Police and Fire Shared Services

Oliver Heald Excerpts

Tuesday 3rd November 2015 Westminster Hall

[Amanda Milling]

I thank my hon. Friend for his intervention, and he makes the valid point that there are many incredibly good examples of such collaboration across the country. Indeed, when I put pen to paper for this debate, I was able to write down several such examples, although I will not repeat them this afternoon; I have saved people from that. Nevertheless, as I say, there are many good examples out there.

Although there is evidence of progress in terms of fire services’ collaboration, co-responding and co-location with other blue light services, the Knight report highlighted that such collaboration was actually quite patchy, even though it could create real savings when it did happen. It gave some really good examples of collaboration, which were quite wide-ranging in nature, including the co-location of stations and headquarters, shared training, joint communication centres, joint operations and joint fleets. Those examples demonstrate that a clear appetite for collaboration, where there is the will to do it.

[Sir Oliver Heald (North East Hertfordshire) (Con)]

Does my hon. Friend agree that in a county such as Hertfordshire, where there is a shortage of staff for the ambulance service and it is difficult to recruit them, it would be a good idea if firemen who already have some medical skills could be trained up to paramedic status and possibly deployed—by agreement—in accident situations or when required?

[Amanda Milling]

I thank my hon. and learned Friend for his intervention. He makes the very good point that where people have such skills, it is right that when they respond to situations they should use them, although we may have to be quite careful with that approach in the future.

As I said, the Knight report identified that collaboration was not universal; in fact, it was quite patchy across the country. It is for that reason that I welcome the Government’s commitment to greater collaboration, which was set out in the Conservative manifesto as a commitment

“to enable fire and police services to work more closely together”.

In September, a joint consultation was launched by the Home Secretary, the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government and the Health Secretary, which invited views on proposals to improve joint working between services. I welcome those proposals, as I believe that legislating for greater collaboration will go some way to seeing more areas adopting shared initiatives, providing positive outcomes for the public, in terms of both their safety and their pockets. I will make a few points about this joint consultation, because my view is that the proposed moves should be the first step towards a more formal, mandatory integration, by which I mean the creation of police and fire commissioners.

Although I appreciate that it might be unrealistic and too complex to integrate the two services ahead of the police and crime commissioner elections in May 2016, the moves proposed in the consultation should provide the road map to achieving combined police and fire commissioners. This hybrid role could be created in the next term of the PCC, with full police and fire commissioner elections taking place in 2020.

I have been disappointed to read some press reports that cite some resistance to the proposals, the implication being that the police are taking over the fire service. Before I go any further, it is worth noting that I am by no means suggesting that the police go out and fight fires while firefighters go out and arrest criminals.

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[Ian Lavery]

Of course we can. The only problem is that we have only one mine left—but anyway, I am sure we will discuss that. The coastguard is an important service as well.

The issue that has been brought to the House is the greater collaboration and work between the police and the fire service. I think we all agree that we want a top-class service, across all four blue-light services. We want to have the best possible and the safest service we can have—top class, with the best technology and everything that the communities that we represent need. The real cause for concern is that this is not just about having a top-class service or enhancing the blue-light services; it is being approached as a cost-cutting exercise. That is what the general public are concerned about.

Since 2010, there has been a huge reduction in the police service and the fire service and we cannot get enough people in the ambulance service. People are rightly concerned about the cuts in the services, whether front-line or back-office staff.

[Sir Oliver Heald]

Suppose that the fire service had someone who wanted to train as a paramedic and also someone who was capable of filling out the accident book, as the police do at a straightforward road accident. Why should that multi-tasking not take place? If it saves money, what is wrong with that?

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[Ian Lavery]

I have lost my thread, Mr Pritchard. I was in full flow until I asked people to call me a dinosaur.

[Sir Oliver Heald]

One of the latest and most popular cartoons is called, I think, “The Happy Dinosaur”.

[Ian Lavery]

I have been called a dinosaur many times, but rarely have I been called a happy dinosaur, so that is a first.

In her very good speech, the hon. Lady suggested that we need to move immediately from a voluntary to a mandatory arrangement. We have a duty as Members of Parliament to listen to the people on the frontline—the police who are dealing with crime in our communities, and the fire and rescue services that are dealing with problems every day—rather than just tell them what to do.

