Coastguard Service

Richard Drax Excerpts

Thursday 24th March 2011 Westminster Hall

[Richard Drax (South Dorset) (Con)]

Mr Crausby, I will launch straight in. Thank you very much indeed for calling me and I offer my thanks to my hon. Friend the Member for Truro and Falmouth (Sarah Newton) for securing this debate. I pay tribute to all those who work in the rescue services, and I welcome the Minister to Westminster Hall today. As a former soldier and firefighter, if anyone knows what we are talking about and can listen to what we are saying it is him.

I have a personal interest in this subject, because one of the 18 centres that we are discussing is in my constituency of South Dorset. It is, of course, the Portland coastguard station and I am instinctively protective of it. It is one of the busiest stations in the country, perhaps 20 times busier than other centres. Anyone who has been down to Portland during the peak summer period will know how busy it is. In fact, hardly a day passes without one seeing the air-sea rescue helicopter in the air after it has been called out for one emergency or another.

I am delighted that the Minister has told me, both privately and in public, that the rescuers—the helicopter crews, the lifeboats and the volunteers—will remain. What I am concerned about is that they will not be co-ordinated by local people. To me, that is the Achilles heel of the new system, and I will say more about it shortly.

We are told that the operation will move to the new “super-centre” at Solent, for lack of another word. First, as I understand it from my local coastguards, it is unlikely that any of them will go there. They are local people who are busy with family commitments, and I can assure people that the journey to Southampton from Portland probably takes about 90 minutes, because the roads in Dorset are appalling.

Secondly, I ask hon. Members to imagine a busy, hot bank holiday on the south coast. Millions of people are enjoying our seas and cliffs. Staff at the new super-centre will be bombarded with minutiae, and there will be many different events running concurrently. Time will be lost as each call is assessed, questions are asked and instructions are sought. Currently, the local watchkeepers in South Dorset and around the country get out of bed and the first thing that they do is to look out of their window. They immediately appreciate what is going on around them. They do not have to look any further to know all about the weather and the wind. If those centres are lost, the ability to co-ordinate local knowledge, so that rescuers can be best targeted and the best resource used, will be lost, which will lead to delay. As I have said, that is the Achilles heel of this proposal.

Thirdly, if we lose that human link in the chain, even with the best will in the world, I do not believe that the super-centres and their staff—not all of whom, of course, will be familiar with the areas that they are covering—will have the knowledge that they should have. There is a great deal of complexity in my part of the world in South Dorset. Like many places, it has quirky names for bays, caves, cliffs, currents and tides. At the moment, coastguard staff walk their area of responsibility and know it intimately. I doubt that that will happen with the new super-centre. Computers will help, and reference has been made to the so-called “rescue by Google”. However, as the Minister and I both know, the best intelligence is “human int.” and the “mark 1 eyeball”, to use a military expression.

Fourthly, and leading on from my last point, technology is not always reliable. Computers tend to break down, and the fewer computers that we have, the bigger the catastrophe when things go wrong. Fifthly, speed is vital. We have heard about that already. One of my constituents, an ambulance dispatcher, summed it up neatly when he explained that it is the “golden hour” that counts on land, while on water it is down to minutes, or, as my hon. Friend the Member for South East Cornwall (Sheryll Murray) said, seconds.

Sixthly—and this is not to be underestimated—the uniformed presence in our constituencies is important. We live in a country that has many problems. The uniformed presence in my constituency adds to the role that staff play, with a ripple effect of seeing those men and women who are highly respected. Many people come into the coastguard station and ask for other things to be done, quite apart from the jobs that the coastguards are doing, which is keeping everyone at sea and along the coast safe. We must not ignore that uniformed presence.

We have all had a good whinge, and I am no exception, but may I offer a solution? We have 18 centres that are fully manned, despite the discrepancies in their work load. One reason is that they are not fully integrated. Surely, surely, surely, we can interlink 18 centres, so that they can be used more flexibly. They would not necessarily be open all the time, but they could be used more flexibly, so that in the summer the emphasis is on the south coast, and in the winter months it is on Scotland and Northern Ireland. I am not saying that there would not be any cover in the summer months, but Members can see what I mean and accept the logic of my proposal.

Under the existing system, if we lose one centre, we are down about 5% of our capacity. Under the new system, and certainly at night with the two new super-centres, we would be down 50% of our capacity. That is a huge difference. May I put two questions to the Minister? First, are the locations that he is considering for these super-centres—the substations that have not been chosen yet—being selected on the basis of cost or of strategic importance? Secondly, will he confirm who will monitor channel 16? As I understand it, that monitoring will cease. I am a sailor, and perhaps many other Members here today are too, and we rely on channel 16.

We know from bitter experience how expensive these things can be when they go wrong. The Minister has told me that the fire service reorganisation does not compare with these measures—I am afraid that I disagree with him—but it cost the taxpayer more than £400 million. I do not think that we can afford that today. Relying on these two super-centres for the whole country, albeit with bells and whistles, appears risky at best and foolhardy at worst. Will they provide the resilience and integrity that we need to cover 11,000 miles of coastline? I and many others do not think that they will. I am afraid that the idea of Aberdeen taking up the slack during a very hot and busy bank holiday weekend, because Southampton or Solent has gone down is pie in the sky.

Finally, I turn to the consultation. I sent one of my representatives to a recent consultation, which sadly I could not attend because I was speaking in the House. As I understand it, the coastguards who attended were told not to go in uniform and not to identify themselves. Personally, I found that a little sinister and threatening in what I thought was a democratic country. I believe that this is an open debate. Does the Minister agree with me that if coastguards want to go to such meetings in uniform they should be allowed to do so?

I come to my final, final point. I believe that we are in grave danger of wrecking one of our finest and proudest organisations. As we have heard, we have already cut it down from hundreds of watchtowers to the 18 centres that we are discussing today. I am grateful for the extended time that I have been given to speak, but will the Minister please, please, please consider this very serious issue? Let us try to hope that the solution that we arrive at leads to our retaining the integrity of a service that we have come to respect and love.