Fire and Rescue Centres (North-West)

Robert Neill Excerpts

Tuesday 25th October 2011 Westminster Hall

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government (Robert Neill)]

It is a pleasure to see you in the Chair, Mr Howarth. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Westmorland and Lonsdale (Tim Farron) on securing this debate. I appreciate that the subject is important for his constituents. Indeed, the whole issue of fire control centres is one of real importance.

It is worth setting the issue in its full context. My hon. Friend has rightly referred to the failure of the previous Government’s fire control project, and to the incompetence, inefficiency and waste highlighted by the Public Accounts Committee and the National Audit Office. I have seldom seen a more ringing condemnation of a Government policy than that given to the project that was embarked upon by the now Lord Prescott as part of an enforced regionalisation agenda. There is common ground between my hon. Friend and me in that regard. It is clear that lessons needed to be learned.

My hon. Friend is right to say that, when the coalition Government—by which I mean the Westminster coalition Government—came into office, we discovered that the project was already running 19 months late and experiencing problems. That was the situation that confronted me when I became Minister with responsibility for the fire service in May 2010. As my hon. Friend has rightly said, the NAO report, which was published on 1 July 2011, and the PAC report, which was published on 14 September 2011, highlights a litany of failings. That catalogue of problems led to the project wasting some £469 million of taxpayers’ money on an over-ambitious, over-complex and essentially imposed solution for fire control rooms that, frankly, was not proportionate to the risk faced and that failed the fire services themselves.

Two key failings were identified. The first was the lack of any consultation or involvement with the fire and rescue services at the beginning, which was highlighted by both reports, particularly that of the PAC. It was a top-down, imposed solution, and originally part of a broader regionalisation agenda that was killed off by a referendum in the north-east. The project under discussion was the last bit left hanging around. Secondly, the principal failure related to incompetence in the procurement of the IT—the software and the computer works. Part of the overall scheme involved the procurement of the nine regional control centres, and it is ironic that that was the one bit of the scheme that was actually delivered on time and pretty much to budget—the centres were there, but the properly working kit to put in them was not. That was why this Government took the view that we should negotiate with the suppliers, and we eventually concluded that a pass had been reached whereby we could not guarantee sensibly the delivery of the scheme to time, to budget or to the proper specification. Ultimately, therefore, we terminated the contract.

[John Woodcock]

Will the Minister put on record how much public money was wasted by that decision to terminate the project part way through?

[Robert Neill]

Although the matter was subject to commercial confidentiality, the hon. Gentleman should be made aware that damages were paid to the Government by the suppliers of the scheme, so we in fact recouped some money as a result of our actions.

[John Woodcock]

How much?

[Robert Neill]

The figure has been put in the public domain at about £22 million. The Government respected that confidentiality agreement, but since the figure is now in the public domain, I will not shirk from it. The Government got some money back. I say to the hon. Gentleman that his Government poured £469 million down the drain before we could prevent it from happening, so I do not accept any criticisms whatsoever of the decision to terminate the contract.

What we now have to do, sensibly, is find a solution that deals with the ongoing needs of the fire service for their control centres—that will vary from place to place—and that finds uses, as far as practically possible, for the nine control rooms that are left and in which a certain amount of public money has been invested. To that end—this is the background to the decision that Cumbria has taken—we determined that we would not go down the route of imposing a centralised solution. That is what went wrong before and is where I have common ground with, for example, the Fire Brigades Union, which is also very critical of that scheme.

We have decided that decisions on improving the efficiency and resilience of local control room systems are best made at a local level because, as my hon. Friend the Member for Westmorland and Lonsdale fairly says, that is where the risks are best understood. In addition, if it is practical to do so, we want to make good use of the buildings that are available. Frankly, it is preferable that fire and rescue services should take them over because they are purpose built for that service, but if they do not do so, other emergency services could also be appropriate users. We have said that we will not force fire authorities down such a route and that it is a matter for them to decide. If there is no fire and rescue or emergency service use for a particular centre, we will consider other uses to try to minimise the damage incurred to the public purse by past failings.

To that end, in July this year, I announced an £83 million scheme to build the national resilience that we all want to encourage through locally determined solutions and collaboration and innovation. Every fire and rescue authority—in Cumbria we are talking about the county council and in other places about stand-alone or combined fire authorities, for example, Greater Manchester and Merseyside—can apply for up to £1.8 million to improve the resilience and efficiency of their fire and rescue control services. The funding will cover the installation of improved communication equipment to give the enhanced voice and data services that are a priority for the sector. We consulted widely with the sector before introducing the scheme and the people we spoke to said that the ability for fire and rescue services to talk to each other—the transfer of voice and data, so that they can mobilise across boundaries and so on—was a key priority. We have therefore concentrated on that.

