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9 Jun 2009 : Column 205WH—continued
“It would be a serious mistake for any local authority to assume that the principles I have announced today for this year are in any way a guide to the approach or the levels I may set in future years.”—[Official Report, 26 March 2009; Vol. 490, c. 465.]
Mr. Malik: As I have said, I shall give full details on that issue in writing.
The authority’s papers show that it will have reserves of £9.4 million by the end of 2009-10, of which £5.6 million is not earmarked. It remains a Government priority to keep down the level of council tax increases, and Surrey police authority knew that. It also knew that if it set an excessive increase in 2009-10, it would be at risk of in-year capping and of being required to re-bill.
Mr. Ian Taylor: I am very concerned about something that I think the Minister just said. For the record, again, the general reserves of Surrey police are £5.6 million, which is less than the 3 per cent. in Audit Commission guidance, so raiding that would cause even more concern in any external audit of Surrey police. Surely, the Minister is not advocating that, is he?
Mr. Malik: I am not advocating anything. I am merely pointing out the facts. It is not my job or the job of anyone in the House to manage the financial and operational affairs of any police authority.
Hon. Members: So why are you capping?
Mr. Mike Weir (in the Chair): Order.
Mr. Malik: I will deal with that point. I know that hon. Members are anxious, and I am quite sure that they are being sincere and not politically vindictive, but if they allowed me to respond they might get answers to some of their questions.
The authority knew that if it was excessive in 2009-10, it would be at risk of in-year capping and of being required to re-bill. It also knew that its 2009-10 increases would be compared with notional levels of budget requirement and council tax for 2008-09. Surrey knew all that, but it went on to set an excessive increase.
Paul Holmes: Will the Minister give way?
Mr. Malik: I will, but this will probably be the last time, because I want to respond to the points that have been made.
Paul Holmes: The Minister keeps referring to notional budgets, but as was pointed out in Derbyshire’s judicial review application, there is no provision in legislation for the Government to set notional budgets. I know that Surrey has said the same thing. He also keeps talking about excessive budgets, but the Government have admitted every year since 2006 that Derbyshire police has been underfunded by £5 million, but the extra council tax will raise only £1.6 million. How can that be excessive?
Mr. Mike Weir (in the Chair): Order. I remind the Member that this debate is about Surrey, not Derbyshire.
Mr. Malik: I am more than happy to respond to a debate on Derbyshire in future, but this is not it.
Out of 421 authorities, including 37 police authorities, Surrey is the only one that has ever set an excessive increase for two years in succession. The hon. Member for Mole Valley has had the privilege of serving in government, so he knows that it is not about costs, but about principles. If 420 out of 421 billing and precepting authorities have managed to live within their means and be financially responsible, it would be ludicrous to make an exception in any case. That would send out entirely the wrong message and would set a detrimental precedent that could heap up many problems in both the short and longer term.
I have heard a lot about Surrey being a fountain of wealth creation in the UK, and that it should therefore benefit disproportionately through expenditure on it, but the Government do not believe in redistribution based on the amount of wealth created in an area.
Anne Milton: Will the Minister give way?
Mr. Malik: I am sorry, but I am not going to give way, so hon. Members should please not bother.
We believe that money and resources ought to go to where there is need, and the last thing that we want to do is create a north-south divide such as that in the 1980s.
Anne Milton: Will the Minister give way?
Mr. Malik: I will not give way, I am afraid.
Mr. Malins: On a point of order, Mr. Weir. You know that all Surrey MPs who were available to attend today have attended, and that we have made a great number of points, none of which has yet been dealt with. Is it proper for the Minister simply to say, with several minutes to go, that he will not give way at all again? Is that a proper action for a Minister, or should he give way?
Mr. Mike Weir (in the Chair): That is not a point of order. It is not for the Chair to determine how the Minister responds to a debate.
Mr. Malik: The hon. Member for Woking (Mr. Malins) has been here long enough to know that and has, unfortunately, just eaten up even more of my time, leaving me less time to respond to his points.
I accept that much of Surrey police authority is probably excellent, as the hon. Member for Guildford (Anne Milton) has said, but, sadly, its financial arrangements do not fall into that category. I take her point about the Street Angels project, which seems a worthy initiative, and I wish it well.
The hon. Member for Woking spoke at some length about terrorism and counter-terrorism, for which there is a separate budget, which has more than doubled in the past few years because the Government have recognised some of the challenges that the country faces in that regard.
