Fire Services (Hertfordshire)

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr. Hood. I warmly congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for St. Albans (Anne Main) on securing the debate and on her eloquent and well researched remarks. She is passionate about the issue and has responded as a good constituency Member of Parliament to last week’s debate and lobby, when the Fire Brigades Union came to the House. I also pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for North-East Hertfordshire (Mr. Heald), who brought a personal touch to the debate when he related the experience of his constituent and his family, and the bravery of that gentleman. I support and congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Hertsmere (Mr. Clappison) on his principled and tenacious campaign on behalf of his constituents to save Radlett fire station. The issue is immensely important, not least because, as we have heard, 22 firefighters have been killed in the past five years, and the trend seems to be getting worse. It is interesting that one of the mantras repeated constantly by the Minister’s predecessor, the hon. Member for Gloucester (Mr. Dhanda), concerned the number of fire-related deaths being the lowest since the 1950s. I do not necessarily query that. It is the case, and is the result of demographic and social changes and changes in education and community engagement. I congratulate the Government on that success, but the corollary, if I may quote Matt Wrack, the general secretary of the Fire Brigades Union, whom I met last week with Mick Shaw, the president, is that there is"““a policy vacuum—a neglect of up-to-date central guidance on firefighter safety.””" If, as my hon. Friends have said, overall fire deaths are falling but firefighter deaths are rising, there are some big issues. It goes without saying that I pay tribute to Hertfordshire fire and rescue as well as to the Fire Brigades Union, not only for its report, ““In the Line of Duty””, but for its work in exposing the shambles of the regional fire control centres and destroying the intellectual case for that policy. I will refer to that later. I draw the House’s attention to early-day motion 2489 on firefighter safety and data collection, which I tabled and which has been signed by 61 other hon. Members from all parties. It is a straightforward early-day motion that calls for more safety-critical operational guidance for fire authorities, draws attention to the deficiency in data collection mentioned by my hon. Friends and urges greater clarity and standardisation in the recording and investigation of firefighter fatalities and injuries. It stands as a record of the commitment of Her Majesty’s Opposition to this pressing issue. My hon. Friend the Member for St. Albans raised concerns about flooding and resilience funding, which we discussed two weeks ago in this Chamber. The reason why Project Fireguard has collapsed is that fire authorities take the sensible view that resilience is essentially a national issue that should be funded nationally. It is incumbent on the Government to move quickly and to decide, finally, whether it should be a statutory duty for fire and rescue authorities to attend to flooding. If not, the Government should decide where to site funding to facilitate proper reactions to flooding incidents across the country. It is important to discuss the practical operation of the Fire and Rescue Services Act 2004. Mention has been made of the integrated risk management plans. In the experience of many long-standing firefighters, union officials, local councils and fire authorities, the plans are being used as a fig leaf for driving through revenue cuts that remove retained firefighters, authorities and stations. In a debate on 18 March this year on Humberside fire and rescue, we saw that that is what is happening in practical terms. We should review integrated risk management plans, relate them to the everyday on-site training that firefighters receive and use them properly in terms of risk assessment. On funding, as I have mentioned, we need to bring forward the review of the formula spending share from 2010 to 2009, not least in the light of yesterday’s pre-Budget report and the fact that this Government have all but bankrupted this country. That is an important issue that the Fire Brigades Union and others will take forward. Why is there such a lack of risk-critical operational guidance? Why have we not updated it using avenues such as the national chief fire and rescue adviser, Sir Ken Knight, or the operational guidelines from the Department for Communities and Local Government? As the Minister will know, his predecessor and I debated the national fire and rescue service framework in June. That would have been an opportune moment to review firefighter training, but it was not addressed. More emphasis is placed on diversity, quotas and tick boxes than on firefighter safety. I do not think that that is the right set of priorities going forward over the next few years. We come to the subject of regional fire control centres. Where do I begin? Yesterday morning, I visited the new regional fire control centre at Blackbrook business park in Taunton. It has been built on the edge of a flood plain. There has been massive opposition to regional fire control centres, not least in Gloucestershire, where the fire element of the tri-service centre in Quedgeley has been ripped out and a £6 million private finance initiative scheme disabled by the obsession for regional government started by the right hon. Member for Kingston upon Hull, East (Mr. Prescott), the 2004 vote against the regional assembly and the vote not to go ahead with the merger of police forces. Fire control centres are the only behemoth of regional government still being pursued by this Government. Given that the then fire Minister told us in 2004 that regional control centres would cost only £100 million and would definitely generate £30 million, or 30 per cent., in revenue savings over the period to 2017, the figures are horrendous. Some £55 million has been spent so far on consultants and £50 million on local and national project set-up. That is £100 million already. Some £190 million has been spent on IT and £342 million on premises. We are heading towards £700 million, and not one regional control centre is yet open, nor is one likely to open. I challenge the Minister to give us a date for the new cut-overs. He has delayed them in the south-west and throughout the country, and he has refused to tell fire authorities when they will happen. He knows that they must happen before 2012, because of the Olympics—senior chief fire officers have said that it will not be a tenable situation if the fire control project is not online by the time of the Olympics. He will also know that, as I have said, the cost basis rationale for the project is dead and buried, as is the resilience basis. All the technical improvements that Ministers trotted out constantly and wrote to hon. Members about in the summer are happening anyway. For instance, in Avon, 19 of the 20 technical improvements that have taken place would have happened anyway, without a regional control centre and all the related costs. I challenge the Minister to have the courage of his convictions in his new role and say to the Treasury, ““This is a disastrous project. It’s impacting in the post-comprehensive spending review period on real front-line services and on revenue funding. Kill it off; pull the plug.”” He would have our strong and emphatic support, as well as that of the hon. Member for Falmouth and Camborne (Julia Goldsworthy), I am sure. Incidentally, I am sure that the hon. Member for Falmouth and Camborne will support the Conservatives’ push for greater transparency. In government, we would seek an Australian-style grants commission that would exercise fairness and transparency in allocating revenue grant funding, unlike the present Government, who seem to make it up as they go along. However, I am slightly concerned that the hon. Lady is confused about how it will all be paid for. I thought that the Liberal Democrats had killed off local income tax, not least because it is electoral poison in most of the south of England, including—dare I say it—in the south-west and Cornwall.