Coastguard (Maritime Incident Response Group)

Thérèse Coffey Excerpts

Thursday 17th October 2013 Westminster Hall

[Dr Thérèse Coffey (Suffolk Coastal) (Con)]

It is a great pleasure to contribute to this debate and to follow the hon. Member for Liverpool, Riverside (Mrs Ellman). She knows that I grew up in Liverpool. I lived in Formby for a while, so I am familiar with Blundellsands, where the Liverpool station is based.

There is no specific co-ordination centre in my constituency, but the stations of Yarmouth and Thames both serve the Suffolk coast, stretching from Felixstowe up to beyond Southwold. However, I have excellent volunteer coastguards. I have met the Lowestoft and Southwold branch several times and I follow them on Twitter. They are very informative and they work closely with the Royal National Lifeboat Institution. Such brave volunteers deserve our praise and thanks for the difficult job that they do so willingly.

When the issue erupted, thanks to the Government’s proposals early on in the Parliament, MPs learned a lot about how such an important service works. Admittedly, it took a lot of explaining to understand it, but I am one of the MPs who, having learnt more about it and having made representations about aspects of concern in parts of the country, ended up supporting the revised changes that the Government came up with.

Sadly, even now, it seems that we have not been able to communicate exactly how the coastguard service works and the fact that the people who make the rescues locally are the volunteers—the people of the community—who have local knowledge, as opposed to the people in the centres, who of course use their local knowledge and other skills to deploy the right resources accordingly. When I learned that fact, it gave me more confidence. When I learned about the extra training that was to be given and the extra equipment that was to be provided, that gave me even more confidence that we were doing a lot more to support our volunteer coastguard rescue officers on the front line. And thus it has proved. I am confident in their abilities. I have met them at Southwold on various occasions. I did not meet them when they had been called into action, most notably earlier in the summer when they worked closely with the RNLI to rescue more than 50 people off the coast at Southwold, but they continue to have my full support.

I want to pick up a few specific points raised by the hon. Lady in her report, and to say more about local understanding and resilience. I understand that several people have transferred from the Yarmouth station to the Humber station, so the Government policy of keeping one of two pairing centres open, and encouraging and helping staff to move if they so wish, certainly appears to have happened in our case. That is useful because it not only keeps those people in employment, but builds greater knowledge about the wider area that the centres cover.

To step back and wear a non-constituency hat, there is a lot to be said for trying to increase the resilience of our national network of information, because it does not take much—someone being off ill or whatever—for there suddenly to be gaps in knowledge. That is not unique, dare I say it, to the coastguard system, but it is one reason why many of our emergency services, such as the NHS or the police, put as much information as possible into a common format or database that other people can draw on. That does not mean that people never speak to each other, but it is deliberately done to make services more resilient.

Will you allow me to stray slightly to illustrate the point, Mr Rosindell? An extreme example is that the Care Quality Commission often picks up issues about people relying on information being passed verbally in hospitals, instead of their documenting it to provide extra safety for the patient. That is a real parallel to the coastguard service. We should not get too hung up about local knowledge: of course it is important, but people do not need to know every metre or yard of the coastline to be aware of the key problems in a given area. The areas off Southwold and near Felixstowe ferry have particularly difficult currents, but that kind of knowledge should be assimilated by a broader range of people, so that we are not reliant on a relatively small group of coastguard co-ordinating officers in our Yarmouth and Thames centres.

I am reassured by the important point made by the Select Committee’s recommendation in paragraph 27, that

“any work to develop and foster local knowledge should be organised by…management, properly scheduled, and remunerated, not left to coastguards to organise themselves when they are off duty.”

I fully agree that we have to build up such knowledge. I am also reassured by paragraph 36 of the Government response, which mentions exercises, full pairing days, visits for staff, and visits and briefings as part of working with the Royal National Lifeboat Institution. Those are important parts of on-the-job training, and the Select Committee makes the very fair point that people should not be expected to pick up such knowledge by themselves or by chance.

Of course, the test will come with the big incident that, thank God, has not happened yet—we hope it never does—and I appreciate people’s concerns about wanting resources to be deployed as quickly as possible in such an incident. I am confident that more such centralisation, with a wider network of centres, but without going from the former situation to having only two centres open 24/7, will provide the kind of resilience in which people can have trust. It will also build knowledge to ensure that people are safe 24/7, not just when a coastguard co-ordinating centre happens to be open. I am pleased to have been able to review the report.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Marsden]

I will correct the record as and when I have examined the details of what the Minister has said, and if it needs to be corrected.