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[The Minister for Policing, Crime and Criminal Justice (Mike Penning)]

As usual, Mr Pritchard, it is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Cannock Chase (Amanda Milling) on securing this debate. What perfect timing, with the consultation having just finished and Her Majesty’s Opposition accepting that Vera Baird and Paddy Tipping were absolutely right that police and crime commissioners should be kept. We agree. Thank goodness that the Conservative party won the election, or Vera and Paddy would not have been happy.

I declare an interest: I am an ex-firefighter and an ex-military paramedic, and I have also worked in counter-terrorism, so, perhaps unusually for a Minister in a debate on this subject, I know what I am talking about a fraction. I apologise to the hon. Member for Wansbeck (Ian Lavery): I was in no way saying that firefighters have the same sort of powers as the police. The police are warranted, of course, but it is important to note that fire services have statutory powers as well. At no stage in any part of the debate has it been said from the Government Benches—or anywhere, I think— that front-line operational officers in the police, fire or ambulance services should be amalgamated. I will explain and reiterate what has been said, using anecdotal evidence.

I came out of the military, having done four years as a qualified battlefield medic. I joined the fire service and was told to take a first aid certificate. I attended what used to be called RTAs—road traffic accidents; they are now called road traffic collisions, or RTCs—often with no ambulance in sight, not for minutes but for a considerable length of time. Sometimes, the police were not there. These days, very often the police will not be there, because it will be the Highways Agency traffic officers—they have renamed themselves since I left the Department for Transport—who attend. Having better skills to protect the public is crucial. That is part of what we are trying to do. In my own county, the fantastic chief fire officer, Roy Wilsher, who almost 10 years ago did an amazing job saving half my constituency when the Buncefield oil depot blew to smithereens, is the CEO of the PCC’s office. As well as being the chief fire officer, he actually runs the PCC office. Why? Because it is logical and sensible.

The public often talk about buildings. It is our job to ensure that they talk about not buildings but people. I welcome the shadow Minister to her role. I think we will probably meet fairly often, although I am not the Minister responsible for the fire service—that falls to my right hon. Friend the Minister for Communities and Resilience; I am here because of the connection to PCCs. When she reads Hansard, she will find that she said it is about buildings, not people. I think she meant that the other way around, but I fully respect and understand that. A church is not a building; it is a group of people who come together. Emergency services should not be about buildings, but about how we deliver the best service.

We must learn from the mistakes in the past. The amalgamation of the ambulance service met a fair bit of opposition. I am not a Health Minister, although I was shadowing the public Health Minister responsible for the ambulance service when it happened, and we had real concerns about it, some of which came true. We fundamentally opposed the regionalisation of fire control centres. Thank goodness we stopped that in time, although there are still some very expensive buildings out there, at least one of which is occupied by the coastguard. Actually, this is nothing new. I remember that in the early ’80s—all those years ago when I was a fireman in Essex—there was a tri-service control centre in Warwickshire. They were doing it then, so we have come full circle.

The skills of the people who are there to look after us are rightly interoperable. I hear forces saying, “We are going to lose x amount of front-line people”, “We are going to lose this” or “We are going to lose that,” but have they really looked at where those savings can be made so they can deliver the taxpayer-funded service that the public deserve?

We were talking about procurement a moment ago. I am not one to say that one size fits all and that we should procure everything from one place, but I published on the Home Office website how much each police force spends on the average 20 items. We all want our officers to have body armour, but there is a £300 difference between the price that two forces pay for it. Surely, as we approach the police and crime commissioner elections, that is the sort of thing we should be talking about. The fire service and the police both buy white shirts, so why do they not buy white shirts together? If a local provider can match the average national price, I am sure we would all want to support that local business, but if it cannot we have to question seriously whether that would provide value for money. We have changed the way we procure vehicles. There was some criticism from the Opposition, but for the first time the Government are buying huge amounts of very expensive equipment at e-auctions at the best value we can get it for. That is our responsibility as representatives of taxpayers.

