Emergency Services (Interoperability)

Mark Pawsey Excerpts

Tuesday 12th June 2012 Westminster Hall

[Mark Pawsey (Rugby) (Con)]

It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Havard, and a pleasure to secure a debate on such an important subject. People might assume that because I am introducing this topic, I have a background in one of the emergency services. That is not so, although I have a brother who is a police officer. I was in business before coming to Parliament and I approach the issue of emergency services working together from the perspective of a business person in many ways, ensuring the efficiency of the operation and that public assets are used with maximum efficiency.

During my time as a Member of Parliament, I have formed the view that the emergency services are at their best when they work co-operatively and closely together. I have become aware of the benefits of that way of working since becoming an MP and have joined other hon. Members in creating a new all-party parliamentary group on emergency services. Other all-party groups support the individual services, but I remain convinced that the services need to be brought together to ensure that they work for the good of the country as a whole. It is important that each emergency service is not viewed, organised and operated in isolation. Our new all-party group was set up with the explicit objective of promoting joined-up working between the emergency services—the key word being “interoperability”. I shall cover those issues in my remarks.

Why do we need interoperability between the emergency services? History shows clearly that there can be a real danger if an emergency service looks inward on itself and operates solely in its own interests when contributing to resolving an emergency. There is grave danger if the three main emergency services—police, fire and rescue and the ambulance service—work in isolation, with little contact between them. This was borne out particularly in the emergency response to the 7 July bombings. There have been a number of reports since that event, and Lady Justice Hallett’s coroner’s report in particular highlighted interoperability between the emergency services as a major issue. The report bore out concerns that each service, when responding to that event, did not have a full grasp of what the other services were doing in response. The coroner’s report, which was published on 6 May 2011, said that there was a lack of adequate sharing of information between the emergency services’ and Transport for London’s control rooms.

One of the first issues that the all-party group considered was how many emergency services there are. I have mentioned the three blue-light services—police, fire and rescue and ambulance—which are most commonly referred to as emergency services, but they are not the only people who respond on our behalf when an emergency occurs. For example, coastguards play a vitally important role in saving lives, and orange-light services, such as the Highways Agency, assist with the day to day, smooth running of the road network. In emergencies affecting London, both Transport for London and the Port of London Authority are involved. So the response to any emergency will involve more than the traditional blue-light services. The key issue with regard to interoperability is that each service needs to know about the activity of others in responding to an emergency or the threat of loss of life.

[Karen Lumley (Redditch) (Con)]

A few weeks ago we had the unfortunate experience of the English Defence League marching in Redditch. I was impressed by the emergency services working together under the police’s gold command. Does my hon. Friend agree that as the Olympics draw closer, we need a seamless, comprehensive, integrated approach to our services, with a clear chain of command, so that everyone knows who they are reporting to?

[Mark Pawsey]

My hon. Friend is well ahead of me. I will talk at some length about the Olympics, which is one of the biggest challenges our country faces in terms of a possible security threat. My hon. Friend is right to draw attention to the need for gold command, led by the police service.

On the broader issue of who responds on our behalf in an emergency, taking the simple example of a serious accident on the motorway, attendance of the police and the ambulance service, responding to dangers to life, and of the fire and rescue service—to free people trapped in vehicles—will be necessary, but it is just as crucial that the Highways Agency is there to assess the situation, to help to minimise the effect on traffic and get the motorway moving again as quickly as possible. That example shows why joint working is paramount.

If we accept that the services responding on our behalf to an emergency need to work more closely together, where does responsibility for joint working currently lie? The three main blue-light services are the responsibility of different Departments. The police service is the responsibility of the Home Office; the ambulance service is administered by the Department of Health; and the fire and rescue service is administered by local authorities, under the control of the Department for Communities and Local Government. In theory, that may be no bad thing, but in practice there is grave danger that each service is considered in isolation. Since becoming an MP, I have learnt about silo thinking, and with each emergency service attached to a Department, there is a danger of such thinking.

