Clause 19 - Charging
Fire and Rescue Services Bill
4:30 pm
Mr Philip Hammond (Runnymede and Weybridge, Conservative)
I beg to move amendment No. 55, in
clause 19, page 9, line 24, after first 'the', insert 'marginal'.
This is a probing amendment. It would insert the word ''marginal'' before ''cost'' in line 24. The amendment thus suggests that authorities be limited to recovery of marginal cost. That may not be what the Government intend, and the term ''marginal cost'' in the context of fire and rescue operations may not be obviously self-defining. The purpose of the amendment is to probe the Government on how they intend to operate the regime of limited recovery of costs.
In an organisation such as a fire and rescue authority, which needs to be able to respond to an emergency—I do not want to raise anybody's hackles by phrasing that in the wrong way—there is, by definition, surplus capacity of significant amounts of time as personnel await the occurrence of an incident. It is therefore difficult to talk about marginal cost. The manpower is there anyway, so it would be absurd if the costs that could be recovered were simply the costs of the petrol used getting to and from the incident. It would probably also be inappropriate to charge for the cost per hour of the wage and salary bills of the crews attending.
There are complicated issues around the recovery of costs where a range of activities are undertaken. If I have correctly understood subsection (5), it intends a balancing of the books to take place for each class of event for which charging occurs, rather than for a pool of charging across the whole authority. Rescuing cats from trees will constitute a set of books that balance over the year, and getting people out of lifts will be a different activity that must balance across the year. The same crews, appliances and overheads will be involved, all of which will also be used in non-chargeable work. Has the Minister discussed proper accounting with bodies such as the Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy so that we can understand what we are discussing when we read that
''the authority's income from charges does not exceed the costs to them for taking the action for which the charges are imposed''?