Much has been said about common sense, but there is no more basic common sense than living within one’s means. Why can 420 other authorities accept and live within their means, while Surrey cannot? Every one of the 36 other police authorities could have come here and made many of the same arguments, but they have not. I have heard today that they recognise the challenges that budgets impose on them, but they also recognise
their responsibility to stay within budget and make reasonable increases. That is common sense to everyone else.
The hon. Member for Runnymede and Weybridge (Mr. Hammond) made some arguments that I simply did not find credible. There were some rather silly and churlish accusations about petty political vindictiveness, but, as I have just explained, this has nothing to do with politics. Surrey is the only billing and precepting authority out of 421 that has gone for excessive increases in two successive years.
Sir Paul Beresford: I thank the Minister for giving way in the last few moments. The one thing that we have asked throughout is that there should be the opportunity, with the placing of the order, to designate the capping and set it against next year. That would save an enormous amount of money which the authority would have to find otherwise, whether from balances, with which I would disagree, or in a precept or savings. Is the Minister prepared to reconsider that and lay an order so that re-billing does not have to occur?
Mr. Malik: At this stage, I am not prepared to reconsider, because I think it would be wrong and would set a wholly inappropriate precedent. Surrey had the opportunity to look at things again last year, but it chose to ignore that and now it is paying the price. Even though it knew what the price would be, it is complaining. That is completely inappropriate, and it would be a wrong precedent to set. For that reason, I am pretty sure that I will not reconsider this matter in the way that the hon. Gentleman would like.
We will not have the final word today, however, as the capping of the authority in 2009-10 is subject to the approval of the House of Commons. A draft order to cap it is being laid tomorrow, and we expect the House to debate the order at the end of this month or at the beginning of July. Hon. Members are right to vent their spleen about this, but they ought to vent it at Surrey police authority for not managing its books in the way in which 420 other billing and precepting authorities have been doing.
Extreme Solar Events
12.30 pm
Graham Stringer (Manchester, Blackley) (Lab): On 23 April 2008, the Select Committee on Innovation, Universities, Science and Skills published its report on science budget allocations. During the course of the Committee’s inquiry, we received a number of representations from different scientific bodies about the decision of the Science and Technology Facilities Council to reduce the budget allocation for ground-based solar terrestrial physics to zero. We received evidence from UK Solar Physics research and from the British Academy, but the clearest evidence that we received was from the British Antarctic Survey.
I shall quote two parts of the British Antarctic Survey’s evidence, in which it makes a case for not cutting the budget in relation to solar terrestrial physics:
“Sun-climate links: researchers are becoming increasingly aware of links between solar variability and the earth’s climate. It is critical that we establish the relative importance of solar-induced effects on climate change so we can predict more accurately the man-made influences on climate. The InterGovernmental Panel on Climate Change reported that the current level of understanding is very low and Sir Keith O’Nions in recent evidence to the Public Accounts committee about the Halley research station in Antarctica asserted that the ‘physics of the upper atmosphere there will be a very key part of climate change’.”
It is therefore an odd decision to cut the budget.
More importantly for the case I want to make, the British Antarctic Survey stated:
“Space weather: solar variability has a very strong influence on the near-earth space environment, including large transient increases in the amount of radiation there. Such space weather events are frequent but intermittent and of varying severity, the prediction of which is an ultimate goal of STP research. They can lead to temporary loss of service from satellites, or even the complete loss of satellites worth about $300 million each. More than half of all space insurance is done through London and is worth $500 million per year.”
The Committee went on to make a case for fewer cuts to the budget. The work had not been done, so we could not have known that a month later—on May 22-23—a meeting was held under the auspices of the Space Studies Board about the societal and economic impacts of severe space weather events. Such work comes under the national academies in the United States, which had been called together to discuss the impact of severe space weather. I have heard that National Aeronautics and Space Administration funded the project because it was concerned about the matter. NASA was particularly concerned about what became known as the Halloween storms, which took place in autumn 2003, when there was a large space storm and transformer problems in Sweden. Commercial airline flights were moved away from the Arctic region and the level at which commercial airlines were flying had to be lowered. The advanced earth observing satellite II has not been heard of since; it was damaged beyond repair after that space storm.
At this point, it is worth discussing the definition of space storms, what the likely future impacts might be and how that should be reflected in the Government’s response. Space storms are associated with sun spots—a cooling of the sun’s surface—which are caused by bursts of magnetic knots from the interior of the sun. Associated with space storms are coronal mass ejections, which are essentially billions of tonnes of plasma composed of protons and electrons that hurl very quickly towards the
earth. Coronal mass ejections travel at varying speeds depending on how big and concentrated they are, but they can travel up to 1,500 miles a second. They can travel at a considerable speed and they seem to happen every 11, 12 or 13 years.
