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Mr. Bellingham: I have spent much of the morning talking to the Norfolk fire service and the Government have made no effort whatever to ascertain the views or comments of the people at the sharp end—the people on the ground.

Mr. Gummer: It is even worse. The Minister has not talked to the county or the district council, yet the county council is in his pocket. It is a Labour-driven county council. One would have thought that a word or

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two was appropriate there: we could understand leaving Norfolk out—it has happily gone back to Conservative control, as will Suffolk at the next election—but the right hon. Gentleman might have talked to his friends—but not a word. I understand that Ipswich district council has had no discussions; indeed the Minister has not talked to anyone. He has not even talked to the Fire Brigades Union in either county, or the Retained Firefighters Union. He has not done much talking or, indeed, listening, which worries me considerably.

Mr. Raynsford: Will the right hon. Gentleman now give the House the benefit of the full answer that I gave him, which made it clear that the representative of the fire authority in Suffolk attended a meeting, to which I invited all fire authorities in December to discuss those very issues?

Mr. Gummer: I did not think that the Minister wanted to be reminded of that part of the answer. When asked whether he had had detailed discussions with all those people, I discovered that

"all aspects of fire modernisation are discussed when we meet interested parties from time-to-time in the course of our Ministerial duties"—

over tea, perhaps, when there is an opportunity to have a word or two to the hand-picked ticket-holding people who attend such meetings. However, the Minister continues:

"The Chief Fire Officer for Suffolk"—

not the district councils, the Fire Brigades Union or the Retained Firefighters Union— just the one person—did not have an interview with the Minister, but he was lucky enough to attend

"the Fire and Rescue Service seminar on 3 December 2003 addressed by the right hon. Nick Raynsford MP and Phil Hope MP, and officials from the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister expect to visit the Suffolk Fire and Rescue Service shortly." —[Official Report, 15 January 2004; Vol. 416, c. 862W.]

We do not hear whether the chief fire officer had any discussions; all we hear is that he had to sit down and listen to the decisions that had already been taken and are now before the House. The date, 3 December 2003, means that even if the poor man had had a chance to say something, it would not have made any difference because the decisions had already been taken. I know that because the Minister told me later in response to another question that it did not matter that he had not talked specifically to counties in the eastern region because the decisions taken applied to "all regions equally well".

In other words, before discussing it with the regions, he has concluded that the decisions are so common to everyone that it does not matter whether those involved are in Cumbria or Essex: it will still work. One size fits all.

Richard Younger-Ross: It is called the Big Conversation.

Mr. Gummer: I am not sure that that advances our debate, but sadly I have never understood the hon. Gentleman to advance any debate.

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I still believe that the Minister is trying to force an answer on the nation—

Mr. Raynsford: No.

Mr. Gummer: Very well, he is not trying to force it, but he is taking powers to do everything, and to make other people do his will in respect of every item. If he were the only Minister in this Government doing that, I would be less worried; but whenever an issue is presented to the House, the Government's answer is to centralise it, because the man in Whitehall knows best.

When the Government get into a mess with the health service, what do they do? They centralise it, put more power into the Minister's hands, take power away from the localities, ensure that everyone does what the Minister thinks should be done. When the Government experience difficulty with education, what happens? The Department lays down yet more regulations and targets, and gives yet more teachers yet more forms to fill in. Now the Government are doing the same with the fire service. We are going to tell everyone exactly what to do unless everyone voluntarily does exactly what we want beforehand—although the Minister will not tell people exactly what the Government want until it is discovered that they have not done it. Then they will be told to do it, and to do it before a date in May.

The Minister is very interesting on this. He is usually so genuine about these matters. Now he is asking everyone else to hurry up, but when it comes to the issue on which we all agree that he promised to be quick—the disciplinary issue—he admits that he has not met his own target. Indeed, he has not met it in respect of two crucial issues—discipline and a reduction in the number of deaths from fire. Why is that? I will tell you why, Mr. Deputy Speaker: it is more difficult than he imagined. He will not understand that the same is true of the people whom he is telling to do things: their task, too, will be much more difficult than he imagines.

I ask the Minister to think again. I ask him to explain the position to my constituents in Orford, on the edge of Suffolk. They have their own fire station, and have a good relationship with those who work there. They need to feel confident that a system that serves the people of Luton with equal care has been subject to a sensible division. They need to believe something that I do not understand.

Mr. Raynsford: I will convince them.

Mr. Gummer: I think the Minister will find that rather difficult. They are asking themselves what is the region to which he has accorded these powers. It is, in fact, a region established by the last Government to make it easier to administer national priorities through a regional office. That was a compromise that fitted most of the Departments that then had regional organisations, but it did not happen to fit the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, which had a different regional organisation. That was partly because it was quite difficult to exert MAFF's individual, direct influence in distant areas, not least the far south-west. I remember keeping open an office down in Truro simply because it would have been very difficult to deal with it as other Departments dealt with other regions.

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I do not think that the Minister has thought fully about whether the specified regions are the right ones, if the service is to be regionalised. It is surely not logical for him to say that because they are the regions that he has decided to use in another context, it is convenient to use them in this context. I am not even sure whether he has thought this through in the context of terrorism and similar civil issues. In any event, it does not strike me as sensible to say that what has been decided in that context should apply to the fire service.

We must ask whether Mott MacDonald has been sold a pup. I suspect that it has been told to produce something that merely meets a series of financial requirements. I agree with my hon. Friend the Member for Runnymede and Weybridge (Mr. Hammond), who suggested that it was difficult for a consultant not to know what the Deputy Prime Minister wanted. The Deputy Prime Minister wants better reasons for regionalisation than he already has. He must find something for the regional offices to do; he must find a reason for the regions. We know why that is. First, he is politically and personally committed, for reasons that he has never found it easy to explain. Secondly, this is the only way in which the Government can surmount the difficulty in which they have landed themselves with a half-thought-out devolution proposal.

We must ask ourselves whether these regions fit the provision of fire services. I do not think that the Government have argued their case for any one of them, and I believe that we can argue the case against most of them. It does not fit the south-west, it does not fit the south-east, it does not fit the eastern region, it does not fit the west midlands, it does not fit the east midlands, and most of us would say that it does not fit the other regions either; but it is just possible that someone might support it there.

In those circumstances, why are the Government shoehorning the whole nation into a system for which they know no one will vote? That certainly applies to at least three quarters of it. Otherwise they would already have announced referendums—but they have announced them only in areas where they think they have a hope of winning. They know that they have no hope of winning anywhere else, so what are they doing? They are removing democratic control from people, partly to encourage them to vote for a different form of democratic control because that is what they want.

Mr. Clifton-Brown: My right hon. Friend represents a very rural part of the eastern region, while I represent a very rural part of the south-west. Has he thought of the danger posed to those in rural areas? It is more expensive to provide a fire and rescue service there, simply because of the distances that fire tenders and officers must travel to deal with the odd incident.

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