There are myriad other things that can be done. Hampshire is very well represented in the debate this afternoon for a reason: it is one of the most forward-thinking authorities in the country. I went to Winchester fire station, in the constituency of my hon. Friend the Member for Winchester (Steve Brine), and met the chief fire officer. The station is shared. I went to the yard, where the fire brigade was carrying out a drill—I am sure they do joint drills with the police in that yard, because that is the sort of thing we need to see—and at the bottom part of the yard is a brand spanking new building for the armed response unit and other police facilities. Nobody would ever know, and, frankly, I do not think the public would care if we explained to them that we want to do this to look after people.

[Sir Oliver Heald]

One of the advantages of what was suggested by our hon. Friend the Member for Southampton, Itchen (Royston Smith) is that it would mean we have the flexibility of having a company, which other authorities can join and move their back-office functions into. Equally, the sort of contracts that he talked about—outsourcing contracts and others of that type—have a flexibility to them. Do the Government support that sort of thing, or are they going to create new institutions through statute?

[Mike Penning]

We do not want to make it mandatory. We need to learn from the mistakes of the past. As an illustration of the support that my hon. Friend the Member for Southampton, Itchen (Royston Smith) alluded to, the Home Office gave £1.8 million to support H3, and we supplied extensive moneys for the relocation from the police innovation fund. That is the sort of innovation we are looking for.

The only thing I disagreed with my hon. Friend the Member for Cannock Chase about was her point about compulsion. I know exactly where she is coming from, and I have a huge amount of sympathy with it. I was arguing this point long before austerity was even thought of, when we were throwing money at our emergency services—we have sometimes seriously thrown money at our emergency services over the years, not least for kit that is hardly ever used—because it is right that we have a better, joined-up emergency service. We need people who are trained for the 21st century; we cannot look at the fire service, the police service and the ambulance service in a historical way.

Community first responders were never heard of previously. Communities came together for that. People said, “I want to be part of this community. I would like to do this.” We have them in my constituency, and they do really well. My point is that it is always better if the Government can bring people together and say, “This would be better for you,” rather than say, “This would be better for you, now come together and do it.” The consultation specifically looks at some areas where it would be difficult—for example, where forces and fire authorities are not co-located.

Northamptonshire is a good example, because the Northamptonshire PCC is one of the most forward-thinking PCCs in the country. He is already running the fire service management, but he does not interfere in the operational running of the fire service, in exactly the same way as PCCs do not have any effect on the operation of the police force. He is now looking at the ambulance service to see whether, for instance, the clinical commissioning groups would like to commission non-blue- light or blue-light vehicles from him. The vast majority of the ambulance services that are offered in this country, such as patient transport, do not use blue-light vehicles. It is hugely expensive, and it is often very highly qualified people doing those sorts of jobs. Where we are short of paramedics, we have to ensure they are doing front-line jobs, not administrative jobs or ordinary patient transport jobs.

I want to touch on that point in relation to the police forces, too. It is imperative that highly paid, highly skilled, hugely brave people—I was at Liverpool cathedral yesterday with David Phillips’s family and the thousands of people from across these islands and the world who came to pay tribute to him—are in operational positions, not behind a desk. In some forces, 10% of the warranted officers are not available because they are not fit for duty. How can that be right?

The hon. Member for Coventry South (Mr Cunningham) said policemen have been made redundant, but we have not made anybody redundant. They may have been declared medically unfit for duty, but we do not have the power to make officers redundant. We have got to ensure that as many people are in front-line roles as possible in the fire service, the ambulance service and the police service. They should be doing the jobs they trained for and joined the force to do, and they should be serving the community.

When we go in one direction away from danger, those people go in the opposite direction for us. We should pay tribute to them and ensure that they have the right kit and body armour. When I was in the fire service, we had cork helmets and serge jackets from the second world war. Now, they have the proper equipment. We had body armour that it was almost impossible for me to stand up in, and I am pretty hefty—not as big as them, but still pretty heavy. Now, they have lightweight breathing apparatus. We rightly praise their skills, but let us save money in the back offices, the bureaucracy and procurement before we dream of saying that we are not going to provide front-line officers, no matter which of those services it is.

This debate is a massively important part of the consultation. It is brilliant that we agree on most things, which is what this Chamber was designed for.