[Mr David Hanson (Delyn) (Lab)]

There are even more silos, because the health service and local government in Wales are devolved to the Welsh Assembly, and the position is similar in Scotland. The Home Office has a responsibility nationally for such matters. Rather than three silos, there are in fact five or seven.

[Mark Pawsey]

The right hon. Gentleman makes a fair point, which adds to the argument in favour of some overarching control or administration to ensure close working between the various agencies involved, so that we do not drift to silo thinking.

I welcome the fact that the Crime and Security Minister is here to respond for the Government, because the police take the lead at incidents—my hon. Friend the Member for Redditch (Karen Lumley) drew attention to the police taking command—and he is best placed to speak about interoperability between the emergency services. I hope that he accepts that there must be greater focus on the need for joint working between the services and between Departments. The Government must understand and appreciate the need for greater collaboration.

Interoperability between the emergency services means that each of the three Departments that I mentioned must work together, and the Cabinet Office, which is charged with ensuring effective development, co-ordination and implementation of Government objectives across the board, must play its part in ensuring that interoperability becomes a key facet of our emergency services. For there to be a unified service response, there needs to be a unified Government response to the pressures faced by the services.

The problem was highlighted in a 2011 report by the Royal United Services Institute, “Anatomy of a Terrorist Attack”:

“Political understanding of the complexities of major incident response is critical to the future of the emergency services.”

The report also contrasted the civil situation with the military situation. In the military, all three emergency services report to one body, the Ministry of Defence, but the civil emergency services do not have an equivalent. In the absence of a Minister with specific responsibility for the broader emergency services, there is no one to argue for ring-fenced or increased budgets, making the recommendations of the report on 7 July difficult to implement.

We can see a difficult picture emerging, although given the structure of the civil service and how government is organised, there is some sense of inevitability about that. It is important, however, to understand how vital interoperability between the services is. Communications between the services—their ability to talk to and understand each other—is also a key point in joint working. Lady Justice Hallett reported:

“It is also well known, particularly as a result of the report of the 7th July Review Committee, that there were considerable failings in radio and mobile communications...The unprecedented volume of radio and mobile telephone communications caused congestion on the airwaves because of a lack of capacity. The emergency services and London Underground were further inhibited in their communications by restrictions on the coverage of their radio systems.”

My awareness of the issue arose from a visit to Airwave, a company with a substantial presence in my constituency of Rugby. The company designed, built and operates the largest public safety radio communications network in the world. It delivers voice and data communications to all the organisations involved in the public services, including the blue-light services as well as local authorities, utilities and transport providers. It has its own Tetra—terrestrial trunked radio—network in the UK, which was purpose-built to meet the needs of the emergency services, and covers 99% of the country’s landmass. Since 2008—after the 7/7 bombings, clearly—the network has included the entire London underground system. Importantly for us, given what we are discussing today, Airwave’s network is interoperable, which means that the emergency services and public safety organisations can communicate effectively with one another.

The success and importance of interoperability within the emergency services was noted in the coroner’s report on 7/7, which drew attention to the need for inter-agency liaison and communications:

“The 7th July 2005 Review Committee concluded that communications within and between the emergency services ‘did not stand up on 7 July’. It further observed that individual emergency service personnel could not communicate effectively, in some cases with each other and, in other cases, with their control rooms…There have been substantial improvements brought about by the introduction of the CONNECT and AIRWAVE radio systems.”

Where are we now? How can interoperability help? Each day, the emergency services need to ensure that they are working with each other efficiently. Furthermore, working together takes on even more importance during major events.

[Geoffrey Clifton-Brown (The Cotswolds) (Con)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing this important debate. In addition to the Government’s emergency services, and taking into account that a serious event might take place in more than one city at once, might we not lack overall resilience training in this country? My constituency contains the Fire Service college at Moreton-in-Marsh, where a certain amount of inter-service training takes place. Could we not do much more as a nation to have interoperability and resilience training, not only for the silos that my hon. Friend mentioned but for the many more that could be involved, such as the utilities and local authorities?

