Clause 2 - Fire authorities: power to charge
Marine Safety Bill
3:00 pm
Dr Brian Iddon (Bolton South East, Labour)
The purpose of clause 2 is to amend section 3 of the Fire Services Act 1947. Section 3 of the 1947 Act is concerned with the supplementary powers of fire authorities, and subsection (2) of the clause removes any doubt that a fire authority may use its brigade for purposes other than firefighting in the area of another fire authority or at sea. Hon. Members might like to know that the jurisdiction normally ends at the county boundaries or the low watermark.
Section 4 of the Fire Services Act 1947 states:
''Save as expressly provided in this Act, a fire authority shall not make any charge for services rendered by the Authority.''
After that, the Bill inserts an exception stating that fire authorities in England, Wales and the Isles of Scilly may make a charge for firefighting at sea and outside the area of every fire authority in Great Britain.
The purpose of the Bill is to increase safety at sea and reduce the threat and damage caused by pollution from ships. Clause 2 amends the Fire Services Act 1947, as I have said, by including a provision giving fire authorities the power to recover costs that they incur in fighting fires at sea outside any fire authority's area. The fire might be on a ship, an oil rig or even another structure, such as a pontoon.
In the 10 years between 1991 and 2001, some 347 fires were recorded on ships in UK territorial waters. Of those, at least 12 could have resulted in significant loss of life were it not for the assistance that the coastal fire teams gave once they had been airlifted to the scene. Two of those incidents are particularly worth recalling. First, in 1999, the container ship the Ever Decent collided with the cruise ship Norwegian Dream some 20 miles from Margate. The cruise ship entered the side of the container ship, causing a major fire, with injuries to 28 of the 2,400 people on the vessels. Experts say that had the container ship entered the side of the cruise ship, and not the other way round, the picture would have been a lot worse, with the cruise ship lying disabled in a toxic cloud of smoke. Major fire service involvement offshore would certainly have been required.
The second incident, to which I also referred on Second Reading, concerned a three-day fire on the ro-ro ferry Kukawa in 1997. The court ruled that the fire service's claim to recover costs was inadmissible. That was a serious setback to firefighting at sea, and some
fire authorities have now revoked their declared facility status because of those funding problems. I understand that about 10 of 40 authorities are still there to fight fires at sea. That number may be reduced even further, and the authorities are extremely worried that we will not have the ability to fight fires around all 10,000 miles of our coastline adequately if coastal fire services decide, one after the other, to pull out because of the difficulty in recovering costs, as at least one has done already.
We need the new provisions in my Bill to encourage the fire authorities to continue to provide that expert and life-saving service. Obviously, special facilities and expertise, over and above that necessary for fighting fires on land, are needed to fight maritime fires, particularly those that occur at sea.