Saddleworth Moor and Tameside: Ongoing Fire

Debate between Nick Hurd and Alistair Carmichael

Monday 2nd July 2018 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hurd]

The whole House would agree with the abhorrence that my hon. Friend expresses about arson, which is the most terrible crime. He may be aware that one arrest has been made in the context of these fires. Of course, the criminal justice process must reach its conclusion on that, but I expect the full weight of the law to be applied.

[Mr Alistair Carmichael (Orkney and Shetland) (LD)]

May I associate myself and my party with all those who have made expressions of support and encouragement to those who are currently engaged in fighting this fire? The countryside that we currently see ablaze is very special, but it is not unique. We see that sort of area the length and breadth of the country and it supports communities involved in hill farming and crofting. [Interruption.] I am pleased that the House is so keen to express its support for hill farmers and crofters. These people make a marginal living at best, so can the Minister tell us what work is being done in Government to ensure that, God forbid, should this becomes a pattern this summer, support will be given to protect the livelihoods of the people in those areas?

[Mr Hurd]

I wholly endorse what the right hon. Gentleman said about the value of hill farming communities and the beauty of the particular locations of these terrible incidents. I come back to what I said before to my right hon. Friend the Member for Mid Sussex (Sir Nicholas Soames) about the need, once this situation is under control, to work closely with the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and others to think about how these risks are managed more effectively in the future.

People with Mental Health Problems: Detainment

Debate between Nick Hurd and Alistair Carmichael

Wednesday 31st January 2018 Westminster Hall

[Mr Hurd]

I certainly give an undertaking to the hon. Lady that I will look into that. Prisoner rights in custody are pretty clear in terms of the duties on a custody officer—a custody officer is required to determine whether a detainee is, or might be, in need of medical treatment or attention, and to make sure that he or she receives appropriate treatment or attention if he or she appears to be suffering from an illness or injury or a mental disorder—but I give the hon. Lady that undertaking and will write to her.

Having acknowledged the point made by the right hon. Member for Orkney and Shetland, I want to place on record some of the genuine improvements that have been made. He raises a real concern, which has weight in the police system because of the amount of time police officers spend, in the modern age, dealing with people on the mental health spectrum.

A considerable effort has been made in recent years to improve local responses. Crisis care concordat partnerships have been successful in pushing people together at a local level to address long-standing issues such as the overuse of police cells as places of safety. As I have gone around the system, I have been very impressed to hear about the various triage schemes in many areas. Those schemes encourage closer working and exchange of real-time information between the police and health professionals. There are different models. Some have health staff embedded in police control centres. Others have health professionals working alongside police on the ground, and sometimes in the custody suites. The common feature of those models is that they enable the police to deal more confidently with people in crisis, informed by professional advice about the best solution.

Many areas are developing community-based voluntary sector or partnership drop-in centres—sometimes called crisis cafes or places of calm—to which those who feel themselves nearing a crisis may be referred, or may self-refer, for support and advice. Such co-operation mechanisms have resulted in a significant and, I hope, welcome reduction in the use of police stations for those who have committed no offence. In 2016-17, a little more than 1,000 such uses were recorded, compared with just under 8,500 in 2012-13, so there is progress on that front.

We are changing the powers available to the police under the Mental Health Act 1983. In particular, the use of police stations as places of safety has been completely banned for under-18s. For adults, regulations now set out very specific criteria on when a police station can be used. Police officers are required, if practicable, to consult a mental health practitioner before detaining a person under section 136, but I will come back to the hon. Member for Stretford and Urmston (Kate Green) with a more refined position on requirements to consult the individual’s own medical practitioner.

The period for which a person may be detained for the purposes of a mental health assessment under section 135 or section 136 is now reduced to 24 hours to ensure such assessments and arrangements for further care are completed as swiftly as possible and that people are not unnecessarily delayed. Police powers to detain a person under section 136 have been extended to any place other than a private dwelling, enabling the police to act promptly in places such as workplaces.

Better community partnership and changes to the 1983 Act have clearly made a difference.

[Mr Carmichael]

The point on which the IPCC upheld the complaint of my constituent’s son was that he should have been detained under section 136 as well as the Criminal Justice Act 1988 provisions, and that did not happen. That was a fairly narrow point, in many ways, but anecdotal evidence suggests that it is fairly widespread. What is the Home Office doing to establish an objective picture and find out what is happening on the ground? I suspect the procedures are not that bad, but the implementation requires some attention.

[Mr Hurd]

I accept the point that the IPCC found that guidance to detain under both section 136 and for any accepted offence had been breached in that case. I am not quite sure how long it took between 2014 and that judgment—probably too long. I accept that, but I come back to my earlier point. The right hon. Gentleman will know from experience that from the specific, we learn and probe general application. That is why our complaints process must work better than it does at the moment, not just for his constituent’s son and others in that position, but for the police officers concerned.

A lot of police officers are, in their words, being left out to dry for long periods of time, while the processes take too long. We want a swift process of finding the truth; we want accountability—accountability matters—but then we want a culture of learning and thinking, “What have we learned, and what are we doing about it?” We are not there yet, but everyone is talking about it in the right way. Part of my responsibility as Policing Minister is to continue pushing on that.