[Mark Pawsey]

I shall come to local resilience forums and the useful part that they play in bringing people together. Communications are key, with people working together and understanding the different ways of operating. Clearly, through training at an institution such as the one in my hon. Friend’s constituency, emergency services personnel can get to understand more about the actions of colleagues not only in their own service but in other services. That understanding can be crucial in getting the right help to an incident as fast as possible. Not only must the police, fire and ambulance services be able to work with each other, but every individual force within each service needs to be able to do so as well. There are 53 police forces in the UK and their work often overlaps, most often at a force boundary but also when specialist forces such as the British Transport police are involved or when officers travel to another area to provide support at an event. Good communications are at the heart of such interoperability.

One organisation cannot work with another if it does not know what the other organisation is doing or trying to achieve. Sometimes that is straightforward, such as ensuring that all staff within a service use the same sort of language as other services. For instance, there is anecdotal evidence about the terminology used by the emergency services during the 7/7 bombings. To some, talk of “casualties” found in the tunnels meant injured people, but to those in another service a “casualty” was someone who had died, so when they heard the word, support was not prioritised because they believed it was too late. Another example—the blowing of whistles—comes from the time of the IRA bombings in Manchester in 1996. When the police blow a whistle, all available officers run towards the sound; when the military blow a whistle, everyone stands to attention; and when the fire service blows a whistle, everyone runs away because it is a sign that a building is in danger of collapse. There was no danger as a result in that particular incident, but the different responses to the sound of a whistle show how important it is to make certain that everyone responding to an emergency speaks the same language and works to the same procedures.

I am pleased to note that in July 2007 the National Policing Improvement Agency produced a guide to language to be used over the Airwave network, “AirwaveSpeak”. That was an early step to ensure that all police agencies spoke the same language. The development should be continued more broadly, to include other emergency services.

The quality of the technology is also important to ensure the achievement of interoperability. Before the Airwave network was rolled out nationally in 2005, the emergency services throughout the country used different systems and were not able to communicate easily with one another, leading to practical difficulties. For example, police officers working at force boundaries had to swap radio handsets regularly in order to keep in touch with each other. Now the situation has changed and members of all three emergency services and up to 300 other organisations have access to a common communications platform.

A recent example of the benefits of interoperability occurred last summer, during the 2011 riots, when unprecedented disorder took place in some towns and cities throughout England. An important point to note about those events was the sheer scale of the operations that the emergency services had to deal with. The number of police on duty in the capital rose from 6,000 to 16,000, and officers came to London from 25 different forces, from as far afield as Devon and Cornwall and Strathclyde. Crucially, even with such substantially increased numbers, all the forces involved were able to communicate with one another because they were operating on a common communications platform. Therefore, the necessary complex response to that event was co-ordinated and officers from different parts of the country could work together. There was criticism of the Airwave radio network—hon. Members may have read such criticism in an article in The Observer in December 2011—but the company’s rebuttal and subsequent media reporting clearly show that the network did exactly what it was created to do and supported interoperability in action.

A recent experience of our emergency services looking after a substantial number of people at an event was the diamond jubilee weekend, when the communications network helped the emergency services to work together effectively. I shall give an insight into just how many people used the network at the weekend. I have been told that, as we might expect, the key time was the river pageant on the Sunday. That was the peak day of operations, and during the 12-hour period between 6 o’clock in the morning and 6 o’clock in the evening, 125,315 radio handsets were used by the emergency services across the network. There were more than 1 million interactions across 135 sites. Some 74 organisations, including police, ambulance, fire and rescue services— emergency blue-light services—from all over the country were on the network and forces came from as far afield as the Isle of Wight, mid-Wales and Fife.

In addition to the police services, which were defined as clearly marked users, making use of the system, a further 93 users were recorded as having used the Airwave direct network, including groups such as the Royal National Lifeboat Institution, Transport for London, the Highways Agency and the Port of London Authority. The fact that emergency and non-blue-light services could talk to one another therefore led to success on that day. The Olympics are just around the corner and will start in 45 days. The diamond jubilee weekend was useful, early experience for our emergency services in preparation for what will almost certainly be the biggest test of working together. They can go into the rest of the summer with confidence.

