Clause 19 - Charging
Fire and Rescue Services Bill
4:15 pm
Mr Philip Hammond (Runnymede and Weybridge, Conservative)
I listened carefully to the Minister. I shall first address his comments on amendment No. 162. I can see the practical difficulties of the tariff approach, which I do not dispute. I was hoping to elicit from the Minister a commitment that there would be transparency in the process. I am not exaggerating when I say that I can envisage a sub-committee of a fire authority sitting down every third Tuesday in the month with a list of incidents and submissions to decide whether a charge should be levied. My concern is about discrimination between individuals or groups of individuals in a fire authority's charging practices. The consultation paper and other documents do not reassure me on that front. Much greater clarity is required.
In one document, there is a reference to the unemployed being exempt from charges—that is a clear group, which we could easily define. But there will be many other special pleading cases, and we do not want to get into a situation where fire and rescue authorities are routinely adjudicating substantial charges. We know what will happen. A certain group of people will get their bill and pay it, and another large group will play the system by contesting and arguing until the authority in question realises that it is costing it more to process the charge than it will receive in revenue, even if it wins the argument and gets the money in the end, which often it does not. I guess that that is the same with congestion charging fines or parking tickets. I am therefore concerned about the lack of transparency, but I accept the Minister's criticism that the tariff approach will not be the perfect solution.
I thought that the Minister's flooding example in a case where third parties might be charged was interesting. Again, it treads on a few local sensitivities in my constituency, because many people living by the river cannot get household insurance as a result of the repeated flooding, so they will not see their insurers pick up the cost of pumping out their basements. No one has suggested that there should be a prohibition on charging for pumping out basements or for pumping buildings free of water, but I see nothing in the Bill that would prevent a fire authority from charging for rescuing a person from an upstairs window of a flooded building. We do not want a fire brigade arriving at a flooded building with its rescue equipment to be asked by a person leaning out of a first-floor window, ''How much are you going to charge me? Until I know, I would rather wait here in this flooded building until my next-door neighbour has been down to Brighton to collect his boat and come back to get me,'' or ''I'll wait until my husband comes home from work, gets the ladder out of the garage and rescues me.'' We clearly do not want that to happen.
I have exaggerated the case, in the hope of bringing a smile to my hon. Friends' faces in an otherwise tedious section of the debate, but that situation could really arise. Somebody could be trapped in a building by floodwater, which is clearly not satisfactory, even if they were not in immediate danger. It is not at all fanciful to think that they would have to ask, ''Will it cost me anything if I accept your offer of rescue by aerial platform from the second-floor window?''
There are issues that we need to explore further, but I am prepared to accept that the debate has been had on amendment No. 46; the vote has happened, and we
lost that vote. It would be inappropriate to press amendment No. 50, which is closely linked to that previous group of amendments, so I beg to ask leave to withdraw the amendment.
Amendment, by leave, withdrawn.