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Mr. Raynsford: I shall give way for the last time.
Mr. Williams: Can the Minister provide some guidance on the devolution aspects of the Bill? Clause 59 states, in respect of parts 1 to 6, that
- "reference to the Secretary of State"
- "a reference to the National Assembly for Wales".
Mr. Raynsford: It is our intention entirely to devolve responsibility for the fire and rescue service to the Welsh Assembly Government.
The challenges of the 21st century require a modern fire and rescue service that is better able to protect the public and save more lives. It should be a service that places greater emphasis on preventing fires and takes greater account of today's risks in deploying its resources. It should also be a service that is working closely with local communities to identify and eliminate risks, particularly those affecting the most vulnerable. It should be a more efficient service where fire and rescue authorities work together to underpin national resilience and to support each other in facing a range of challenges. The White Paper set out the Government's vision for a fire and rescue service—a vision that has been widely welcomed and endorsed, most recently by the Select Committee. The Fire and Rescue Services Bill is crucial in delivering that vision, and I commend it to the House.
5.19 pm
Mr. Philip Hammond (Runnymede and Weybridge) (Con): I beg to move,
- That this House declines to give a Second Reading to the Fire and Rescue Services Bill because the Bill is granting to the Secretary of State too many powers to intervene which is against the thrust of the Government's stated approach to modernisation of the Fire and Rescue Service and will undermine local accountability; because the approach to introducing new regional structures for the fire service is based on the boundaries of the Government Offices for the Regions, most of which are inappropriate for this purpose and are not sufficiently accountable in the absence of elected regional assemblies; and because some key measures to promote fire prevention, particularly requirements for greater use of sprinklers, are not strong enough or are absent in the Bill.
As the Minister pointed out, the pace of change is challenging. Some of the most significant elements of that agenda are already well advanced: integrated risk management plans are being developed, and the national fire and rescue framework has been published in draft form and is out for consultation. Tight timetables apply to both. Primary legislation to update the statutory framework in which fire and rescue services operate—which has changed very little since the Fire Services Act 1947—was always anticipated and was welcomed by Conservative Members, but this Bill goes much further.
The 2002 pay claim by the Fire Brigades Union was seized on by the Government as an opportunity to force through radical change in the focus and ethos of our fire and rescue services. The Government repeatedly set out their case that abandoning prescriptive response standards and placing greater emphasis on the community fire safety role would enhance public safety, while generating enough savings to finance a reasonable pay settlement for firefighters. The Government's key claim was that modernisation would reduce the number of accidental fire deaths in the home, and would save money that could finance the pay settlement by focusing on prevention and improved fire safety and by tailoring the deployment of firefighting capacity better to reflect risk to human life.
I am afraid that the Government's claim that the modernisation programme is primarily about saving lives is shot to pieces by their own downgrading of their public service agreement target for accidental fire death reduction. In their 2000 spending review, the Government committed themselves to reducing the number of such deaths in the home by 20 per cent., from a baseline of the average between 1994 and 1999, and to achieving that by 31 March this year—just 10 weeks away. Last summer that target date was changed to 31 March 2010, a change described by the Select Committee—rather politely, I thought—as "surprising".
While the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister was immersed in a frenzy of activity last summer—with the integrated risk management plans, the preparation of the Bill and the drafting of the national framework prior to consultation, all in the name of reducing the number of accidental fire deaths—Ministers were quietly abandoning their agreed targets. They have now effectively admitted that the end result of the modernisation programme—the national framework, the integrated risk management plans and the Bill—will be the slipping from 2004 to 2010 of the date for the achievement of the 20 per cent. reduction. According to my calculation, that means that the Government's new target will be met this year with 10 per cent. more deaths than under the old target. That is unacceptable from a Government who claim to put community safety at the top of the agenda.
Andrew Bennett : I understand the hon. Gentleman's criticism of the targets, but he could attack either of two sets of targets—the original ones, or the new ones. What is really criminal is this: the original targets were so badly conceived and badly thought out that it was clear that the service lacked the risk management analysis that would have provided good targets. Surely the hon. Gentleman should concentrate on the fact that the targets of the past were guesses plucked out of the air, rather than being based on—for instance—the demographic figures that the Select Committee obtained from the Minister.
Mr. Hammond: I understand that the original target was agreed in the spending review of 2000. I suspect that the Treasury would reject the notion that it was parcelling out money to Departments on the basis of targets plucked out of thin air. I think that the time to raise that objection was during the spending round.
Mr. Gummer: Would targets not be much more credible if they were set for a date on which the present Minister was likely to be in power? Has my hon. Friend noticed that for environmental and fire targets alike, dates are constantly set so far forward that it is unlikely that the present Ministers would be in their posts, even if their Government were to continue? The real sin is for Ministers to set targets that they will never have to meet, but that someone else will.
