Clause 15 - Arrangements with other employers offire-fighters
Fire and Rescue Services Bill
10:00 am
Mr Philip Hammond (Runnymede and Weybridge, Conservative)
Clause 15 deals with the situation where fire authorities want to make arrangements between other private sector, or third party, providers of support whom they may wish to use in certain circumstances. It allows for the equivalent of reinforcement schemes, which are a mutual aid arrangement between fire authorities, on a one-way commercial basis, with third-party employers of fire fighters.
This is a perfectly sensible arrangement. The obvious case that springs to mind is that of employers of private fire brigades. I think that I am right in saying that British Airports Authority has the fourth-largest fire service in the United Kingdom, measured in terms of manpower and equipment. Although it is spread across a very large area, it is quite a significant resource that could be used as back-up in certain types of emergency.
There are other employers of private fire brigades: large commercial undertakings might have fire equipment on their premises that could be brought into service in a particular type of emergency. We are absolutely at one with the purposes of the clause. This is another provision brought forward from 1947, and it gives fire authorities a statutory basis—a proper basis—on which to engage in commercial arrangements with outside bodies.
We now need to look at this in the light of the other changes that we have made to the environment in which fire authorities operate and to their functions that. Subsection (1) allows the fire and rescue authority to
''enter into arrangements with a person who employs fire-fighters . . . for the purpose of the discharge by the authority of a function conferred on it under section 7, 8 or 9.''
Clause 7 confers firefighting functions on a fire authority; clause 8 confers road traffic accident functions on a fire authority; and clause 9 deals with other emergencies, which can be anything specified by the Secretary of State. We have already had the benefit of the draft order, so we know that it will include such things as dealing with the response to terrorist attack, major flooding incidents, inshore rescue and perhaps rescue further out at sea, as has previously been seen. However, those are not firefighting functions.
The purpose of amendment No. 37 is to challenge the restriction of powers under subsection (1) to arrangements with employers of firefighters. There is no obvious reason why only an employer of firefighters should be contracted to render assistance to a fire authority in relation, for example, to road traffic accidents. Let me give an example. It might be perfectly logical for fire authorities to have stand-by arrangements with operators of heavy lifting equipment, such as large, heavy cranes that can be brought on to the motorway to remove wreckage or, in the case of a building collapsing, the kind of equipment that can be used to jack up and support structural elements of the building.
I know that in some cases the Government intend that the fire and rescue services will have access to a pool of such equipment that will be purchased and, I assume, maintained centrally by a designated authority on behalf of the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister. That is fine but, by definition, those will always be centrally pooled resources. It is perfectly logical, particularly in more sparsely populated areas of the country, that fire and rescue authorities may wish to enter into arrangements to bring in assistance—I heard the Minister muttering ''clause 16'', from a sedentary position—not to delegate the discharge of their functions to another person, but to contract with another person to assist them in the discharge of their functions. I take that to be a very different thing.
The best and most obvious example is the use of heavy lifting equipment. Why is it necessary for a fire authority to contract for the supply of locally available heavy lifting equipment or hydraulic jacks, and for experts in their use, only if the contractor employs firefighters? That has been brought forward from the 1947 Act, and a time when the only statutory function that we were dealing with was firefighting and the requirement that the person in question employed firefighters would be wholly logical and consistent with the structure of the Act. Now that we have introduced other statutory functions, we must revisit that. Amendment No. 37 is designed to remove the reference to clauses 8 and 9 from subsection (1) so that the restriction on making such arrangements only with employers of firefighters would relate only to firefighting functions.
Amendment No. 39 would introduce a new subsection that gives fire and rescue authorities broader powers to enter into arrangements relating to their functions under clause 6—the fire safety promotion clause, which is not mentioned in clause 15. Clause 8 refers to road traffic accidents, clause 9 refers to emergencies as defined by the Secretary of State and clause 11 deals with discretionary services and the power to respond to other eventualities. In relation to those functions, fire authorities could enter into arrangements on a commercial basis with any third parties that they found appropriate.
The Under-Secretary needs to explain why there is no reference to clause 6 in clause 15. There are statutory duties on a fire authority for fire safety, and
it is perfectly conceivable that authorities will want to contract out—for example, for the fitting of smoke detectors—to a third-party contractor on a commercial basis. I do not see where that power is stipulated.