I understand that the Port of London Authority, a user of the system, is looking forward to working on the Olympics and to facilitating

“a response which is both integrated and resilient”.

The Olympics provide a fantastic opportunity for our country. The eyes of the world will be on the UK and London in particular, and excitement is rightly starting to build in London as we approach the event. However, for our emergency services, the Olympics are their biggest challenge. Having visited the Olympics site with the all-party group on emergency services earlier in the year, I am confident that our services are well prepared for the challenge, and I look forward to their success.

One feature will be the armed forces’ contribution to Olympics security, and we will start to see interoperability between the emergency services and the military. The interest in the military’s role in providing security was evidenced by questions to the Secretary of State for Defence in the House just yesterday. The armed forces will use the same communications network as the emergency services, with about 8,000 military personnel having access to that service, making up around 3% of communications network users throughout the Olympics. They will act as reservists, and 13,500 personnel will be called up for the games, although, as my hon. Friend the Member for Redditch said, the police will be the lead service in terms of security.

I was interested to attend a recent all-party group on the armed forces briefing on the military’s contribution to Olympics security. Their role is divided into three sections: safety and security; support for operations; and a wider contingency role. It is clear that the planning is detailed, and the attention to detail is impressive. I was interested in a senior naval officer’s response when asked what success would look like. He said that he hoped that the 64 days of the summer Olympics and Paralympics will be the most boring of a servicemen’s career. I think that we all endorse that. I welcome the joining up of the work of the emergency services and armed forces.

I turn to shared assets. There is a link between services working closely together and their ability to share assets. Sharing assets is a big opportunity for public services more broadly to effect financial savings. I recently spoke at a Royal United Services Institute conference entitled “Blue Light Air Assets: Future Operations”, when particular consideration was given to the future of air assets. Sharing such assets is vital in helping the emergency services to work together with the coastguard and air ambulance services.

I pay particular tribute to the air ambulance service. In recent years, I have become involved with the Warwickshire and Northampton air ambulance service, which operates in my constituency. Air assets are used extensively and to great effect by all the emergency services, and in the UK the majority of those air assets are helicopters. RUSI’s research papers all point to the importance of the blue-light air service’s contribution. Crucially, in the UK, there is currently no co-ordination of those air assets, nationally or across agencies. Sadly, individual emergency services and regional forces currently operate their own air assets in isolation, and that goes back to the issue that I referred to earlier: silo thinking.

[Guy Opperman (Hexham) (Con)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend on securing this debate. Does he agree that, as we have the great benefit throughout the country of an air ambulance service for which taxpayers pay nothing whatever, the ongoing situation whereby the Royal National Lifeboat Institution is exempt from VAT on fuel, but the air ambulance service must pay VAT on the fuel that it uses should be changed? Will he join my campaign to put the matter before the Backbench Business Committee to try to persuade the Government to review VAT on the air ambulance service?

[Mark Pawsey]

I, too, am a great supporter of the air ambulance service as a charitable institution, and I know about its tremendous work to raise funds in and around the midlands. I share my hon. Friend’s concern that charitable funds are used to pay tax. I am more than happy to join him in his representations.

On silo thinking, the RUSI report argues that there must be much greater co-ordination in the use of our air assets. Its report on operations for the future makes it clear that the aim should be to ensure that organisations do not consider their air assets in isolation and that they investigate joint working and asset sharing with others. If those twin policies were pursued, there would be a welcome reduction in costs and improved efficiency in the use of assets. The report calls for, as I do, greater collaboration between Government agencies and asset sharing.

A helpful case study comes from Northern Ireland during the troubles when all helicopter assets were owned and operated by the Ministry of Defence in the UK in direct support of the Royal Ulster Constabulary and the civil authority. A single air-tasking cell enabled a helicopter in the air to switch from a life-saving mission to a police task, depending on need and urgency.

Given my background of owning and running a business over 25 years before first arriving at the House, I have always been keen to ensure the maximum use of any item of capital—effectively, to sweat the asset as much as possible—and it certainly seems that there is a great deal of sense in sharing key assets that might sometimes be idle. I would be interested to hear the Minister’s views on how sharing helicopter assets between police forces and other bodies could contribute to more effective working.