The largest such event was known as the Carrington event, which took place just under 150 years ago. The size of that event has since been studied and it turned out to be four times larger than any of the recently measured solar weather events. Richard Carrington was a British scientist and astronomer who first worked out the relationship between sun spot activity and the magnetic phenomena in the earth’s atmosphere, such as the aurora borealis, the aurora australis and St. Elmo’s fire, which sailors have known about for years. Richard Carrington worked out that such atmospheric magnetic events were related to what was happening on the sun.
The 2003 event—and to a lesser extent the 1989 event, in which 9 million people in Quebec lost power—meant that the body that works with National Academies in the States sat down and discussed what was happening. I know that anyone who talks about space, cataclysmic events and potential disasters is not likely to be taken too seriously, but I hope that my hon. Friend the Minister will take the matter seriously. If there were a large solar storm of the strength of Carrington—there is no reason to believe that the event of 150 years ago was as large as space storms can get—there would not only be serious consequences for western society, but all societies that are dependent on current technologies.
There are particular concerns that the magnetic impact of these storms would cause induced currents in step-up and step-down transformers. Direct current would be induced in systems that are meant to deal with alternating currents, which would saturate the magnets at the core of the transformers and melt the copper wire. Such a proposition is not theoretical; it is what happened in Quebec in 1989. The current systems are more vulnerable because, for greater efficiency, modern grids operate at ever higher voltages—for example, the Chinese have recently put in voltage systems that operate at 1,000 V.
When the relevant bodies looked at the situation, they worked out what the impact would be in north America and China. They also said that the inter-dependability of the grids in Europe meant that we could have a serious catastrophe in Europe. For north America, they estimated that within 90 seconds of one of these events, 300 key transformers could go down, affecting 130 million people. The impacts are obvious to anyone who thinks about it: water that needs to be pumped up multi-storey buildings would stop; trains would stop; the underground would stop; and, because we live in a just-in-time society, a lot of industry would stop. It would be very difficult after a few days to get petrol to petrol stations, the back-up generators for hospitals could fail, and we would be in a serious situation.
There have been attempts to estimate the number of back-up transformers, but there are very few. In any case, there are not many crews available to put in new transformers. Nuclear power stations would shut down if the grid went down. The Committee estimated that a Carrington-type event would have 10 times the impact on the United States of the Katrina hurricane a few years ago and would cost that country $2 trillion. That is a large figure, and consequences could be dire.
When I tabled a parliamentary question, I was told that the Government were aware of the matter and that contingency plans were in place. I would be interested to know the answer to a question about timing. Again, this is covered in the National Academies report. Much of the information about the timing and prediction of such events comes from the ACE satellite—the advanced composition explorer—which can get information to us in about 15 to 30 minutes. However, if the plasma were travelling as fast as it is estimated that it travelled 150 years ago, it would get here in 12 minutes, so the advanced warning would not arrive in time. The other satellite that can provide such information—it was damaged in the last solar storm in 2003—is SOHO, or the solar and heliospheric observatory. It, too, would have difficulty getting the information to us in time.
There have to be particular circumstances for a Carrington event to happen. Solar winds and ejections of plasma happen from time to time, but the most difficult events involve plasma directed straight at the earth. In 2003, the largest ejection just missed the earth. The plasma has to be travelling very quickly, it has to be dense and intense, and finally—this is quite important—its polarity has to be the opposite of the earth’s polarity. If it is the same, it just slips past the earth. It is like the difference between a knife going through water and an explosion in water. If plasma with an opposite polarity were to hit the earth’s atmosphere, it would cause many problems.
Given that there is no evidence that the current events are as large as they could get, and given the estimates that a large event could have serious consequences, I have two or three questions to ask the Minister. First, was it wise to cut the money going to ground-based solar-terrestrial physics, when one of the objectives is to understand the signs better and to predict events? Secondly, does the Minister agree with the National Academies estimates that the fastest of such storms are not predictable, and, therefore, that it would not be possible to take generators out of the system to protect them, and that we are vulnerable? The consequent question is, if something like that were to happen, are contingency plans in place for transformers and emergency services that go beyond the normal emergency plans that we have in place in this country? I look forward with interest to my hon. Friend’s reply.
12.44 pm
The Minister of State, Department of Energy and Climate Change (Joan Ruddock): I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Manchester, Blackley (Graham Stringer) on securing this important debate and on giving us an interesting presentation. I am sure that this matter is not well known to most people; none the less, as he said, it is extremely important.
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