Fire and rescue services can either apply for the funding individually or collaborate by pooling their funding and providing further enhancements across a group of fire authorities. That is a decision that four of the authorities in the north-west have decided to take. As has been rightly observed by my hon. Friend, that area is not the same as the old north-west region because Merseyside has decided it does not want to be part of it. The scheme is not steered by the Government: it is a collaboration of sovereign authorities coming together to decide that they want to go down that route. Those authorities have been advised by their chief fire officers, who are their principal professional advisers.

Cumbria will be able to use its pot, either jointly or alone. As well as enhanced voice and data services, some of the things we want the funding to be used for include common standards to underpin collaboration and interoperability, and the facilitation of improved overload and fallback arrangements. My hon. Friend referred to the catastrophic floods in Cumbria. There are circumstances in which an individual control room can become heavily weighed down with the burden of such matters and it is sensible to have some resilience not necessarily physically in the same area. In fact, there are occasionally some advantages in having what is called a remote buddy system, whereby one control centre is able to rely on the support of another that is not affected by the same physical events. All those things can be in the mix. The Chief Fire Officers Association has indicated that it intends to apply for funding under our scheme to disseminate that sort of good practice.

Of course, my hon. Friend is right: the Merseyside fire authority decided that a north-west consortium was not an option that it wished to pursue. That is entirely its right and it will therefore pursue its own arrangements. However, I understand that the chief fire officers of the remaining authorities—Greater Manchester, Lancashire, Cheshire and Cumbria—have indicated that they are keen to proceed. That is the professional judgment that the chief officers have made, which I respect and do not seek to second-guess. They are also accountable to the elected members of their fire authorities, which in the case of Cumbria is the county council. As my hon. Friend indicates, the county council must ultimately make a decision on the matter. I will not second-guess its decision because it is on the ground and the decision is a local matter. What it is doing is not out of line with decisions being taken elsewhere in the country as a number of collaborative arrangements of one kind or another are taking place.

My Department is determined to be supportive and work with consortia where that is what people on the ground want. Where people think that a stand-alone solution is appropriate, again, they can bid to enhance on that basis. Inevitably, there are local concerns when such changes are made, but it is worth saying that whatever arrangements any fire authority makes with its control room, that does not alter the fact that it is the local fire crews on the ground who will be responding to the emergency calls, wherever they are directed from. Their local knowledge remains available. I just observe that the arrangements for a collaborative approach going beyond one county are not unique to the fire service. It is fair to say that the North West Ambulance Service mobilises on a much more regionalised basis from a control room in Preston. So the fire authority is not going out on a limb in that regard.

[Tim Farron]

The Minister makes some very good points. I thank him for mentioning that matter because it takes us down the road of where we might end up if we have a regionalised fire control room. Since the North West Ambulance Service went to a regionalised system based in an urban area, at least initially the number of times the volunteer first responder unit in Cumbria and north Lancashire was scrambled by the call handler dropped significantly. The urban-based call handlers did not have experience relating to first responders. The analogy I would make is with the mountain rescue teams. If somebody—wonderful as they may be—has no direct experience of the quirks of living in a rural area, those volunteer services will not be scrambled when they could save a life.

--- Later in debate ---

[Robert Neill]

With respect to my hon. Friend, I would not go down the route of saying that that is automatically the case, because much depends on the briefing and the knowledge of the people in the control centre. At the moment, within the large county of Cumbria, calls are taken at a county-wide level. That is not as local as doing something at a fire station level, which we know would not be practical. Frankly, the appropriate level is a matter of professional judgment. It is also fair to say that a number of other fire authorities have similar arrangements. Suffolk and Cambridge, which cover a very large geographical area, are due to merge their control rooms. I have not seen evidence to suggest that that would pose an enhanced risk.

The key thing is that there is proper input from the fire authorities. The north-west consortium is being overseen by a project board and has very straightforward governance arrangements. The project board is led by a chief fire officer—a professional—as project director and there are senior representatives from each of the fire services in the consortium area on the board. Ultimately, they have reported to their authority. The decision has been scrutinised through the county council’s scrutiny procedure and the cabinet has concluded that that is the route it wishes to go down.

[Tim Farron]

The Minister pointed out earlier that the Government kyboshed the previous Government’s regionalised programme for two reasons, one of which was the lack of consultation. The consultation across Cumbria has been absolutely appalling. The Minister talked about the overview and scrutiny committee. It considered the proposals and rejected them, and the cabinet ignored that. Will he make a comment on the failure of consultation in that respect?

[Robert Neill]

The Government do not run those consultations centrally; it is for the county council to use its processes. I say again that the county council was advised by its chief fire officer. Often support for collaborative arrangements comes from professional fire offices, who frequently take the view that a modern and viable control centre can work well.

We are talking about a matter for local decision, which is why, with every respect to my hon. Friend, I will not be tempted down the route of telling the county council how to run its business. I have made it very clear already that we thought a centrally imposed solution was wrong, but that a locally developed solution—whatever it may be; it will vary from place to place—is the right one.