Does the Minister accept, therefore, that frequent reports of low morale in the service are exacerbated by the Government’s inability to provide a clear picture of coastguards’ future? It seems to me that the closures at Forth and Clyde, what has been said in that area and the admirable work of my hon. Friend the Member for North Ayrshire and Arran (Katy Clark) on the numbers involved have produced some really rather concerning statistics. The Public and Commercial Services Union has said that not only are 15% of all operational coastguard posts vacant but of the 416 posts that are filled 24% of them are filled by officers on fixed-term appointments; I gather that those are Maritime and Coastguard Agency statistics from 2012. My hon. Friend the Member for Liverpool, Riverside, the Chair of the Select Committee, has already given the details showing the disillusionment and resignation among volunteer coastguards.

The Government have failed to offer a clear or finite timetable to coastguards, and they have explained that that was due to the assessment of ongoing operations and the success of transition. How that assessment would be made has never been made very clear. We have heard about the problems at Yarmouth, with it being designated as a daylight-only centre, and we have also heard about the changes in the closing dates for Solent, Portland and Brixham. These problems and changes breed confusion and can also lower morale. So can the Minister say what the current timetable is for the remaining closures at Liverpool, Swansea and Thames in 2014-15, and can he also say if that timetable is likely to change given that the original timetable for those closures was produced in 2011?

As I say, the Select Committee’s report talks quite a lot about local knowledge, but of course what has been very apparent in this whole process—my hon. Friend, the Chair of the Committee, has already referred to this—is the continuing concern, which has been expressed again today by hon. Members, both about those centres that have closed and those that are expected to close.

I will just touch on two or three of those centres. The closure of the Yarmouth centre is not just an example of local jobs and a proud tradition being lost; there are also some very specific local issues along that coastline. I know that they have been considerably aired in the local media, including the transfer of oil from one tanker to another along the coast from Lowestoft and Southwold. There have been issues about co-ordination, which have been exacerbated by the removal of the Yarmouth centre. There has been a particular incident at Caister in the recent past and the Caister lifeboat centre has expressed its concerns. My colleague in the European Parliament, Richard Howitt, said that the decision on Yarmouth could lead to a disaster.

[Dr Coffey]

rose—

[Mr Marsden]

I am just about to come on to what the hon. Lady said earlier. She told us that several people had transferred from Yarmouth to Humber, but of course what she did not tell us was how many people had not done so.

[Dr Coffey]

The hon. Gentleman just needs to be careful about that case, because I think it is still being investigated. I appreciate that Mr Howitt said what he did, but the risk is that when the full details come out he will understand that the process happened exactly as it should have done.

[Mr Marsden]

I thank the hon. Lady for her intervention. I am not making any particular comment on what the final incident report might be in that respect; I am merely reporting to her, as I am sure she is already aware, the concerns that were expressed by the Caister lifeboat crew.

There are also issues regarding the Clyde and Forth closures, which have been already referred to, including the fact that those services are now being operated out of Belfast. In my own neck of the woods, in Blackpool, we are concerned about the closure of the Liverpool centre. There is significant concern about all its work being done out of Holyhead. Mr Ken Harcombe, from the National Coastwatch Institution’s Rossall point observatory, just outside my constituency, said:

“Our concern would be if there was any delay dealing with someone 300 miles away, that could cost lives.”

We are keen to maintain some local community with Liverpool.

Blackpool attracts some 10 million visitors a year. We have a lot of problems with sea tragedies and, if such problems are exacerbated, that will make things far worse, not just in Blackpool, but along the whole coast. That is why the coroner for the area has expressed her concerns in the past and why the Blackpool annual patrol report for 2011 stated:

“The impending closure of Liverpool Coastguard Rescue Co-ordination Centre, is anticipated to have a significant effect on beach/sea safety at Blackpool.”

Before I leave local issues, my hon. Friend the Member for Gower (Martin Caton), who is unable to be with us today, tells me that in Swansea there remains considerable concern about the decision to close the centre there. There was a huge cross-party campaign against the closure. Questions still remain about why Milford Haven was chosen as the site, as opposed to Swansea.

We have heard about the situation regarding emergency towing vehicles in Scotland. What lessons have the Government learned from the experiences there about the need to maintain a Government-backed ETV in the interests of ensuring safety and protection from maritime pollution? I am not in a position to say what the extent of that provision should be, but surely in this situation we should consider those things. What is the state of the procurement process, to find emergency towing vehicles support in Scottish waters? What are the long-term plans to ensure the stable, reliable provision of ETV support in the rest of the UK’s waters?

The Government did not explain, in their response to the Select Committee’s critical question, how the ETV in the northern isles would effectively serve the west coast. We have heard concerns about that this afternoon.