Search and Rescue Service

Sarah Newton Excerpts

Tuesday 1st March 2011 Westminster Hall

[Sir Alan Beith]

I am grateful to my right hon. Friend who, from his constituency, knows well the work of Westland in that area. I have an open mind about whether a major refit of at least some of the Sea Kings could be carried out. It is one of the options to be considered. However, we cannot simply go on as we are with relatively short-term maintenance of the Sea Kings.

The personnel who work in search and rescue with the RAF and the Royal Navy are also in limbo. That is also true of the Maritime and Coastguard Agency personnel, although they already have a contract; but it expires within the year, I think, so they too are in a state of uncertainty. The Government need to get a grip on the situation and some people need to know pretty soon, for their careers, what will happen. Are they likely to have a future in search and rescue, whether on the military side or as contractors’ employees? What will happen?

We also need to bear in mind some of the warnings given during the contract process. My right hon. Friend the Member for Orkney and Shetland (Mr Carmichael), to whom I am sure the Minister will want to listen, as he is now the Government Deputy Chief Whip, said in February 2010:

“It is essential that this contract…is better negotiated and has fewer loopholes than the interim contract we had for the last few years”—

the MCA contract. He said that the contract must protect against situations like the one that arose in 2008. The back-up helicopter based at Sumburgh was off-station for a whole week, but the Department for Transport and the MCA were powerless to do anything about it. He also wanted to see the new service rooted properly in the communities that it serves rather than being dependent on a stream of temporary pilots and support officers constantly being shipped in and out.

What are the options? What are the Government considering? First are the short-term immediate continuity arrangements. The RAF will carry on, as it always does. It has the resilience and determination to cope in situations, whether created by Governments or world events, that would challenge many other organisations, and I have every confidence in its ability to do so. However, we need answers on how long it will be before a new scheme replaces the present arrangements. Personnel have careers to plan, and MCA helicopters are contracted only until next year. As I said earlier, the Sea Kings are now extremely difficult to keep airworthy. How long will this situation continue? What level of refit of the Sea King is possible? Would a major upgrade of the Sea King be a short-term option, or would it be too expensive? Should it therefore be considered as a longer-term measure?

What is being considered in the longer term? There are obviously several options. One is to retender a version of the contract. The Government clearly ruled out retendering the contract in its present form when they made their announcement, so they have obviously given it some consideration. There are several reasons why retendering is not the answer. There were too many flaws in the original contract, some of which I referred to earlier; once it became impossible to continue it, the questions that had arisen while it was being considered then needed to be considered again. At that stage in the contract process, it may have been too late to resolve those questions, but when the matter was reopened they needed to be reconsidered.

Another reason why it would have been difficult to retender was that experience has shown that the procurement process is not up to the job. To go back to the same process and risk another failure was not something that the Government could properly have done. We have seen many other weaknesses in the defence procurement process, which has led many to lack confidence in it.

In some respects the previous contract was not cost-effective, which is why it was under review. The reason why the Government did not stop it as a result of the Chief Secretary’s review, but were about to announce that it would go ahead, was that the contract had gone too far to be stopped and the gap would be undesirably long if the process had to be started again. However, events have now forced us into that very gap. The Government concluded during the cost review that it would be unwise to have such a gap, but they now have one. That puts a particular responsibility on Ministers to tell us how they intend to deal with a situation that they felt obliged to avoid until dropping the contract became inevitable because of the irregularities that were found. Simply retendering does not seem to be a proper option.

Another alternative would be to lease helicopters for use by existing RAF, Royal Navy and MCA-based crews. There are various options, but even in the short term it may be necessary to have short leasing contracts. What else is the MCA to do when its existing contract expires? What can the RAF do if it is found that a major refit of the Sea Kings will be too expensive to be considered as a short-term measure? Will aircraft have to be leased? The option of leasing of helicopters is clearly on the table, but will there be a new form of contract, involving both leasing aircraft and crew, with some of the features of the previous contract but rather better developed?

There is significant private sector interest in providing helicopters to the oil industry, the police and other services where they are essential. The market is not devoid of other operators, but as we heard earlier, the service requires a particularly high level of skill and training and it has to serve a wide range of functions. Rescues take place at sea, in dangerous coastal areas, in mountains, in fog—conditions that would defy many traditional commercial operators. It would be a pretty demanding contract, and the public are entitled to know that it will be carried out by people with the skills and equipment to do so.

[Sarah Newton (Truro and Falmouth) (Con)]

I congratulate my right hon. Friend on securing this debate. The Government have inherited a difficult situation, and I agree with what he says about the importance of introducing some certainty.

Many people in my constituency work at RNAS Culdrose, which plays an important role in our community. We are proud of its role in search and rescue, as it works closely with Falmouth coastguard. The Sea King helicopters provide what I would call a more inshore rescue service, but does my right hon. Friend agree that we must not lose sight of the important role of the Nimrod, and the necessity to have some replacement for the much more distant sea rescues, which are also part of the search and rescue service?

[Sir Alan Beith]

I am grateful to my hon. Friend for those comments. She obviously has similar experiences to mine in working with the RAF locally and being very aware that its work is respected by the community.

My hon. Friend spoke also about the Nimrod. That is a big problem for the Ministry of Defence, and it illustrates similarities to the subject of our debate, not least because it has been dragging on for a long time and we still do not have a proper solution. However, it is probably beyond the scope of today’s debate—and, I believe, beyond the responsibilities of the Minister answering it—but my hon. Friend was right to flag it up.

Much has been said in public recently about the relationship between the RAF and the coastguard. I simply make this comment. If its relationship with the coastguard were dependent on where the major control centres were situated, we would have got into difficulties years ago, when our major control centre moved from Tynemouth to Humberside. What makes the relationship work well is not only that the control centres operate efficiently, as they should, but that the RAF develops good close personal relationships with the coastguards—mostly volunteers in coastal communities up and down our coastline—as it does also with the lifeboat service. The building of those relationships, and therefore the desirability of having crew in place for reasonable periods, is essential to the success of the service.

I emphasise a few more points that I believe the Minister needs to consider. What about 24-hour cover? It raised great concern when the idea that two or even three search and rescue areas—a single area is huge—could be treated as one for 12 hours of the 24 became part of the proposal, and even more concern when it was suggested that it could be done with existing aircraft before the new contract came into being.

That concern remains. People want to know that there is 24-hour cover on no larger a scale than the existing areas, because if a neighbouring area is already on operational duty and carrying out a rescue, there will be no search and rescue helicopter within a reasonably manageable distance for 24 hours of the day. We need an answer on that. We also need clarification on what is going to happen to the Falklands support operation if the RAF is no longer to be involved in SAR there. We need to know about the potential impact of legal action, and whether it is likely to cause delay to the key decisions that are now being taken. I hope not.

Overall, it is an awful business. We will know fully when the investigations are completed, but it approaches what we could call a scandal. Courageous and skilled aircrew have been let down by the inadequacy of the Ministry of Defence procurement process and the way in which it was carried out. The challenge for the Department for Transport is to carry out the task rather better than the MOD, which has conspicuously failed. The time scale now is short and demanding. Can the Department do it? How will it do it, and what assurances can the Minister give to those employed in, or dependent on, search and rescue that they will have satisfactory continuity arrangements over a reasonably short time and that a new system will be put in place in which the public can have confidence?