rather than be rolled out immediately. Why did the Government choose categorically to ignore that key recommendation?

I fear that these proposals carry a number of serious risks, and I worry about the continuation of the successful, locally driven collaborations that have been talked about at length in recent years and have saved lives. When I was shadow Fire Minister, I visited a number of fire services, including Northumberland’s, and I heard of collaborations with ambulance services. I was particularly impressed by the Lincolnshire fire and rescue service and the East Midlands ambulance service, which ensured a swift, comprehensive service to isolated parts of the county. Firefighters responded to medical emergencies and took patients to hospital if they could do so more quickly than the ambulance. It really did save lives; it was an exceptionally good collaboration.

Only yesterday, we heard that the ambulance service has missed its targets six months in a row. Our paramedics work hard, but they cannot be everywhere at once. Our fire and ambulance services recognise that, and they work side by side to be part of the solution. What will happen to such innovations in the brave new world of combined police and fire services? Will PCCs be charged to continue that work, or will it simply fall by the wayside? What guarantees do communities have that such innovations, which are important to them, will be top of PCCs’ agendas?

To save money and be more efficient and effective, local services successfully share back office functions. A good example is the North West Fire Control project, which set up a single control centre for services in Cumbria, Lancashire and Greater Manchester. It works really well. What will happen to such collaborations? Will those services be disaggregated? I do not know. Perhaps the Minister does. I worry that there is a danger that such locally driven projects will be crowded out as energy is spent on responding to an agenda that has been dreamt up in Whitehall.

I also worry that dismantling the existing structures of accountability will cause a democratic deficit. The next PCC elections are in May, and the major political parties have already selected most of their candidates. Does the Minister expect the candidates to detail in their manifestos their intentions about fire services? Should that be a central issue in the election debates? I gently say that I do not believe that the Home Secretary or the Minister expect the fire service to be a central plank in the PCC elections. Is that not worrying in itself? It is as though the Government see the fire service as a secondary concern to policing.

Peter Murphy, director of public policy and management research at Nottingham Business School at Nottingham Trent University, said that

“if the current plans are implemented there is a very strong chance that the fire and rescue services would go back to the ‘benign neglect’ that characterised the service from 1974 to 2001 when the Home Office was last responsible for fire services. Police, civil disobedience, immigration and criminal justice dominated the Home Office agenda, as well as its time and resources.”

If the fire service becomes the lesser partner in a merged service,

“the long-term implications will include smaller fire crews with fewer appliances and older equipment arriving at incidents. Prevention and protection work, already significantly falling, will result in fewer school visits and fire alarm checks for the elderly, not to mention the effect on business, as insurance costs rise because of increased risks to buildings and premises.”

I think his assessment is right. There is a real danger that fire will become an unloved, secondary concern of management—a Cinderella service. Perhaps the Minister can tell us how he will ensure that the service is improved, that we invest in the best equipment and training, that vulnerable people continue to have fire alarm checks and that schools are visited and children educated.

I want to ask a basic question about reorganisation. The Government appear to assume that it will be easy for fire and rescue services to reorganise to suit the PCCs’ boundaries, but to talk simply about transferring responsibility from a local authority belies the complexity of the situation. Fire budgets are very integrated in some councils to ensure the efficiency and effectiveness of the service, so it will be difficult to unravel them, as has been shown by previous attempted mergers of fire services. Has any work been done to assess the complexity? What conclusions has the Minister come to about the difficulties he might encounter? What concerns have county and metropolitan councils raised with him about disaggregating budgets and the effect on important emergency services?

Finally, on funding, fire and rescue services have already had to reduce spending by 12% over the course of the last Parliament, which is a cumulative cash cut of some £236 million, and further projected reductions are to come. When I met some fire services, I was told that their service would not be viable in future as a result of the cuts. That is the reality of the tough financial context in which PCCs are being asked to take on fire services.

There are alarming signs that the front-line service is beginning to suffer. Response times are creeping upwards. As the Minister knows full well, every second counts when people are stuck in a car wreck or a burning building. What risk analysis has the Home Office done to ascertain how PCCs will be able to reduce fire spending without increasing response times and reducing resilience and safety? I ask him to publish that risk assessment so that we can all evaluate it. It is not as if police forces have spare money to pass to the fire service, as we heard in the effective speech by the hon. Member for Portsmouth South (Mrs Drummond). They are still absorbing cuts of 25% to their funding from the last Parliament and face further real-term cuts. They have done amazingly well in such tough circumstances, but one has to wonder whether PCCs are happy that the Government are handing them another Whitehall-imposed funding crisis to deal with. Again, does the Minister expect PCCs to cover the shortfall in funding by introducing privatisation into the fire and rescue frontline? The last time I asked that question, the Minister shook his head but offered no verbal or recordable assurances whatsoever. Will he allow PCCs to end the full-time professional fire service or to sell it off bit by bit? What assurances can he give the House that those paths will not be followed? What control will remain in Whitehall to ensure that our fire services are not privatised or sold?

In conclusion, we genuinely support closer and more effective working between the emergency services, which we have seen work really well, but we have serious concerns about the inherent risk in the Government’s proposals. If the Minister is convinced that they are the way forward, he should publish a risk assessment and be confident that a rigorous pilot will demonstrate their merits. Until he commits to that, I feel that the risks involved are too great and pose too much of a threat to our communities for us to be able to support the proposals.