Civil Contingencies Act 2004 (Amendment of List of Responders) Order 2005

My Lords, I did not expect the order to excite great passions, but I thought that it might excite a little more interest. I am grateful to the noble Lord for his support and encouragement to those involved in contingency planning and civil protection. I   am also very grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady   Wilcox, for her response and generosity. The noble Baroness asked a number of questions, with which I shall try to deal in turn. The first question was whether this would have made any difference last week. In practical terms, the answer has to be ““no””. In essence, all that the order does is codify the role of the Strategic Health Authority in emergency planning and response, so it gives effect to what was being undertaken in any event. It is to give greater confidence and certainty to the process that we have brought the order forward. The noble Baroness also expressed a small concern that we were bringing an order forward so quickly after the Bill. Perhaps that could have been reflected more widely in concerns about the accuracy of the responder’s list and so on. The noble Baroness does not need to worry too much about that. The process was always set up to provide the legislation with some necessary flexibility, so that if it seemed appropriate to add to the responder’s list at a later stage we could do that. As I have basically said, a minor technical change is necessary in part because of the evolution of the SHA’s co-ordination role in relation to emergency planning and response since the introduction of the Bill to Parliament. It is worth adding that it has strong support from stakeholders and the health responder community—to describe it in a slightly jargonistic way. It demonstrates the Government’s continued commitment to ensuring that the regime itself keeps apace with wider developments in the health services. One could also fairly reflect that it says a lot about our commitment to listening to those who are involved. If those who are involved are saying to us, ““Look, we think you need to make this change now””, then here we are. We have listened; we have thought about it; we have consulted; we have asked people; and we are bringing forward that change. Perhaps it is worth adding that we gave some consideration at the time of the legislation to including SHAs in the responder’s list. But we took a decision at that stage not to do that because we wanted to have more systematic discussions with the stakeholders and also wanted to enable the SHA role to emerge and settle down. That is really why we have done it now and have included them in the category 2 responder’s list in the way in which we have. The noble Baroness, Lady Wilcox, also asked about a single service for London. The answer to that is ““no””. Arrangements work well at the moment. One SHA taking the lead as a matter of practice works well with the others. So we are happy with arrangements as they are. I am very happy to respond to those points. If there are any other issues that the noble Baroness thinks are important and relevant, and wants to come back later, she is very welcome to drop me a note asking for further particulars and insights. I make the offer today that if the noble Baroness and the noble Lord, Lord Greaves, in his transitory role, want further briefing from the Civil Contingencies Unit within the Cabinet Office, they are welcome to take up that offer. We want to spread the knowledge and to advance people’s understanding of how it works. We can all be proud of what was achieved last week in terrible circumstances, but we are not complacent about what we and the services have achieved. I give a commitment to the House today that we will seek to ensure that we ratchet up levels of improvement so that there is preparedness for any unpleasant, unforeseen or unpredicted circumstances that might arise in the future when services are put under pressure in emergencies in the way in which they were last week when they responded so magnificently. On Question, Motion agreed to.