Knight Review of the Fire and Rescue authorities in England

Written evidence from the Mayor of London (FRR 03)

1. The Mayor welcomes the chance to respond to the CLG Committee’s inquiry into the review, conducted by Sir Ken Knight, of efficiencies and operations in fire and rescue authorities in England. In the review’s final report, Sir Ken is right to highlight the key statistic that overall attendance at incidents is down 40 per cent over the last decade.

2. This surely points to an urgent need to reform the fire service so that it is best placed to achieve the significant level of efficiencies (potentially as high as £200 million) which the Knight Review sets out as attainable nationally.

3. In terms of the arrangements in the capital, the London Fire and Emergency Planning Authority (LFEPA) is one of the Greater London Authority’s (GLA) functional bodies and oversees the work of the London Fire Brigade (LFB).

4. The LFB is by some distance the largest fire service in England, employing one fifth (5,600 out of the 28,200) of the wholetime firefighters in place across the country, and will therefore play a key part in achieving the efficiencies available.

5. It is important that the options for closer working across the ‘blue light’ services in London are given careful consideration. However, the issues arising in the capital are slightly different from other localities in England given the relative size of LFB and its pan-London partner bodies and the economies of scale available to them.

6. The particular issue the Mayor would like to raise in the London context is one of governance and decision-making. The GLA Act sets out the membership of LFEPA as comprising eight Assembly Members, seven London Borough councillors and two appointees of the Mayor’s choice. The Assembly Members and councillors are appointed on the basis of political proportionality. The Mayor appoints the Chairman from among those 17 Members.

7. The membership proportions set out in the Act almost inevitably mean that any Mayor will not command a majority on LFEPA and nor will his choice as Chairman. In the past, this has not been a major problem as, while there have been general expectations to modernise, there have not been the grant reductions we are currently experiencing.

8. The deficiencies in the current arrangements have come to a head during the on-going process to agree the Fifth London Safety Plan. The London Fire Commissioner presented plans for a reorganisation of fire cover in London to a plenary meeting of LFEPA held on 21 January 2013, partly so that LFEPA could make the level of budget savings I expect from it in 2014-15. The Commissioner’s plans involved closing 12 fire stations in the capital while retaining the current London-wide target response times.

9. At that plenary meeting LFEPA resolved to go against the Commissioner’s professional advice and withdraw any reference to fire station closures from the version of the draft Plan to go out for public consultation.

10. This created something of a constitutional conundrum for the GLA as the legislation in place requires the GLA Group budget to be balanced but also establishes LFEPA as a decision-making body in its own right for matters relating to fire provision.

11. The Mayor had no option but to use – for the first time – his direction making power over LFEPA and to reinstate the Commissioner’s plans in the version of the draft Plan to go out for public consultation. Without my intervention, the achievement of a balanced GLA Group budget for 2014-15 would have been jeopardised.

12. This was far from ideal as the direction-making power should only be used in extremis. It is certainly not a sustainable means of decision-making on fire matters in London in the medium to long term.

13. The constitutional conundrum intensified when LFEPA at first refused to follow the Mayor’s direction. This immediately threw up a wider set of issues around the Mayoralty’s principal role as the executive for the GLA Group and the London Assembly’s principal role as the scrutiny body for the Group (noting that the Assembly has the largest allocation of seats on one of the Group’s executive bodies, LFEPA). Although LFEPA ended up relenting, the fundamental issue of executive accountability remains.

14. Recent events have strongly demonstrated that reform of LFEPA’s membership is required. We cannot continue with the confused arrangements whereby the Mayoralty is perceived to have full accountability for decisions relating fire provision but is in a minority position on LFEPA.

15. Any attempt to run LFEPA from the GLA via the Mayor’s direction-making power would be a hugely time consuming exercise and would not represent a good use of public funds. As a result, the Mayor suggests that:

· In the short term, the current arrangements are made to operate as best they can, noting that the Mayoral power of direction might need to be used again so that Fifth London Safety Plan conforms with the Group budget parameters for 2014-15;

· In the medium term, and as an interim measure to give the Mayoralty greater control over LFEPA pending more fundamental reform, consideration is given by the Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG) to the Secretary of State invoking his order making power whereby the composition of LFEPA can be varied, provided there remains one more Assembly Member on the Authority than borough councillor – one possible allocation of seats would be to have six Assembly Members, six Mayoral appointees and five councillors; and

· In the long term, primary legislation could be introduced to reform LFEPA so that it is established as a Mayoral body along the lines of the Mayor’s Office for Policing and Crime (MOPAC) with scrutiny of a reformed LFEPA provided by a joint committee of Assembly Members and London Borough councillors, retaining both the Assembly’s and London Councils’ oversight of London fire issues.

16. The purpose of the reforms outlined above would be to provide greater clarity in terms of executive and scrutiny roles. The Mayor would be fully accountable for the resourcing decisions taken, as he is with the GLA’s three other functional bodies (MOPAC, Transport for London and the London Legacy Development Corporation).

17. Finally, it is worth noting that the LFEPA accountability issue highlighted in this submission has also been raised as anomalous by a number of witnesses during the Committee’s current inquiry into the GLA Act 2007.

June 2013