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Mr. Djanogly: My hon. Friend made that clear in his own speech.
One wonders what the reason is. Could it be the Labour party's long-held disdain for public services being performed outside the public sector? If so, that is a sorry set of circumstances. I look forward to hearing the Minister's explanation of her position and fully support the new clause and the amendments.
Mr. David Heath (Somerton and Frome) (LD): I support the amendments tabled by the hon. Member for Sheffield, Hillsborough (Helen Jackson) and supported by my hon. Friend the Member for Sheffield, Hallam (Mr. Allan). Whatever the Government's intentions—I am sure that there was never any intention to exclude the voluntary organisations, which do such a wonderful job in providing practical and emotional support when there is a disaster—an explicit recognition of that role would be enormously helpful. I hope that the Minister will be able to explain further how she sees the relationship between the statutory and the voluntary sector in this context.
I urge the hon. Lady to accept the proposal, because an explicit reference in the Bill would be in the interests of all concerned, in terms not only of planning but of understanding capabilities and recognising what resources may be available. It would also acknowledge
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the essential role played, albeit often at a slightly lower level than the first responders who arrive at the scene, in providing support not only to victims and their families and others affected but, as the hon. Member for Huntingdon (Mr. Djanogly) said, to the people who have to deal at first hand with the emergency, and looking after their emotional and practical well-being, which is equally important.
The point that I want to raise is slightly different and I would be interested to hear from the hon. Member for Newark whether it is encompassed in his proposal. I welcome the fact that his proposal has been developed since the Bill was in Committee, because there was a concern that it might lead to two parallel organisations—the voluntary sector as already established and what he proposed. It is now clear that his proposal would integrate existing structures.
I am concerned about maintaining a register of professionals in a variety of fields who can be deployed at short notice in case of a civil contingency. We are not terribly good at that in this country. We are good at getting our emergency services on the scene and doing the job, but we sometimes then need more members of the caring, medical and surgical professions to be available, simply because of the scale of the emergency and we are not very good at knowing where those individuals are.
I am talking about people who do not have commitments within their own hospital or medical environment, but who could be used in a particular region or situation to provide support. For example, there are chronic emergencies, such as foot and mouth, as well as acute emergencies. During the outbreak, I had colleagues and friends in the farming community in my area who were experienced veterinary surgeons but were not, for one reason or another, in practice. They volunteered their services either to go in and identify potential infection, or to replace those who were doing that, and were therefore unable to do their normal work. Those offers of support met no response whatever from the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food.
That was a scandalous and avoidable waste of professional resources. A similar situation could arise in, for instance, the nursing profession. There is not a surplus of trained theatre or accident and emergency nurses, so we cannot afford to lose people who have left the profession but retain the necessary skills to help in an emergency.
Either as a result of the proposal of the hon. Member for Newark to establish a volunteer reserve that identifies professionals in the same way that people with medical training are retained as a distinct category within the military reserve list, or as the result of Government action that the Minister may tell us about in her reply, we should identify professionals who are willing to provide their services, can be easily contacted and, most importantly, are available at short notice to drop whatever they are doing to help in an emergency. People are willing to use their skills and professional abilities, but they need a mechanism to enable them to reach the right place at the right time.
Mr. Swayne:
If such an emergency arose in the hon. Gentleman's constituency or, indeed, mine, the primary response would probably be made by firemen, who are
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effectively volunteers retained for precisely that purpose. The principle is acceptable and works now, so it is a mystery why it should not work in the scenario envisaged in the Bill.
Mr. Heath: The hon. Gentleman is right. Retained firefighters do a wonderful job in rural constituencies such as ours and I have long argued that we should have retained police officers to provide a presence in rural areas, but that is to depart from the purpose of this debate.
We have a reservoir of ability that we should be able to call on at short notice. The key is identifying before an emergency who those people are, how we can get hold of them, how they can be recruited to serve in an emergency and how they are to be organised. Those crucial elements are missing from the Bill and I hope that they will be included in the proposal of the hon. Member for Newark.
