Clause 19 - Charging
Fire and Rescue Services Bill
3:00 pm
Mr Philip Hammond (Runnymede and Weybridge, Conservative)
You are absolutely right, Mr O'Hara. I was enjoying the debate so much, I had not noticed. All I can say to you in mitigation is that I do not think it was my fault that it went in such a direction.
Amendment No. 47 would extend the exclusion on charging to functions that are conferred on a fire authority under clause 9—other emergency functions. Let us look at the draft statutory instrument that the Minister has already published to see what kind of instances we are talking about. A fire authority would not be able to charge someone for chemically decontaminating them after a terrorist attack, for rescuing them from the sea after a collision or for rescuing them from floodwaters rising around their ankles in their home. That is the kind of core service that the public would expect to be paid for out of taxation and funded as a proper public emergency response service. Amendment No. 47 would specifically allow for the charging of one fire authority by another where under proposed section 9 the Secretary of State has conferred functions on a fire authority requiring it to operate outside its own area. That is right and proper and we would not want to interfere with that.
Amendment No. 48 moves beyond the statutory services and deals with an important point, which I hope the Minister will respond to in a different tone from the one that I anticipate he will use in response to amendment Nos. 40, 46 and 47. There is no reference in the Bill to co-response initiatives, but I hope—and I am pretty confident—that he will confirm that it is the Government's wish to encourage medical co-response by fire services. It was one of the issues that was constantly referred to in the many debates and discussions that we had during the fire dispute.
Amendment No.48 would preclude charging for emergency medical assistance of a type that would be free if given by a national health service ambulance trust. That addresses the concern raised by the hon. Member for Teignbridge that in certain circumstances—wrongly in my view—NHS ambulance trusts are allowed to charge for work related to road traffic accidents. I am not seeking to roll that back or to restrict fire authorities from doing the same. With amendment No. 48, I am seeking to limit the circumstances in which fire authorities could charge, so that it is not simply an accident of fate that determines whether the fire engine arrives before the ambulance and a person has to pay for a certain level of first-response medical care at the scene of an incident—which may or may not be a road traffic accident. It is essential that the public can be confident that they will not be charged for medical assistance simply because the fire brigade is first on the scene.
I hope that that is a sensible and necessary exclusion. If the Minister does not accept the amendment, I hope that he can give assurances that a victim will not be lying at the side of the road listening to two sets of
sirens coming from different directions and hoping that the ambulance will get stuck at the traffic lights—sorry, that the fire engine will get stuck at the traffic lights, so the ambulance arrives first and the victim is not at risk of being charged by the fire authority for the medical attention that it will deliver.