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Mr. Raynsford: Had the hon. Gentleman been at the meeting in Manchester, of which he gave a somewhat misleading description, he would have heard the only contribution on the fire service coming from someone who announced himself as a former firefighter from Merseyside, who warmly congratulated the Government on proposing the regionalisation of the fire service if an elected regional assembly is voted for in the referendum. Had the hon. Gentleman been there, he might have taken a different position.
Mr. Hammond: The Minister, who was at the meeting—I am assured that he tugged urgently at the Deputy Prime Minister's sleeve as he inflicted damage on what was left of Labour party unity—will know that it was an all-ticket event. Some people who would have liked to attend were not able to do so.
Andrew Bennett: Where does the hon. Gentleman's party stand on the Barnett formula? Is he firmly committed to it for ever more, or does he want to review it?
Mr. Hammond: I suspect that if I strayed into a debate on the Barnett formula, you would rule me out of order,
Mr. Deputy Speaker. Perhaps when we have an opportunity to debate again—as I am sure we will—elected regional assemblies and what the Deputy Prime Minister has been telling audiences up and down the country in private at least, we can explore that matter in more detail.
Mr. Gummer: Will my hon. Friend also think about the remarkable fact that when the Mott MacDonald report looked into the regionalisation of the fire service, it surprisingly enough landed on the position that it just happened to be true that the natural way to organise it into regions was to follow those regions that we already had? Is he surprised that regions that were created for quite different reasons—I was part of their creation—turn out to be exactly the regions that are suitable for the reorganisation of the fire service?
Mr. Hammond: My right hon. Friend makes a valid point, which I shall address in a moment. If he looks carefully at the Mott MacDonald report, he will see that nowhere does it claim that the existing regions with Government offices are operationally the most appropriate regions for the organisation of fire and rescue service. It limits its claim to suggesting that speed of implementation, administrative convenience and financing considerations would be facilitated by using those existing regions.
I suggest to my right hon. Friend that any consultant who makes his living from delivering reports to the ODPM would not need very well tuned antennae to realise that, if he is asked to report on the optimal configuration of any service, deciding that nine English regions is indeed the optimum might be likely to favour him for further work.
Mr. Raynsford: Before the hon. Gentleman gets carried away on such flights of fantasy, may I put two points to him? First, the Mott MacDonald report indicated that an optimal solution for cost-effectiveness might have been just three super-regions, but there were obvious concerns about whether that was a sensible way forward. Secondly, the hon. Gentleman will be well aware of the Civil Contingencies Bill and the question of regional resilience planning on the basis of the regions as created for Government offices by the right hon. Member for Suffolk, Coastal (Mr. Gummer). There is an obvious logic in the fire service relating to other emergency planning for other reasons. Consistency is clearly advantageous.
Mr. Hammond: The Minister is right: consistency is advantageous, but whether consistently applying the wrong boundaries is right, I am not sure. The Mott MacDonald report considered only three options. I shall leave it to the hon. Member for Denton and Reddish (Andrew Bennett) to underscore the Select Committee's conclusion that—I think that I am right in saying—although the financial case for nine regional control rooms may have been made, there has been no attempt to make a service delivery case for that configuration, which further undermines the
Government's claim that modernisation is about saving lives and delivering a service rather than simply saving money.
Mr. Swire: Does my hon. Friend share my concern that, by mirroring the so-called regions on which the Minister is so keen, in the south-west we will end up with a lack of clarification on delivery? After all, it is a region stretching from the Isles of Scilly to Mickleton in Gloucestershire, which is nearer to Gretna Green than to Penzance, with different requirements in the conurbations of Gloucester and Swindon from those in the more remote areas of Devon and Cornwall and a further mix of areas that have a high percentage of retained firefighters, such as Devon, and those that do not.
Mr. Hammond: My hon. Friend is right; I take his point. It is questionable whether a single control room can effectively provide a service across 23,000 sq km, which is what the south-west region, the largest in England, comprises. I suspect that people living at one end of that hugely extended geographical region feel that they have been deprived of their local fire and rescue services.
Mr. Drew: The hon. Gentleman will know, as the hon. Member for Cotswold (Mr. Clifton-Brown) is sitting next to him, that we have an alternative model in Gloucestershire that has considerable merit. However, one problem with it is that there are three different forms of accountability: the fire service is in local government control, the police have their own authority and the ambulance service has its own trust. How could that model be made more accountable by bringing those services together?
