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Mr. Hammond: As I was saying, we have no problem with collaboration, but we want it to be a bottom-up collaboration—an organic collaboration—between fire authorities, so that we reinforce, not undermine, fire and rescue authorities that have a statutory duty. The regional management boards are out of control. If the Minister does not believe that, he needs to talk to members of fire and rescue authorities in his party, as well as in my party, and he will hear that message.
The stakeholders have been excluded and to a large extent alienated by the process. Democratically accountable bodies have been bypassed and the Government's preferred procurement model for fire control has been imposed on them. That procurement model has excluded public sector bodies from taking part in the process; it has made it an all-private sector procurement process.
As I have tried to explain, there is a technical risk that the project will be delayed or fail completely, but there is something else that is serious and probably of even greater concern on which I want specifically to press the Minister—the interim risk. We have 46 control rooms in England, and the highly skilled, motivated professionals who work in them know that only nine control rooms will replace 45 of the control rooms, the London one being the exception. Many of those people are geographically too remote from the new control rooms to make commuting a viable option, and they have real fears for their jobs.
The issue to bear in mind is retaining and recruiting staff in that environment, which will now last until 2008. I talked today to Avon fire authority and East Sussex fire and rescue authority, both of which have lost fire control staff recently. Interestingly, in East Sussex , a deputy chief fire officer has interviewed each member of the fire control staff to find out their intentions. Several of them are actively seeking employment elsewhere. The majority of the staff told him that that they are awaiting the announcement of where the regional control centre will be before making their final decision.
I predict—this will be a problem that the Minister will have to deal with later this year—that when the location of the control centres is announced, there will be a mass exodus of qualified fire control staff from the existing 46 control rooms looking for new, secure jobs with a future, when they realise that they live too far away from the new control rooms to realistically consider commuting. That represents a danger to public safety and to the delivery of fire and rescue services over the interim period between spring 2005 and the implementation of the project in 2007–08.
Will the Minister tell the Committee not that the Government are saying that they recognise that there is a problem, but what they are doing to deal with it?
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Will they take specific action? Will they make money available, for example, for retention bonuses to be paid to staff when the control centres come into being? Such practices are common in the private sector, but they might have to be adopted for fire and rescue services to keep the show on the road through the transitional period.
Will the Minister also tell the Committee about the London control centre? A paragraph has been slipped into the national framework document stating that, if changes are needed to the London control system, they will be implemented at the end of the programme in 2008. London taxpayers have just funded the implementation of a state-of-the-art control and mobilisation centre at Greenwich View, and the London Fire and Emergency Planning Authority is obviously concerned at any suggestion that it will have to scrap state-of-the-art equipment to comply with the Government's common technology requirements. Will he make it clear whether the London fire brigade will be required to do that?
Will the Minister also say—he has been pressed on this a number of times and has refused to give any clear commitments—whether the Government will underwrite the financial costs of the change for authorities that have already done what the Deputy Prime Minister urged them to do long ago, and created tri-service control rooms? That has happened in Wilshire, Gloucestershire and Cumberland. When the fire service is compulsorily pulled out of those arrangements, will the Minister make good the financial loss that it occasions to those authorities?
I am conscious of the time, but there is just one other point that I want to make. I am disappointed that some of the yields of modernisation that we all expected and that were promised to us are nowhere in sight. The selling point of the modernisation programme and the whole Bain agenda was that we could get better fire and rescue services through targeting, at no additional resource cost. In other words, we could make savings from within the system without any loss of safety—indeed, while enhancing safety—in order to pay firefighters the generous pay settlement agreed after the last dispute.
There were to be changes in shift patterns. I remember discussions about redeployment of fire appliances, which would be in business districts during the day, and residential districts at night. There was to be full-time, full-night working, rather than the current practice of sleeping during the night shift in fire stations. None of those things has happened yet, although I hope that they will happen in time. That raises the question of where the financial savings will come from to pay for the fire brigade staff's generous pay settlement.
