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11 am
Mr. Alex Salmond (Banff and Buchan): I am very grateful for the opportunity to debate the effects of the extreme weather conditions which prevailed over Christmas and the new year. The presence of so many Back-Bench Members in the Chamber indicates that the matter touched just about every constituency in Scotland.
Today, I shall focus attention on the response of the Scottish Office to a national emergency which demanded a nationally co-ordinated response. I think that the Opposition are united in the view that the performance of Scottish Office Ministers was inept and inadequate. That is also a common view in Scotland.
In recent years, the Scottish Office has not been a byword for speedy action and transparent accountability. That is, perhaps, a criticism that the House would expect from me. However, the whole of Scotland will wonder today why this debate on this subject is proving of so little importance to the Secretary of State for Scotland that he cannot drag himself to the Dispatch Box to consider the matter or to defend his record and the record of his ministerial team. I understand that all the other political leaders of Scotland seek to catch your eye in this debate, Mr. Deputy Speaker. We are entitled to hear a reply by the Secretary of State for Scotland. Instead, he prefers to leave his junior Minister, the hon. Member for Kincardine and Deeside (Mr. Kynoch), yet again, to carry the can for the crisis.
Clearly, we would not find on the desk of the Secretary of State the same plaque that was on Harry Truman's. For the Secretary of State, the buck clearly stops elsewhere. After hibernating during the freeze, he is now hiding from the debate. He might well hide because it is his Department that failed the people of Scotland in the recent crisis. He should, therefore, be here to answer personally for his Department's inadequacy. After all, the crisis in Scotland was his first major challenge as Secretary of State for Scotland. For the first time in the tenure of his post, there was an opportunity to show his mettle and to direct the resources available to him to do some good. At the end of 1995, the Secretary of State for Scotland was weighed in the balance and found wanting.
The Secretary of State was on holiday during the crisis. I have no doubt that it was a well-deserved holiday. It must be exhausting setting up quangos here, abolishing byelaws there, listening intently to trade unionists and councillors and generally being the caring, sharing face of Scottish Conservatism.
Dr. Norman A. Godman (Greenock and Port Glasgow):
And then ignoring them.
Mr. Salmond:
Then ignoring them, as the hon. Gentleman says. It must be exhausting to come into the office every day in the sure and certain knowledge, as we see again from today's System 3 poll, that Scotland remains solidly against the Tories and that the impact of
"young Lochinvar", as Lady Thatcher once memorably described the Secretary of State, has been only to force Tory support downwards.
In my view, exhausted as the Secretary of State undoubtedly was, he had a clear obligation to return to duty over the holiday period when it was obvious that the
scale of the problem facing Scots in every part of our country was greater than could be imagined. There were, after all, many others--plumbers, electricity linesmen, road workers, housing officers, social workers and a huge cast of unnamed heroes--who abandoned the turkey and plum pudding to help those in trouble. They set a selfless example; that example should have been set from the very top of the Scottish Office structure.
Hon. Members may well ask what the difference would have been if the Secretary of State had taken personal charge. I suggest that the very inaction and lack of direction at the Scottish Office during the Secretary of State's absence show that it might have made a difference. I say that not with any great admiration for the Secretary of State's abilities and powers, but because in Scotland today, the only Minister with the power of initiative is the Secretary of State himself.
As well as telling us something of the calibre of the other Scottish Ministers in the dying days of this Government, that fact tells us a great deal about the way in which the Secretary of State runs his Department. Such is the centralist power of the Secretary of State and the effect of his purification of the machinery of government that without the king, the court is incapable of action. The Scottish Office was as incapable of movement as the water in the pipes of hundreds of thousands of homes across Scotland. The result was departmental inaction amid general chaos.
What did the mice do when the cat was away? The hon. Member for Kincardine and Deeside, who is replying to the debate--we should give him credit for that--wrote himself out of the script at the first opportunity. His response to an appeal to see for himself the difficulties caused by the weather was to say to the Daily Record on 4 January this year that he would
That might well be a sign of appealing modesty but if so, I am at a loss to understand why he should be responding for the Government in today's debate.
The facts of the exceptional weather are these. From Christmas eve until at least 1 January, and later in some parts, the low temperatures experienced were exceptional. Glasgow recorded its coldest temperature ever on two successive nights--a record-breaking minus 19 deg. One highland village achieved an unofficial record of the lowest temperature ever recorded in Scotland--almost minus 32 deg. In Shetland, the deepest snowfall since the war cut off hundreds of homes and led to the constant use of an evacuation helicopter for medical emergencies.
Road safety was compromised when water and even de-icing fluid froze as it was being applied to windscreens, not just in the north, but on the M8 in the centre of Scotland. Rail travel was disrupted and some airports were closed for lengthy periods. The west and the north of Scotland were colder than Moscow, without the everyday experience of such conditions that makes life bearable and possible.
The domestic effect of those low temperatures was dramatic. In Strathclyde region alone, half a million homes were reported to have suffered burst pipes and 34,000 homes were without water. That does not take into account the rural homes in places such as Argyll where private systems were, no doubt, frozen for days on end. In Grampian, the water supply was devastated. Domestic
and industrial cut-offs were common and many old folk and families with young children were put in a truly desperate situation.
Those are the facts. For each individual affected, especially at the festive season, it was an unpleasant and worrying time. Yet what was the considered response of the Under-Secretary of State for Scotland, the hon. Member for Kincardine and Deeside? What was his ministerial summation of the situation? As he grandly claimed to the Daily Record, it was not a "major problem".
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Scotland (Mr. George Kynoch):
If the hon. Gentleman is going to continue to quote a fabricated story by one Scottish newspaper, he will not make anything constructive out of the debate, which we all, I am sure, wish to try to do.
Mr. Salmond:
The Minister will have plenty of time in which to answer. Although I do not claim that everything that appears in the press is accurate, the Daily Record seems pretty sure of the story. I hope that the Minister is taking action against the newspaper if it has misquoted him on a matter of such importance to Scotland.
I suspect that the folk memory of those patrician and patronising phrases will come to haunt the Minister for a long time. They may have the same currency as
"The national health service is safe in our hands," and they may even match the prophecy by Michael Fish that there would be no hurricane. Even today, the Minister's remarks are reverberating. In another of his ill-judged comments during the crisis, he censured Grampian region for the closure of schools. It was noted in The Scotsman today that he was described yesterday in Grampian region, in a show of unity between the Labour, Liberal Democrat and Scottish National parties in that region, as a
"buffoon".
Lack of water was the worst problem, which led to many people queuing in the streets with buckets. Lack of power was another major difficulty in Scotland. At Christmas time, 30,000 customers lost power in the Scottish Hydro-Electric area alone. Winds were blowing up to 115 mph. In East Lothian, gas supplies were disrupted for up to 72 hours. The state of transport meant that coal and oil deliveries were disrupted, and pressure on plumbers meant that if central heating went off, it stayed off for a long period.
Mr. John Home Robertson (East Lothian):
I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for referring to East Lothian. While he is right to say that gas supplies were cut off for 15,000 of my constituents for up to three days, the situation was worse than that. British Gas provided some households with electric heaters to make up for the loss of their gas heating, but the surge in demand for electricity that followed resulted in the failure of the electricity supply in some streets. This has been a catastrophe for people who will have to pay enormous costs because of their burst pipes and the failure of the gas supply. British Gas TransCo is offering them
£20 compensation. I hope that the hon. Gentleman agrees that that privatised utility should be required contractually to pay more compensation to all concerned.
"just get in the way".
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