Clause 7 - Fire-fighting
Fire and Rescue Services Bill
2:30 pm
Mr Philip Hammond (Runnymede and Weybridge, Conservative)
I, too, am delighted to have the opportunity to serve under your chairmanship again, Mr. O'Hara. I am a little disappointed by the Minister's response, because I thought that he would want to take the opportunity to place on record that, as indicated in the Civil Contingencies Bill, the Government regard protecting the environment as equally important as protecting property, if not protecting life. Some of the more lurid dangers that the Minister painted are more imagined that real. Unlike him, I do not envisage the problem of fire authorities having grossly to misallocate resources to respond to threats to the environment alone.
There will be circumstances, as I said in my opening remarks, in which the threat to property must be balanced against the threat to the environment. I fear that the fact that the statutory duty relates to property only, and that there is no statutory duty relating to the environment—there is merely a permissive power under clause 11, as the Minister said—will mean that fire authorities are invariably constrained to act in the way that will enable them to discharge their duty to protect property, and that that may have adverse consequences for the environment. The example that I gave earlier was hosing down a building that contained contaminated material in order to put out a fire, while knowing full well that the contaminants would be washed out of the building and damage the environment. It is a question of giving people the opportunity to make balanced judgments.
I was not prepared for a confrontation with the Minister on this. I nurtured some hope that he might at least indicate that he would like to get some wording about the environment into clause 7. I will read carefully what he has said and will see if we cannot draft something tighter to deal with the environmental fall-out from fires that involve risks to property and life. That would help me to achieve my aim, while cutting away from the Minister the lurid defence that the proposal would require all fire authorities to devote all their resources to dealing with fires on open heathland, which is certainly not what I intended to convey. I beg to ask leave to withdraw the amendment.
Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.