The Government have made £30 million available in transitional funding, recognising that there is an up-front cost in meeting the pay settlement and that any savings will be slightly longer term. They have pushed back the date on which that £30 million has to be repaid from the current financial year to the next. That still means that fire and rescue authorities have to find
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those savings through modernisation enhancements during this year. Those savings have to be not just £30 million—of course, that is a recurring cost—because authorities also have to generate sufficient savings to repay the historical debt that they have incurred on account of the transitional funding from the Government.
When the modernisation agenda was introduced, given that the Prime Minister and Deputy Prime Minister said at the time that modernisation would mean that the firefighters' pay settlement was self-financing, I said that the challenge for the Government would be to convince the public that modernisation was not simply new Labour-speak for old-fashioned cuts. In the absence of any obvious cost-saving modernisations being delivered to date—that is the information that I get from parliamentary written answers—it is not clear at all that there is any way other than cuts in front-line services to pay for the firefighters' pay settlement and to repay the Government's £30 million loan. That is another time bomb ticking under our fire and rescue services.
I am glad that we have had the opportunity to debate the document, which is important. It might not sound like it, but the Opposition agree with a lot of it. Our job is to hold the Government to account when we think that they are falling down on the job and pushing targets and deadlines back, and when they have simply got it wrong. We do not argue with the end objective of improved fire safety within the limit of the resources available—we all support that—but we think that their method of implementing and achieving that objective has gone off course. We certainly believe that it has gone off course in relation to the regional management boards and the regional fire control centres.
There is much in the document to be commended, but I think that I can promise the Minister that, in future years, we will pray against the order implementing the next edition of the fire and rescue framework and the order on the edition after that, whether or not we think that the framework is a good document.
Phil Hope: You won't be here.
Mr. Hammond: It is terribly generous of the Minister to acknowledge that I will probably be sitting where he is sitting. If I were sitting there, I would expect him to pray against such an order and hold me to account for the delivery of the promises that I had made, just as we will hold him to account in the short interim for the promises that he has made.
3.20 pm
Mr. Graham Allen (Nottingham, North) (Lab): I had not intended to say very much today, but many of my hon. Friends on this Committee so value my words that they want to hear more from me every week. So this evening I shall not be boring my wife at home, and I thought that I should give a few pearls of wisdom now as a way of warming up for this evening, when four of my hon. Friends have decided to put me under house arrest.
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More seriously, it is important that we get on record the value that Labour Members place on firefighters. This is a great opportunity to do that. The men and women working at my own local fire station of Stockhill are prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice every day. The Minister rightly said that that was true of all firefighters, and he was joined in doing so by Front-Bench spokesmen of all parties. The sacrifice that was made yesterday, and the sacrifice that people at Stockhill and every other local fire station are prepared to make, brings that home to all of us. We have to view the order in that context.
We on the Labour Benches should make clear that, in spite of the crocodile questions, as it were, from the Opposition, we have tremendous respect and concern for what firefighters do. There have been some difficult times over recent years, but it is very important that the firefighters out there realise that people on the Labour Benches can raise their concerns without merely being negative or point scoring for the Government. As the Minister knows, there are real concerns and I raise the following issues in that spirit.
My first point relates to the Government's stated aim that by 2010 we will reduce the number of accidental fire-related deaths in the home by 20 per cent. and the number of deliberate fires by 10 per cent. I am concerned that the only measure laid down is the date of 2010. Will the Minister comment on why there are no national performance indicators that can measure progress towards those targets? I appreciate that I have dropped these things on him, and I shall be quite happy to receive a note about them if that is more convenient.
The Opposition spokesman made a point about the ambitious nature, or lack of ambition, of the targets themselves. Some of them are reduced in comparison with the targets set in the past. The arson target is a matter of real concern in the Nottingham area. In my constituency, particularly in the area of Bestwood, we have been blighted by a run of arson attacks. Sometimes, courageous firefighters go out mob-handed; they have to put out a fire in a house and also ensure that there are bodies on the ground to stop some of the local yobs from lobbing bricks or otherwise disturbing their efforts, which are often made to save life and limb. It is amazing that they sometimes have to operate in that way. I would be grateful if the Minister could comment on the arson target.
Another matter of concern has been in another area of my constituency called Broxtowe—
3.24 pm
Sitting suspended for a Division in the House.
3.34 pm
On resuming—
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