Clause 2 - Power to create combined fire and rescue authorities
Fire and Rescue Services Bill
10:00 am
Mr Philip Hammond (Runnymede and Weybridge, Conservative)
The hon. Gentleman is right; there is a concern on two levels. The first concern, which I shall explain later, is that modernisation and a risk management approach at fire authority level will in practice turn into a cost-saving exercise. Secondly, even if that does not happen and the approach is genuinely risk based, there is a danger that the changes will be presented by the local media and refuseniks in the fire service as merely a cost-saving exercise. The Minister must be conscious of that.
I want to explain what I mean by the first potential problem. I do not have the exact figures in front of me, but the Government say that in the first year of the three-year period, there will be a substantial cost of implementing the risk management approach and meeting the firefighters' pay settlement. In the second year, there will be a small net cost, and in the third year there will be a massive saving that outweighs the net cost of those first two years. The Government propose that fire authorities manage the cash-flow implications of the process by taking advantage of what is effectively a loan to all fire authorities across the country from the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister of £30 million, to tide them over that cost impact in the first year, and that they should repay that loan in the second year.
Most, if not all, of the fire and rescue authorities that I have talked to are enthusiastic about the risk management approach. They see it as an opportunity to change some practices in ways that will improve safety, enhance public security and do away with some outmoded and irrelevant practices such as responding to automatic fire alarm calls in commercial buildings. There is no dispute about the wisdom of going down that route. However, none of the fire authorities that I have spoken to believes that substantial savings will be made by establishing a risk management approach, reconfiguring services and meeting the firefighters' pay settlement, which is essentially centrally determined. If the Minister wants to have an argument about that, we can have one, but from the evidence that I have seen
there is little doubt that ODPM civil servants effectively set the agenda of the pay settlement negotiations at the end of that dispute.
Indeed, in many cases—I am sure that the hon. Member for Teignbridge (Richard Younger-Ross) will make this point repeatedly, representing, as he does, an area in the fire authority that has the largest percentage of retained firefighters of any fire authority in the country—the opportunities to benefit from savings will be disproportionately distributed around the country. Many fire authorities will want to seize the opportunity to use the IRMP process to improve the service that they are delivering to their public, but they will find it impossible to do so and at the same time meet the ODPM's requirement that the pay settlement and the costs of restructuring are self-financing from the savings of that process over a period of three years.
Richard Younger-Ross rose—
Jim Knight rose—