Clause 9 - Emergencies
Fire and Rescue Services Bill
3:15 pm
Mr Philip Hammond (Runnymede and Weybridge, Conservative)
I beg to move amendment No. 31, in
clause 9, page 5, line 42, at end insert
', but such an order may only be made with the consent of each authority in the area of which such functions are to be discharged.'.
The clause deals with the fourth category of responsibilities—an unspecified category of emergencies—to be placed on fire and rescue authorities, to be defined by order. We have received a draft order from the Minister, the first that the Government intend to make under the clause. I hope that we will be able to address it in the stand part debate. We have no problem with its general thrust, so the amendments that we have tabled now look slightly off-beam. I should make it clear that we did not have the privilege of seeing it before we tabled them. That does not make our amendments altogether redundant; it simply means that the first order drafted does not reflect any of the problems that concern us.
The Secretary of State has the power to specify a function over which a fire and rescue authority will have responsibility other than those functions that clauses 6 to 8 already confer. The power to confer that function over a wider area than the authority's own has grabbed our attention because, unlike in the draft order, it does not necessarily have to be done in a uniform way across all authorities. We are concerned about a situation in which a Secretary of State confers functions on an authority to be discharged over the area of many authorities.
In the case of a chemical containment, the Secretary of State might decide to designate one authority in a region, which would be his favoured unit of geography—I think the map on the Deputy Prime Minister's wall contains only that unit—as having the function of chemical spillage containment across the whole region. It is perhaps not a very good example, but it serves to illustrate my point. In such circumstances, we have questions about the responsibility of the host authority in whose territory those functions will be discharged and the financing mechanisms, which I will address later.
Amendment No. 31 specifically provides that the recipient authority in whose area the function was to be discharged should consent to the discharge of function by the other authority. We acknowledge that there is a perfectly sensible case for extra-territorial functioning by fire and rescue authorities, but it must be based on consent in a planned and agreed way.
The draft order simply confirms reciprocity in extra-territorial operations and that such assistance will be provided on request. Every fire authority is enjoined to render assistance to every other fire authority on request. We have absolutely no problem with that; it is the perfect formulation. However, the clause goes much further and allows the Secretary of State to make asymmetric arrangements without the consent of the recipient authority.
I will withdraw the amendment. If I do not, it will catch the draft order in an entirely inappropriate way. First, however, I want to hear the Minister's response to the wider concerns about any future orders that impose asymmetric obligations on authorities without the consent of the authorities who are the ''beneficiaries''.