I am running out of time, but I should mention that if a person who has been detained for an offence is identified as having possible mental health or substance misuse issues, they may be referred to liaison and diversion workers for advice and onward referral to support services. Such schemes now provide support across 80% of police custody suites and courts in England, with the expectation that 100% coverage will be achieved by 2021.

On police use of force, a new memorandum of understanding between police forces and mental health and disability settings was finalised in 2017. At the extreme end of that is the response that we have to make to the report on deaths in custody. Some of the issues that the right hon. Gentleman has picked away at—the human testimonies, and the attitudes of the police when they feel defensive—come through very clearly in that report, and we have to break those down.

As I hope I have made clear, across a range of the avenues available to the Government, we are making some progress. I repeat my undertaking to come back to the hon. Member for Stretford and Urmston on her question.

Motion lapsed (Standing Order No. 10(6)).

Smart Meter Roll-out

Debate between Nick Hurd and Alistair Carmichael

Tuesday 6th December 2016 Westminster Hall

[The Minister for Climate Change and Industry (Mr Nick Hurd)]

It is a huge pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Gapes. I congratulate the right hon. Member for Orkney and Shetland (Mr Carmichael) on securing a debate on an issue that will touch and affect every home in the UK. It has drawn quite a crowd of visitors, whom we should welcome. I also welcome the new hon. Member for Richmond Park (Sarah Olney) to her place. I thank the right hon. Member for Orkney and Shetland for the constructive way in which he framed the debate, which is exactly what I would expect given his record in the House. I acknowledge the valuable contribution of my hon. Friend the Member for Wells (James Heappey), who, as I have said on Twitter, is one of the more thoughtful Members of Parliament on the subject of energy. He is always interesting on the topic.

As the right hon. Member for Orkney and Shetland said, the roll-out is a good thing and a long overdue upgrade of an outdated system. I am talking about not just meters—the technology for which is basically 100 years old—but how smart meters fit into a broader and more ambitious strategy to upgrade our energy system, as my hon. Friend the Member for Wells alluded to. Liberal Democrat Secretaries of State in the coalition Government, in which both the right hon. Member for Orkney and Shetland and I served, wrestled with the trilemma of security, affordability and increasingly clean sources of energy. We are also dealing with the matter of how to make the system smarter and more flexible so that it delivers a better experience for our constituents—perhaps by doing away with the nonsense of estimated bills now that we are in 2016, and with calls to call centres. We desire to give our constituents a greater sense of control and, of course, the opportunity to save money.

The roll-out is not the silver bullet for fuel poverty—that is entirely right—but the data suggest that the people with the first wave of smart meters are saving about 3%, according to British Gas surveys. Those are not insignificant sums of money. For our constituents on prepayment schemes, smart meters are a better system for the ability to top up and to read balances quickly. We see smart meters as the foundation of the smart, flexible energy system that we are working towards and to which we are committed. The Secretary of State recently launched the consultation with Ofgem. That is the direction of travel, and we are extremely committed to it because there will be significant benefits to the country—not just to our constituents, but to the people we rely on to supply energy.

There is a smarter future ahead, and that is what we are working towards. The roll-out is unequivocally a good thing, but the right hon. Member for Orkney and Shetland was right to identify some big challenges, none bigger than meeting the roll-out target. However, I associate him with being someone of optimism and ambition—he is a Liberal Democrat, after all—so I say to him that we should not give up on our ambition at this stage. There is no basis on which to do so. It is a challenging target but, as he will know as an experienced politician, if we take our foot off the accelerator, people will read the wrong signals. We want to send a strong signal of our commitment to ensuring that every household and small business is offered a smart meter by the end of 2020. We will follow the evidence and see what it tells us about the feasibility of the target in a few years’ time. The right hon. Gentleman may be in a position to say, “I told you so”—he has teed that up nicely—but I hope not. Now is the wrong time to send a signal of slipped ambition.

There are other challenges, including making the early smart meters interoperable. The right hon. Gentleman is entirely right about that. We should not want our constituents to trade off the opportunity to get a better tariff against the opportunity to retain smart functionality. I assure him that the DCC has begun a project to enrol the early SMETSI 1 smart meters from 2018 in order to make them usable by all energy suppliers, rather than just the one that initially installed them. It is an issue, but one that will go away.

Another challenge that the right hon. Gentleman rightly highlighted is reaching all consumers, including those at risk of being left behind. That requires both a wide area network and a home area network. The DCC is contracted to provide wide area coverage to 99.25% of meter points in Great Britain from 2020, which is, incidentally, greater than for current television and mobile services. There are big challenges, but it is wrong to slip back on our ambition, not least because we can point to good progress being made.

The right hon. Gentleman mentioned a figure of about 3 million smart and advanced meters being in operation. Actually, as of June 2016—these are slightly out-of-date data—the official number is that there are more than 4.2 million smart and advanced meters operating under the programme. Again, we now have some data from the quite large British Gas survey, which show what cost savings the roll-out is delivering for our constituents. The current run rate is about 3%, which is slightly higher than expected. We now have a sense of how popular the smart meters are, with eight out of 10 people recommending them and high levels of customer satisfaction. We have also updated the latest cost-benefit analysis.