Mr. Hammond: My right hon. Friend raises an interesting point. One cannot help but notice that the original target date is a mere 10 weeks away. Although the Minister for Local Government, Regional Governance and Fire has been one of the most enduring members of the Government—he has remained in the same place since 1997—I suspect that even he does not expect to be in his post in 2010. [Interruption.] I hope, for his sake, that he will not be in the same post in 2010.
One is tempted to ask why the Government have changed the target date. Helpfully, the Under-Secretary of State, Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, the hon. Member for Corby (Phil Hope), answered that question in a Standing Committee debate in October 2003, when he said:
- "we extended that date to . . . 2010 because the earlier date was not achievable."—[Official Report, First Standing Committee on Delegated Legislation, 21 October 2003; c. 4.]
Let me be absolutely clear. We support the objectives of maintaining optimum effectiveness and efficiency in our fire and rescue services and ensuring that they are able to deliver their traditional role to the community and deal with the heightened risk of terrorism while focusing on prevention at the same time. We support the abolition of a prescriptive national response standard and the introduction of local flexibility to match the deployment of resources to locally identified risks. We support the ending of anachronistic working practices, discipline procedures and career paths. We positively welcome the recognition of the wide-ranging role of the service by the creation of new statutory duties on fire and rescue authorities to perform the many essential rescue and support tasks that they have carried out in practice for many years, over and above their obligations under the 1947 Act. We emphasised our support for those measures throughout the fire dispute, and I do so again today. Throughout that period, however, the Government expressed their intention to reduce national prescription and thus allow more local control and flexibility.
The Bill will grant sweeping powers to the Secretary of State not only to set output targets, but to dictate how they must be achieved. It gives powers to merge existing authorities to create new combined fire authorities and to appoint members to those authorities for the first time. It gives powers to impose negotiating bodies on employers and employees in the fire service and then to give those bodies guidance that they will be obliged to follow. It gives powers to acquire, own and operate equipment and to provide services, and to require the supposedly independent fire and rescue authorities to use that equipment and purchase those services from the Secretary of State on the terms that he dictates. It gives powers to give a fire authority responsibility in the geographical area of another authority, whether the second authority agrees or not. It also gives powers to intervene in the micro-management of an authority and to order it, as the hon. Member for Kingston and Surbiton (Mr. Davey) pointed out, to do or not do any specified thing. It even gives powers to the Secretary of State, which I am told that no Secretary of State has enjoyed since the end of the second world war, to intervene in the management of a specific fire or incident and to deploy his judgment over that of the professional senior fire officer on the scene.
Critically, the Bill also gives the Secretary of State the power to impose the national fire and rescue framework. The Office of the Deputy Prime Minister drew up the document and although the Bill will give it statutory status, it will not be subject to any scrutiny by Parliament. The document lays down in considerable detail a prescriptive framework that covers every aspect of the organisation, management, operation and indeed ethos of our supposedly locally accountable fire and
rescue authorities. The authorities will be required to follow the framework, and the Secretary of State will report periodically on the extent to which they are doing that.Crucially, the comprehensive performance assessment audits of fire service authorities will take into account the extent to which they adhere to the Secretary of State's agenda, as set out in the framework.
All that sits extremely uncomfortably with the Government's stated objective of decentralisation to create a primarily community-based service. It is odd, indeed, that alongside the welcome abolition of national response standards, they are introducing a regime that will allow them to control directly from Whitehall the organisation, structure, employment practices, collaboration arrangements, procurement, training and human resources policies of every fire and rescue authority in the land, and even to take direct control of a specific fire or incident. To many Opposition Members, that looks like a step backwards, not forwards.
The Government's rhetoric during the dispute was of local empowerment, flexibility in delivery and the withdrawal of Whitehall from the running of fire services. Somewhere along the line, those good ministerial intentions gave way to a more familiar Whitehall instinct: to manage a wholesale reorganisation of the fire service in structure, role and ethos from the Deputy Prime Minister's Office.
Even more alarming is the importation into the fire service debate of the flawed concept of the English regions. It seems that the Deputy Prime Minister believes that joined-up government means propping up one policy area by compromising another. To be frank, so long as his obsession with his regional agenda manifests itself in him running around the country publicly denouncing his Labour parliamentary colleagues as "liars" and privately infuriating the Treasury and his Scottish colleagues by telling anyone who will listen that the creation of elected regional assemblies will be a catalyst for the scrapping of the Barnett formula, the only damage he is doing is to the Labour party and the campaign to flog his regional white elephants to an already sceptical public.
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