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Mr. Clifton-Brown: I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman for giving way again. I would not want him to be misleading, although I accept that he is not doing that deliberately. Where I live, which is a very rural part of Gloucestershire, my phone comes up with three different exchanges on different days of the week, so how would the fire authority be directed to the fire in such a case? The system might work in an urban setting, but it will not work very well in a rural setting.
Andrew Bennett: I do not want to get into the technical detail, but it is essential that the information gets through to the regional control.
Mr. Jim Cunningham (Coventry, South) (Lab): Has my hon. Friend considered joint control rooms for the fire and ambulance services? How would that work in an area such as the west midlands? From time to time such ideas have been bandied about.
Andrew Bennett: I have listened to the arguments about joint control, but the fire service has convinced me of the benefits of a separate fire service control.
On charging, some difficult questions need to be asked. The suggestion from the Opposition that the motorist would pay is a red herring. Serious questions arise with regard to animals; in some situations the fire service has difficulty dealing with them. It is easy to get a cat down from the tree for an elderly lady without charge, but if it is a matter of getting a prize bull out of a slurry pit—I cannot think of anything much worse than trying to do that—and significant expense might be
involved, the question arises whether it would be preferable to shoot the bull humanely. There are issues that need careful consideration.
Mr. Davey: I that hope the Minister will think about that.
Andrew Bennett: I hope that the Minister will reply. I do not expect him to get into the slurry pit, but I expect a reply.
I welcome the Bill. Some improvements could be made in Committee, but it is high time we had a fire service that is both efficient in emergencies, as the service is today, and highly efficient in preventing fires.
6.29 pm
Mr. Edward Davey (Kingston and Surbiton) (LD): The House is doubly grateful to the hon. Member for Denton and Reddish (Andrew Bennett), first for the balanced report that his Select Committee has produced—I hope that he does not see too much of my speech as based on some of his Committee's analysis—but also for taking on in a frank and brave way the fact that some councillors, not necessarily on the types of authority about which he was specifically talking, may not be of the same calibre as other councillors. His mailbag may cause him to regret making that statement, but it has a kernel of truth, and those with some honesty will recognise that.
I shall spend most of my speech criticising the Bill, and the Minister would not expect it to be otherwise; after all, we are the constructive and effective Opposition. But I want to put it on record that we broadly welcome the overall thrust of the ideas behind the Bill—the need to modernise the fire and rescue service—a point made by the hon. Member for Runnymede and Weybridge (Mr. Hammond). I think the Minister will admit that throughout the recent dispute, we gave the Government broad support and agreed with the Bain review that certain measures needed to be introduced urgently; they had been put off by previous Governments for far too long. To the extent that the Bill meets that agenda, it is welcome, particularly the emphasis on fire prevention, which I think has broad support. Updating the Fire Services Act 1947 is vital, as is modernising work practices, and putting the saving of lives at the forefront of our policy has to be right. The hon. Member for Runnymede and Weybridge made much of the change in the target. I think the Government feel some embarrassment about that, and perhaps the Minister could have regretted the fact that the Government got the target wrong more publicly in the first place, but the hon. Gentleman went rather too far in his analysis, suggesting that the Government would downplay the objective of saving lives. The fact that the Bill has that at its forefront gives the lie to that rather cheap analysis.
The problem with much of the Bill is that it goes against the Government's stated aims. The Government, in a number of their documents, most recently in the "Draft Fire and Rescue National Framework 2004/05", stress the importance of developing local solutions for local needs. The document sometimes uses great rhetorical language—
that one size will not fit all; that there is no national blueprint, and so on. The thinking behind the integrated risk management plans, at the centre of the work, is that local discretion and flexibility are key. But when one starts to look at the details of the Bill, one sees the sticky fingers of the Secretary of State all over it, in clause after clause.The Minister will try to defend that by saying that those are reserve powers, but I have never seen so many reserve powers in a Bill. When we debated other Bills, such as the Greater London Authority Bill, the Government took the same approach, as they did on the local government finance regime and capping. But these reserve powers tend to be used rather too frequently. The Minister suggests that the Government do not want to use them very often, but some of the nods and winks that one gets from reading the draft framework suggest that the Government may be looking to use some of the reserve powers rather more quickly than they have on previous occasions, and that is a major concern.
The other concern is on the approach to regionalisation. The Minister is well aware that Liberal Democrats have a different attitude to regionalisation from Conservative Front-Bench spokesmen. We have no problem with the idea of elected regional assemblies; we support them, and we have argued that the Government should go faster and deeper. But there is a huge problem with the way in which the Bill approaches regionalisation, as set out in the Conservative's amendment and in ours, and that is that it uses completely the wrong boundaries. That was debated earlier: the boundaries for the Government offices for the regions were not designed for this purpose, and that is a major problem. Moreover, although the Bill puts fire prevention at the top of its list, in some of the measures that are required to promote fire prevention the Government are being rather slow, and I shall come to the issue of sprinklers later.
I shall now deal in more detail with the regional aspect. The Government's intention on regionalisation is not clear from the documents. The Minister tried to clear this up in his opening remarks, but, if anything, he has left some of us more confused. There do not appear to be any real principles in either the draft framework or the White Paper on how that move should go. The Minister seems to be suggesting that the Secretary of State—again—will decide whether the local fire authorities are doing the job that the Government want, and if not they will regionalise. That is not a principle. That is not some sort of criterion that we can look at objectively and say, "Okay, we understand what would happen and how the move would develop." It is far too random. We do not know at what speed it will develop, so there is a degree of uncertainty, and that is not good for planning or for developing the integrated risk management plans which are so important and which have cross-party support. It is not clear how the regionalisation will happen in those areas that will not have a referendum on elected regional assemblies.
When it comes down to the details, it is unclear how the regional management boards that are described in a little more detail in the draft framework will relate to local authorities. Yes, they have the six tasks that are set out in the draft framework, but how they will relate to
the local fire and rescue authorities is not clear. The Government need to say much more on that, because if we are to have true accountability, we need to understand where the buck stops. Will it stop with the regional management board over the next few years, or with the local fire and rescue authority? After all, it is the local fire and rescue authority that will be setting the council tax precept, so our voters will want clarity on that. Will the regional management board be able to demand resources from the local fire and rescue authorities in its areas and force up the council tax in certain areas, with no accountability to the people in that area? So far, we do not know the answers to the key questions, and the Government must be a little clearer.When the regional management board goes about deciding something like the regional control centre, how will the decision be taken? If one local fire and rescue authority says, "Hey, regional management board, we would like it in our area," and another says it would like it in its area, what criteria will apply? Will the Minister give a clear indication when he replies that that decision will be taken on the basis of the Government's published criteria, not by some political process that is not transparent? We need to be clear how such decisions will be taken.
Our fundamental problem with the Government's approach to regionalisation is that it appears that they are prepared to see the development of regional fire and rescue authorities in the absence of elected regional assemblies. We have no problem with regional fire and rescue authorities where there are elected regional assemblies. There is a lot of sense in that. The key thing though is that there be democratic accountability for the decisions; for the way in which taxes are levied to pay for the services. In many ways it could improve quality, transparency and efficiency. We accept that part of the Government's agenda. But we are worried that the Secretary of State will be able to come to the House with an order for those areas that do not have elected regional assemblies and say, "I want combined fire and rescue authorities on a regional basis," and then set up another regional quango.
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