[Mr Alistair Carmichael]

I completely accept what the Minister says about the signals that can be sent by taking the foot off the gas, to use his analogy, but there are technical issues coming down the tracks. The suppliers are all telling us that the roll-out could take them into the middle of 2018. What is the Minister doing to engage with the suppliers to bring that date forward?

[Mr Hurd]

We are not naive about this. We have set a demanding challenge, so the ongoing conversation with suppliers to talk through some of the practical differences is an essential, fundamental part of the Government’s responsibilities and Ofgem’s responsibilities. I am keen to mention that we have recently published the latest cost-benefit analysis of this ambitious programme, which suggests that we are looking at a significant net benefit of about £5.7 billion for the roll-out—including through supplier cost savings, system benefits and energy efficiency for our consumers. That all leads me to reassert the fundamental point that we remain committed to the programme. The right hon. Gentleman suggested that ambition might have slipped a bit and that the scheme might have been a ball dropped by a busy new Department. That is absolutely not the case. The fact that the Secretary of State recently announced an ambitious consultation about the direction of travel towards a smarter, more flexible system places the roll-out in that context. It is a top priority for the Department.

I want to give the right hon. Gentleman some reassurance about his constituency. He spoke powerfully about the levels of fuel poverty there, and the data are striking. He was candid about the fact that this agenda is not the whole solution to that challenge, but his desire to ensure that no communities are left behind in the process is laudable, and is an aim that is absolutely shared by the Government.

In response to the questions on whether remote rural areas of Scotland be excluded from the roll-out and what the planned communications coverage will be, I would like to place on the record that Arqiva is contracted to provide network coverage to at least 99.5% of Great Britain’s premises in the north region, which covers Scotland, by the end of 2020. That level of coverage compares favourably with other technologies such as mobile and broadband networks. Arqiva is on track to deliver its contractual coverage commitments, having already achieved coverage of more than 80% of premises in the region. Building the smart metering wide area network in Scotland has led to considerable progress and, subject to detailed planning, the DCC is confident that the right hon. Gentleman’s constituency will have a high level of premises coverage. There is a licence obligation on the DCC to strive—best efforts—for 100% coverage.

I hope that I have given the right hon. Gentleman some reassurance regarding his constituency and the fact that, despite some slippage in timetable—a matter of a few months, which, in the scheme of things and against the backdrop to which he alluded, is not the end of the world—the Government and the new Department attach the right level of priority and importance to the roll-out, which we sincerely believe will deliver a much better experience for our constituents in interacting with the energy systems on which they depend. The roll-out is the foundation for a much smarter energy system as we move to upgrade the energy infrastructure of the country after so many years of dithering and delay. It is absolutely at the core of that strategy.

Question put and agreed to.

Sellafield

Debate between Nick Hurd and Alistair Carmichael

Tuesday 6th September 2016 Commons Chamber

[Mr Hurd]

I am grateful to the hon. Lady for giving me the opportunity to reaffirm again the Government’s appreciation for the extremely challenging and incredibly important work that is done by people on the site. It is deeply impressive that, given the complexity of the site and the legacy—this is really difficult stuff—Sellafield’s safety record over the past three years is the best that it has ever been. I quite understand why residents and people working at the site may have been upset and disturbed by the programme last night, but I hope that my statement and corroborating statements from other Members have reassured them that as far as the Government are concerned—not least because the independent regulator attaches enormous importance to Sellafield, as reflected in the resources committed to monitoring the site on a very proactive basis—Sellafield is safe.

[Mr Alistair Carmichael (Orkney and Shetland) (LD)]

I appreciate that the Minister has a duty to offer reassurance, but I have to warn him that the content and tone of what we have heard today come dangerously close to complacency. The people who have been responsible for the historical errors of judgment and underinvestment are still involved in the industry today. These words will be heard with concern in the north of Scotland, where we are seeing nuclear waste shipped out from the former Dounreay plant. Will the Minister have the risk assessment for that operation scrutinised independently of the people who were responsible for making the plans?

[Mr Hurd]

The right hon. Gentleman is an experienced Member of Parliament so I take seriously his warning about tripping over a boundary into complacency. I said at the start that I was determined not to do that. What I am trying to do is reflect genuine empathy with people who live close to the site and who work on the site, who will have been unsettled by the programme last night, which raised nothing new and which, I am keen to stress, in the eyes of the regulator does not change its position in relation to the safety of Sellafield.

The right hon. Gentleman will forgive me if I give some priority to that. He knows the reality of the situation at Sellafield, which is that as a legacy of the cold war, vast amounts of nuclear waste, dumped with no plan for how it would be disposed of safely, languished for decades without anyone properly tackling the problem. The priority for us is to do what we are doing now, which is to continue working to turn that round and clean up Sellafield as safely, cost-effectively and quickly as possible.