Clause 18 - Meaning of ''emergency''
Civil Contingencies Bill
10:30 am
Ms Fiona Mactaggart (Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Race Equality, Community Policy and Civil Renewal), Home Office; Slough, Labour)
I understand the hon. Gentleman's concern. He has raised the issue of the way in which legislation may be used against those conducting proper industrial disputes. He will be reassured by the fact that the legislation is specifically prevented from being used in such a way. Many of the concerns that he and others have expressed have been dealt with.
The first issue is to establish whether the definition of emergency is appropriate and whether the controls are sufficient. The hon. Member for Sheffield, Hallam seeks to make such controls more robust by requiring that a threat should be immediate. I reassure him that the idea of the immediacy of the threat and its consequences is already implied in the Bill. Clause 20(3) states that provision must be necessary, and clause 20(4) requires that the provision to deal with the situation must be needed urgently. The definition of an emergency in clause 18 must, as the hon. Gentleman himself pointed out, be read in the context of the triple lock with those parts of clause 20. If there were no immediate threat, it is very difficult to imagine how these tests in the Bill could be met. If the threat is not immediate, if it is not an urgent necessity and if it can be dealt with by other powers, emergency powers cannot be deployed.
Any assessment of the seriousness of the threat requires an assessment of the immediacy of its consequences. We may need to take action when the consequences will not be immediate but might, as the hon. Member for North-East Hertfordshire pointed out, occur in the future. In such cases, action may nevertheless need to be immediate. The real difficulty of this debate is that we are all conjuring up in our minds extreme situations and, as the hon. Member for Newark (Patrick Mercer) points out, we have a responsibility not to terrify the public.
Let me conjure up an extreme situation in which a threat may not be immediate, but the requirement for action may be immediate. For example, in the case of a biological element that could cause birth defects, the consequences would not happen for nine months, but urgent intervention of a peculiar kind might be required. We need to ensure that the requirement to act is urgent, that it is necessary because there is not another provision and—this is the third element of the triple lock—that there is an emergency.
I shall turn to the definition of an emergency, as that is the main point of the debate. It might help hon. Members if I explain how we came to the construction whereby the Bill names a wide range of things that could constitute an emergency. The reason for that is to create as clear a definition of emergency as possible, so that it is exhaustive and transparent. In clause 18, we do not want to talk about degree, but about the type of event. The issue of degree is dealt with by the necessity for action. Of course, degree is implied in the clause by the word ''serious'', but we are really talking about the circumstances that we might define as an emergency and that could be the first trigger for the use of emergency powers.
The Bill allows for emergency powers to be used in a wide range of contexts. Our intention is that they should be used only very rarely, and only at times of extreme emergency. They are designed not as a front-line tool, but as a safety net when other options are insufficient to resolve an emergency. In contingency planning and in our resilience work, the responsibility on Ministers must always be—and is always—ensuring that we have effective methods, which are not emergency powers, to deal with serious issues.