Swansea Coastguard

Tessa Munt Excerpts

Monday 12th September 2011 Commons Chamber

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Transport (Mike Penning)]

It is a pleasure to respond to this debate, and a pleasure, at this time of night, to see so many hon. Members in the House to listen to a debate about a very serious subject that the hon. Member for Gower (Martin Caton) knows I take very seriously within my portfolio. Earlier, I apologised to him personally for the fact that my office had not informed him that I would be in his constituency last Tuesday—an error for which I take full responsibility.

When I took up this wonderful ministerial position following the general election and my appointment by the Prime Minister I found many documents on my desk, one of which was about the modernisation of the coastguard. It is not traditional to have a shadow spokesman present in such debates, but the current shadow Minister was the Minister with my portfolio when the original consultation proposals were put on the table. The situation that I inherited in this part of the world was that there were three MRCCs. I have to emphasise to the public that these are co-ordination centres, not the places where the people who physically carry out the rescues are based. I think there has been some confusion about that around the country. The volunteers are certainly not touched by this; in fact, their roles will be enhanced and there will be more equipment and more people to facilitate the work that they do.

I inherited the situation that we would go from having three co-ordination centres in Wales to having one. Nobody disputed that at any time when I went round to each of the coastguard centres. Everybody knew that the coastguard needed to be modernised. That had been the subject of dispute for many years, with huge disruption to a national emergency service. As the hon. Gentleman said, we therefore made the decision to go with the original proposals and we went out to consultation on that basis.

I have said from the outset in all the debates, publicly and in the meetings I have had with hon. Members from various parts of the House and in places that I visited around the country, that we would come out of the consultation with a different set of proposals, because otherwise there would have been no point in having the consultation—it would have been a sham. We have experienced sham consultations in this House over the years—I certainly did as a Back Bencher—and I would not allow that to happen. I was absolutely adamant that we would go out and listen and ensure that we came out of the listening process with a 21st-century emergency service that had a resilience it did not have when we went in, and that we would look carefully at the concerns of the public and, probably more importantly, the coastguard—the experts who are there doing the job day in, day out—about the future requirements.

[Tessa Munt (Wells) (LD)]

I want to draw the Minister’s attention to my constituency, where we have Brean, which is a holiday destination, Berrow, and Burnham-on-Sea. Burnham-on-Sea is unique—it has peculiar tides and very swift and difficult changes on the mudflats, where any number of people and vehicles will become stranded over the summer. I have visited the volunteers who make up the local crews for Burnham-on-Sea coastguard and the Burnham area rescue boat. They have such a hard job to do, and they are very alarmed, as are local people, about the closure of Swansea, which would leave us in Somerset looking to Milford Haven, which is 60 miles to the west.

[Mike Penning]

I thank the hon. Lady for that intervention. If she bears with me, I will address those concerns as part of my response to the hon. Member for Gower. More importantly, the concerns were addressed to me only on Tuesday when I was in Swansea, and I will come on to that.

As I was saying, we were determined to come out of the consultation having listened to the concerns of the public, Members of this House and, importantly, the coastguard. When I went around the country, the first station that I went to was Liverpool. Just as on Tuesday, there was a picket. I pay tribute to the picket that happened in Swansea when I was there. As it was described in the press, it was a silent picket. The people were unbelievably generous to me. When I went down to them after I had driven in to explain the process to them, they listened intently and thanked me for coming. That is the response that I have had all around the country.