Mr. Forth: I remain to be convinced by the argument for a volunteer reserve despite the avalanche of consensus in our debate. I am worried when my hon. Friends come to the House to propose yet another bureaucracy or, dare I say, a quango, which is to be interposed between, on the one hand, the existing bodies described in the Bill and the amendments and, on the other, the excellent voluntary bodies that they rightly praised. I am not entirely sure, despite the advocacy of my hon. Friend the Member for Newark (Patrick Mercer), what added value the new organisation would provide, never mind its size, scope, scale, statutory powers and so on. New clause 1 is skeletal to say the least, and gives little or no indication of how the organisation would fit between existing statutory authorities and the voluntary sector. The proposition is therefore problematic.
6.15 pm
It would be much more valuable to explore the prospect of enhancing the role of existing bodies before we rush to create a new one. I often argue on a Friday, as you well know, Mr. Deputy Speaker, because you do Fridays along with me, that we should enforce the existing law more effectively instead of rushing to introduce new laws. The new clause is a parallel case. Before we rush to create yet another body or organisation, however virtuous it might appear—the words "emergency volunteer reserve" give it a patina of respectability or desirability, but that is not enough—we are owed an explanation from my hon. Friend about how it will work. To be fair, he gave the example of a surgeon who wants to volunteer his expertise and experience to contribute to an emergency such as Hillsborough, which was deployed as an example by the Minister and which we all recall only too well. I immediately wondered where the surgeon would go to volunteer and to whom would he make himself known. Where would his skills be recorded, who would be the repository of that information, who would give him any additional training that he needed—although he would have surgical skills, he might need retraining or reorientation to deal with emergencies—and by whom would he be co-ordinated? My first thought was that he would want to sign up with the Red Cross or St. John Ambulance, and a woman volunteer might want to sign
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up with the WRVS or another organisation well versed in responding to such contingencies. The Territorials, local authorities or other bodies mentioned in the Bill may be in a good position to accept to such volunteers.
We should therefore pause before establishing the additional organisation for which my hon. Friend argued. I was worried when he used the words "overlap" and "interlock", because such terms do not satisfactorily explain the complex relationship between existing statutory bodies and the voluntary sector. He argued that the emergency volunteer reserve would be included in the Bill if his new clause is accepted, thus giving it a statutory footing.
Mr. Brazier: My right hon. Friend has gone to the heart of the matter, but does he not accept that certain skills, such as those needed to deal with chemical, nuclear and biological warfare, are not widespread in voluntary organisations? One option is to increase the Territorial Army to its previous size, but some people may want to make a lesser commitment and make themselves available only for such civil defence work. There is therefore a case for establishing a new, lower-cost body instead of expanding the Territorial Army, for which I have argued for many years.
Mr. Forth: I am disappointed that my hon. Friend has reached for that solution, as he could have pressed for an enhancement of the Territorials on the one hand or the fire services on the other. The other day, I heard someone on the radio arguing, albeit in the context of the regrettable reoccurrence of the firefighters' dispute, that we ought to consider making prevention and the sort of response detailed in the Bill a role for firefighters, now that the incidence of fires in society has happily decreased a great deal. Why are we therefore not looking at, for example, adjusting or enhancing the role of the fire services, perhaps introducing an additional service, volunteers and so on, to fit neatly with their organisational responsibility? The role of such volunteers would be not unlike that of retained firefighters in rural areas, who have already been mentioned.
In setting up the organisation proposed in the new clause, there is a danger that we will achieve confusion instead of co-ordination. As soon as we start to interpose new organisations between existing ones, unless we are extremely clever—frankly, I am not confident of our skills as bureaucrats—we risk causing more confusion because we are causing bodies to proliferate, even though we are giving them a comforting title and responsibilities for co-ordination and so on. The case for such organisations must therefore be made more fully before I am convinced that there is added value in my hon. Friend's new clause.
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