Mr. Hammond: Although I dared to level a criticism at the Mott MacDonald report, I am not about to suggest that in the space of a few minutes I can review all the options and come up with the best solution. However, there is a question mark over the process that has been undertaken. Effectively, the Mott MacDonald report considered only a very limited range of options. The key question that needs to be in our minds as we consider this matter is that posed by my right hon. Friend the Member for Suffolk, Coastal: has anybody demonstrated that the Government office regions are the optimal configuration for delivering our fire and rescue services in future?
I was making a slightly light-hearted remark to the effect that I really do not mind the Deputy Prime Minister charging around the country obsessing about the English regions if all he achieves is to damage the campaign in favour of them and to damage the Labour party. But when that obsession spills over into a matter as important as our fire and rescue services and the safety of our communities, the Deputy Prime Minister's antics are no longer a laughing matter.
That is not to say that the Opposition do not recognise the arguments in favour of collaboration between fire brigades and the case for some areas of activity, especially those relating to anti-terrorism response, to be handled at a higher level than the
individual fire and rescue authority. I say to the Minister for Local Government, Regional Governance and Fire that that is virtually self-evident: it makes perfect sense from an operation viewpoint. Had the Government taken what I suggest is the obvious and natural route of imposing statutory duties on independent local fire and rescue authorities to deliver services and to do so efficiently, effectively and economically, and then provided encouragement and support for those fire and rescue authorities to collaborate voluntarily in the combinations that were most effective and most appropriate to their individual local circumstances, they would have had our support—but they did not. Instead, the Government have made the huge and unsubstantiated leap to the politically convenient conclusion that the organisation of fire services should be based on the existing English Government office regions, without producing a shred of evidence to support that conclusion.
Mr. Edward Davey: I have some sympathy with the hon. Gentleman's remarks, but has he spoken with the Conservative spokesman on homeland security, the hon. Member for Newark (Patrick Mercer), who seems to think that the Government have been very tardy in responding?
Mr. Hammond: I have indeed spoken with my hon. Friend. I suggest to the hon. Gentleman that the key point to emerge from the discussion is not whether a higher level of organisation is needed for certain purposes, particularly anti-terrorism response, but whether the unit of organisation that the Government have chosen is the appropriate one or an arbitrary one for that purpose.
In fact, judging by the material that the Government have produced and the Select Committee's review of it, the rationale, such as it is, for regionalisation appears to lie mostly in the financial savings that the ODPM believes can be generated by regionalising control rooms. That view is based on the Mott MacDonald report, which considered only three options. No serious attempt has been made to review the geographical boundaries that are most appropriate, nor have I noticed a flicker of recognition of the absurdity of a system that will deliver one control room for 2.5 million people spread over 8,500 sq km in the north-east region, and one control room for 8 million people spread over 19,000 sq km in the south-east. Effectiveness in delivery of a critical public service on which the safety of the community depends is being subordinated to the political agenda of the Deputy Prime Minister, who insists on seeing a regional solution to every problem.
The Minister for Local Government, Regional Governance and Fire has made it clear that if any of the English regions choose in a referendum to have an elected regional assembly, he will establish a regional fire authority for that region using his powers under the Bill to create a combined fire and rescue authority for a Government office region without the normal requirement, set out in clause 2, that any amalgamation of fire and rescue authorities must be shown to be in
- "the interests of greater economy, efficiency and effectiveness".
The Deputy Prime Minister is not going to chance his agenda to the vagaries of a referendum. Regionalisation by stealth is already upon us in the fire service as in planning, housing, learning and skills and apparently now the police. He has imposed on fire and rescue authorities across the country a regional management board structure which was initially billed as a light touch strategic planning unit helping to ensure an adequate scale of response to the new terrorist threat, but which, it has become clear, will quickly usurp the real freedoms and independence of local fire authorities. The Minister will be empowered to direct different authorities within a region to specialise in different fields. He will be able to direct them to operate beyond their own boundaries and to allow another fire and rescue authority within theirs.
The regional management boards will take over procurement, training, human resources and other senior management functions. Inevitably, the existing brigade structure will wither, and we predict that it will only be a matter of time before the Secretary of State uses the powers that he is taking in the Bill to create fully integrated regional fire authorities. As elsewhere in the Government's regional agenda, the Government are taking powers and accountability away from local people, and are moving them upwards to a more remote, less accountable tier of regional government. The Minister has effectively admitted that if authorities escape that fate, it will only be because they are deemed to have moved so far in the direction of regionalisation on a voluntary basis through compliance with his national framework that the final step of formal amalgamation has become irrelevant.
The Minister will find that as integrated risk management plans will probably produce requirements for the redeployment of appliances and fire station closures, local communities—already sceptical about modernisation, which they think is a euphemism for cuts—will be less willing to accept decisions that are made further away. The Government are fundamentally confused about what they are seeking to achieve.
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