There are several examples of how interoperability can be a success. Existing emergency helicopter provision in north-west England contains many gaps, so there are proposals for a rescue helicopter in that area. Those looking to procure the new rescue helicopter point out that neither police helicopters nor air ambulances are equipped with a winch, and they therefore have to land to load or unload personnel and equipment. Air ambulances are classified as commercial aircraft and can therefore provide an emergency service only during daylight hours. To counter those problems, the proposal in the north-west is for a rescue helicopter that has a winch and uses night-vision devices. Such an asset will therefore have multiple roles and provide an affordable option that will allow all fire and rescue services in the north-west to enhance their response and service delivery, while providing support and resilience to other emergency services and rescue agencies. That is a good example of the widespread benefits that interoperability can bring.

My hon. Friend the Member for The Cotswolds (Geoffrey Clifton-Brown) mentioned the local resilience forums that exist around the country, based on police authorities. The emergency responders—fire, police and ambulance services—meet as a group to consider the risks that affect their areas and to work out strategies to deal with them. That strikes me as an excellent example of interoperability in action that should be welcomed, and I look forward to the Minister’s remarks on how those local resilience forums can be built on.

What can we do in the future to improve interoperability? We have already seen how the adoption of a common platform for communications can significantly improve the performance of emergency services by enabling them to work together. There is, however, more that can be done. About 18 months ago, I attended a reception in the House of Commons for the emergency services. During the discussions that took place around the table between Members and representatives from all the emergency services, it struck me that it was one of only a few occasions in which members of the police had a detailed conversation with people from the ambulance and fire and rescue services. It was a great opportunity for people to network socially, and a greater understanding of each service is vital because, as we have already heard, different words mean different things to different services.

RUSI’s report on shared air assets states that, to achieve interoperability, agencies must fully understand one another if they are to work together effectively. The key question for people to understand is what their agency, and other agencies, are trying to achieve. The one-size-fits-all approach is not necessarily the best way for organisations to act in joined-up way; they need to identify which capabilities, policies, technologies and operational processes need to be shared and, of course, which are best not shared for perfectly good reasons.

We have spoken about the need for interoperability between Departments to help achieve interoperability between services. I understand that the Home Office is looking at the future of emergency services communications, and it is important that national co-ordination is maintained and strengthened to avoid any slipping back.

Interoperability can be enhanced in many ways, and I will refer to a letter that Roy Wilshire, the director of operational response at the Chief Fire Officers Association, has made publicly available to show how working together can be improved. He stated that incident commanders from all three services should train together to ensure that they understand where their procedures are the same, where there are differences, whether those differences are problematic and how they can be aligned—that returns to the point raised by my hon. Friend the Member for The Cotswolds. Furthermore, we should ensure that incident commanders understand each other’s roles and that throughout each service people understand the special skills that their colleagues in other services can provide and ensure that they are used effectively.

An emergency command doctrine should be jointly developed, setting out policies for responding at the earliest stages of a major incident. We need a national, Government-funded programme of exercises to deal with the main threats faced by the country. The Government should ensure that important information, such as Ordnance Survey maps and Met Office data, continues to be available free to the emergency services, so that they all operate using the same information. Finally, the Cabinet Office and Departments that sponsor the three blue-light services—the Home Office, the Department of Health and the Department for Communities and Local Government—should work together to ensure greater interoperability. I hope that all those suggestions have been borne out in my remarks, and I look forward to hearing contributions from colleagues and the Minister.

In conclusion, it is clear that interoperability between the emergency services has come a long way. The response to the 7/7 bombing and the riots in London last year showed that, by working together, emergency services can respond effectively to crucial events as they occur. I am pleased that the introduction of a common communications platform—currently through a company based in my constituency—has had a positive impact on the ability of the emergency services to work together. In future, each emergency service will greatly benefit from a greater understanding of the role played by their colleagues in other services. I look forward to greater departmental interoperability. If the Government have a concerted interoperable approach, a fully interoperable emergency service will be that much closer.