Emergency Workers (Obstruction) Bill

I am grateful to the Father of the House, the right hon. Member for Swansea, West (Mr. Williams), for that explanation. I viewed new clause 1 as a useful probing measure. Like a lot of nonlawyers, when I see something in a Bill that says ““without reasonable excuse”” I begin to worry about the extent of ““reasonable excuse”” and how that could impact on various people. It is important. This Bill, which I believe the Government wanted and which should have been introduced in Government time, not in private Members’ time, is a re-run of the Bill that went through the Scottish Parliament by virtue of the Scotland Act 1998. The right hon. Gentleman said in Committee that, to speed up the drafting, he put a large amount of that Bill into this Bill. The problem is that the Scottish Parliament spent much longer dealing with the matter. In fact, during stage two, as I believe it is called in Scotland, 240 clauses were considered. A number of concerns and grey areas arise. That is why new clause 1 and perhaps the other amendments are important. We need to clarify where the barrier of reasonableness is. The matter was raised with me by a farmer in my constituency who owns farms in an upland landscape of heather moor. He was concerned because, as the right hon. Gentleman knows, those moors are burned in patches in the course of the year to improve grazing or, if there are shooting interests, to assist with the rearing of grouse. That can cause disputes. Some people believe that heather burning is detrimental to wildlife management. Others think that it is essential and important, so there is a dispute. The farmer whom I mentioned asked me what would happen if someone thought that there was a fire on the moor that was damaging the peat or vegetation and therefore the wildlife and called out the fire brigade. The firemen would arrive and the farmer or landowner would say, ““I am doing a perfectly normal, reasonable activity. Why are you here?”” They may say, ““We insist on being here because we must put the fire out.”” The farmer may say, ““You must stop because this has been official to my business”” and a dispute could arise. Whether that would fall within the defence that the farmer had reasonable excuse for obstructing the fire engines I do not know. That is a worrying point. It could be a matter of opinion; there may be a lack of clarity. My right hon. Friend the Member for East Yorkshire (Mr. Knight) mentioned the recent case where an elderly colonel was dragged from his house by the fire brigade and prevented physically from going in to rescue some of his family’s heirlooms and possessions. The colonel took the view that it was safe to go in but the fire service, with its possibly right emphasis on saving life, not property, prevented him from doing so. He may have put up a struggle and determined to go in—I believe that it was his decision whether to take the risk to rescue his possessions. Again, if he landed up in the dock on the basis of obstructing the fire service, I and I think most people would consider that to be deeply unfair. Therefore, there is a considerable number of grey areas in the Bill. I have talked about heather burning and a private house burning but one of the things that irritates people most is rubbish burning. We often see the illegal burning of tyres and other items on certain sites. That may be an environmental offence, but if the firemen arrived to deal with that and the people responsible for the fire obstructed them, would they be in breach of the provision, even though it was on their land and no criminal offence was involved in burning those tyres, although it may have been an environmental offence, which would result in an environmental prosecution? That is another grey area that we should clarify before the Bill proceeds.