Clause 19 - Charging
Fire and Rescue Services Bill
4:30 pm
Mr Philip Hammond (Runnymede and Weybridge, Conservative)
I beg to move amendment No. 53, in
clause 19, page 9, line 22, after 'charge', insert
'(other than a charge for fire safety consultancy services provided by agreement to owners or occupiers of commercial premises, being services of a type also available from non-fire and rescue authority providers and not being services which the authority has a duty to provide under section 6(2))'.
I suspect that the Minister has already helpfully hinted why the amendment is unnecessary. I shall be delighted to hear him tell me that it is unnecessary because the powers relating to our objective already exist in the Local Government Act 2003.
I declare at the outset that I was put up to tabling this amendment by a fire authority that believes that it will be prevented from charging more than cost recovery rates for valuable consultancy services that it delivers, and wishes to continue to deliver, to third parties on a commercial basis. The amendment is designed to exclude from cost recovery-only charging services that are provided in competition with other professional consultants. I have used those words deliberately to try to define the activities that we have in mind. We are talking not about giving advice to vulnerable people in their homes, but about input to architects and engineers in the design of buildings, or advice and consultancy to property developers and property owners in maintaining and managing their fire and escape plans—services that it is perfectly proper for them to contract from a third party specialist such as a big civil engineering firm, for example, or a properly qualified fire and rescue authority.
There is no reason to preclude the fire and rescue authority from making a profit on that kind of competitive work. In addition, it would be inappropriate to require fire and rescue authorities that provide such consultancy services in competition with the private sector to operate as not-for-profit competitors. That would be grossly unfair to the private sector. As the Minister will remember, we had a similar debate on the trading powers of local authorities when we considered the Local Government Act 2003.
If the Minister were to tell me that the objective that I seek to achieve through amendment No. 53 is already available to fire and rescue authorities through the trading powers in the 2003 Act, that would be fine; but
if he were to tell me that the exception would be available only if authorities achieved excellent status, that would present some problems. Clearly, it is not possible to operate a consultancy on a commercial basis if activities have to be turned on and off from one year to the next—if a fire authority had to say ''This year, we shall do £2 million-worth of arm's-length commercial fire consultancy; next year, we will not be allowed to do any. We would like to take it up again the year after, when we are again excellent, but will not be able to because our customer base will have disappeared.''
There needs to be some way of dealing with that problem. I see no reason why we should not exclude from the restriction on cost-plus recovery work that is clearly third-party competitive work, tendered in the marketplace against other competitors and provided to commercial third parties. I hope that the Minister will clarify the situation.