Fire Services (Hertfordshire)

It is a delight to serve under your chairmanship this morning, Mr. Hood. This debate is about firefighters in Hertfordshire. Many hon. Members from all parties met their local fire officers when the fire officers lobbied Parliament on 13 November. The lobby took place principally to raise concerns about the deaths of firefighters in the UK since 1978, but the fire officers also wanted to discuss operational concerns. Not all colleagues can participate in this debate. My hon. Friend the Member for Welwyn Hatfield (Grant Shapps) and other hon. Members would have liked to attend, but they have other engagements. Regrettably, my hon. Friend the Member for Hemel Hempstead (Mike Penning) is in Afghanistan with the armed forces parliamentary scheme, but I know that he feels strongly that firefighters in Hertfordshire provide a hugely valuable service. That was never more appreciated than when our brave firefighters tackled the massive explosion at Buncefield, which was the biggest fire in peacetime Europe. He wants me to tell the Minister that he shares the concerns that I will raise today about the pressure facing firefighters. I am sure that the Minister recognises that those in the fire service who are expected to deliver the service feel a great deal of anger and frustration. Such feelings are also felt by members of the public, who have seen cuts and closures in the name of rationalisation and local efficiencies. I will not address the closures that have impacted on my constituency, because I know that other hon. Members, such as my hon. Friend the Member for Hertsmere (Mr. Clappison), will voice their concerns about the loss of local services. My hon. Friend has campaigned vigorously against the closure of Radlett fire station. As the Minister knows, I continually argue that Hertfordshire and, indeed, St. Albans do particularly badly under the Government’s current funding formula. That has serious implications for the funding of our local services and has led to so-called efficiencies. Given the real-term cut in funding that will take place for all county council services next year, there is a continuous need to find year-on-year efficiencies in Hertfordshire. As a floor authority, we expect to receive an increase of 1.5 per cent. Our fire and rescue authority is unable to raise its own precept, because it is not a separate entity, so it has even less control over its financial destiny. Although the fire authority is exempt from Gershon efficiencies, the total county council budget is not. There are pressures to cut budgets and make savings, which is already happening. Today is an opportunity for the Minister to address our concerns and give us a progress report on some of the outstanding policy recommendations that were made to the Government in relation to fire services. We are waiting for those recommendations to be implemented and for a decision to be made. The debate is timely, and I shall pose a series of questions to which I would like the Minister to respond. The number of firefighters who die on duty was falling, so why have more died on this Government’s watch? Linked to that, how can we tackle concerns relating to emergency planning and training issues? Why are the Government pressing ahead with regional fire control centres? In addition, when will the Government implement a policy of statutory obligations on flooding? Every year on 28 April, trade unionists mark workers’ memorial day with a call to remember the dead and to fight for the living. This year, firefighters and the Fire Brigades Union had special reason to observe it, because, sadly, they had to commemorate the highest number of deaths in a single year since at least 1985, and three of those deaths were in Hertfordshire. Consequently, the FBU made recommendations to the Government in a report entitled ““In the Line of Duty””. I agree with the FBU and think that the Government should look at some of the issues raised by the report. Exactly what constitutes an on-duty death, because that has never been clearly defined? Often, it is defined as being a death that occurs when a firefighter is in uniform or doing a shift. Included in that are, for example, firefighters who are killed in road traffic accidents while travelling in an appliance or fire service vehicle en route to or returning from an incident. That might be extended to include retained firefighters who are killed when responding to a call or returning from attending an incident. Brave firefighters usually selflessly head forwards into danger when we, the public, are mindful of our own lives and safety and head in the opposite direction. The least that we can do is ensure that those who lay their lives on the line for us are truly accounted for and that lessons are learned from serious incidents. That should involve publishing UK-wide figures for all firefighter fatalities, major and serious injuries and near misses in a single annual publication. A national independent fire and rescue service investigation unit should also be established. It is worth considering the FBU’s call for a widening of the definition of reportable incidents to the Health and Safety Executive to include work-related road traffic accidents, heart attacks or other life-limiting situations that are incurred as a result of working in an occupationally hazardous job. Those may be work related, but they are generally excluded from the on-duty figures, although many people think that they should come under the category of an on-duty death. Currently, the only Government source that covers the whole of the UK for the period under review is the annual ““Fire Statistics, United Kingdom”” report. However, those figures refer to fatalities only from fires and therefore do not fully capture firefighter deaths that might be attributed to other causes. We need to learn from incidents, but to the Government’s shame, which is the true way to put it, no formal process has been implemented to deal with matters arising from significant health and safety investigations, coroner’s rule 43 letters and inquiries, such as the one into Buncefield. The Minister should tell us today why such a process has not been implemented. There is a large gap in the fire service’s processes and guidance and in the information that is vital for operational response. There has been a lack of national, central risk-critical operational guidance for some years now, and only recently have the Government started to develop a mechanism to deal with that important issue. Why have the Government been so slow to deal with the matter and shown such a lack of urgency? The chief fire and rescue adviser’s unit has been established. It has sufficient resources to advise Ministers, but, bizarrely, it has insufficient resources to cover the role and responsibilities of the old fire services inspectorate. I am given to understand that the Department for Communities and Local Government is so short of resources in the unit for fire and safety policy that it is considering outsourcing and commissioning national fire service policy work. Will the Minister confirm whether that is the case? There was a consultation on a possible centre of excellence for the fire and rescue service, as envisaged by the Bain review, which took place more than five years ago. A centre of excellence may have gone some way to meeting the concerns about central guidance, capacity and policy. However, sadly, there was no agreement on the funding of the centre and little indication of how it would work in practice. So, the fire service missed out yet again on an opportunity for improvement and on having an agency similar to the one used by the police. Even more worrying—this is linked to the lack of central guidance—has been the demise of Her Majesty’s inspectorate of fire services, which means that fire and rescue services are assessed by the Audit Commission. Although the Audit Commission is an expert in audit, it has no professional expertise in fire and rescue, unlike the inspectorates of other services.