Emergency Workers (Obstruction) Bill

I join my hon. Friends in congratulating the Father of the House on this Bill. If it is enacted, it will be a worthy addition to the statute book, as is recognised by the cross-party support that it has. The Bill has undoubtedly been improved as a result of the lively and constructive debates on it in this House, and it will play an important role in addressing the serious problem of the obstruction of our emergency services. The Bill addresses an increasingly important issue. I hope that Members will forgive me if I repeat some arguments that have already been made, but the need for the Bill is worth reinforcing again. The British crime survey shows that fire and rescue service firefighters and officers, along with police officers and prison service officers and others defined in the Bill as being in the protective services, are the people who are most at risk of experiencing violence and obstruction at work. Some 14 per cent. of workers in the occupational category report that they have experienced an incident of actual or threatened violence while working. The figure for the work force as a whole is 1.7 per cent., so there is a huge and outrageous difference. The former Office of the Deputy Prime Minister collected figures for England and Wales from 2004 at the request of the Chief Fire Officers Association. The stats show that there were almost 400 serious incidents in a nine-month period alone. It is not only the number of incidents that is increasing, but their ferocity and seriousness. I am sure that most hon. Members in the Chamber know of at least a single incident that has occurred in their constituency or nearby that illustrates how serious the problem is becoming. The Fire Brigades Union has published research showing that the instances of obstruction on UK fire crews runs at approximately 40 a week, and we understand that the problem may well be getting worse. I understand that the research is the first of its kind in the UK. The problem is also seriously underreported, so it is suggested that there could be as many as 120 incidents in one week. We believe that there is serious underreporting because only 18 of the 50 English and Welsh fire and rescue services responded to requests for information when the figures were being compiled. Only a third of the brigades thus added their numbers to the statistics that we have available.