Clause 14 - Directions as to reinforcement schemes
Fire and Rescue Services Bill
9:25 am
Mr Philip Hammond (Runnymede and Weybridge, Conservative)
It is good to be back after a short break, which has given me the opportunity to think up some more amendments for the remainder of the Bill's time in Committee.
Clause 14 runs directly on, as one would expect, from clause 13. It gives the Secretary of State the power to give directions on the reinforcement schemes about which the Under-Secretary has been speaking. Some of the amendments deal with other clauses, but they have broadly the same effect.
The clause deals with the Secretary of State's power to intervene to make an order on reinforcement in a situation where, by implication, authorities cannot agree to work together. That does not strike us as a terribly auspicious basis on which to build co-operation and collaboration. I am always wary of either voluntary arrangements that are made with the albatross of the Secretary of State's intervention hanging over them or compulsory arrangements to promote co-operation. Co-operation must come from
the bottom up and cannot be imposed from the top down. However, we accept that the Secretary of State may need a reserve power to require an authority to enter into a reinforcement scheme, to guard against authorities playing an awkward game, which hopefully is unlikely. I hope that the Under-Secretary can assure us that he would not expect such a power to be used routinely and that the Government acknowledge that genuine co-operation and collaboration cannot be imposed by order from Whitehall.
The circumstances in which such an order might be made will invariably involve the Secretary of State taking the side of one authority against another. Although I may be wrong, it seems unlikely that the Secretary of State will order a reinforcement scheme between two authorities that are both reluctant to enter into it. A much more likely scenario is that one authority refuses to co-operate with a scheme that another authority is seeking to introduce, which perhaps involves all the authorities on its borders. Where the Secretary of State intervenes to take the part of one supposedly independent body against another, there needs to be an adjudication process to review and scrutinise what he is proposing.
Initially, I wondered whether there should be a compulsory inquiry along the lines of the permissive power in subsection (3). On reflection, however, I decided that that would not be the most appropriate way to deal with the circumstances that we are considering. With the amendment, and with others relating to clauses 15 and 17, we have therefore sought to provide for the Secretary of State to make the direction by an order that could theoretically be subject to parliamentary scrutiny in a short debate in a Standing Committee. That seems to be a light touch and is a perfectly reasonable and sensible way to proceed. If the order were uncontroversial, it would not necessarily be debated, but if there were an element of controversy and the authority that was being coerced, if I can use that term, wished to raise objections—[Interruption.] I am glad to see that the attention of the Minister of State—the Minister with responsibility for UK resilience—has been drawn to the knocking sound above the ceiling. No doubt he is alert to the risks that might be lurking there and will draw the Committee's attention to them if necessary.
If what the Government were proposing were sufficiently controversial for one of the fire authorities involved to enlist the support of Members of Parliament to scrutinise Ministers, the mechanism suggested in the amendment would be a sensible and light-touch way of allowing them to do so. We would have plenty of time to do what was needed without going over old ground, and we could hold a Standing Committee on a statutory instrument at 8.55 am before a Standing Committee on a Bill took place. Making directions the subject of an order would allow there to be scrutiny, albeit not much, of the exercise of the significant power to override the right of a locally
accountable authority to reject arrangements, or to enter into arrangements that it finds appropriate for its circumstances.
As I said earlier, amendments Nos. 40, 41, 42 and 43 deal with the same matters in clause 17, and would make the directions that the Secretary of State can give subject to statutory instrument and therefore debatable in Parliament. I hope that the Under-Secretary agrees that that would provide the degree of scrutiny that these matters need: something rather less than a full inquiry, but more than simply an instruction issued from Whitehall without any necessity for external scrutiny.