Clause 36 - Prohibition on employment of police
Fire and Rescue Services Bill
10:00 am
Mr Philip Hammond (Runnymede and Weybridge, Conservative)
I was looking forward to exploring whether there is a pool of surplus labour in police forces, meaning that police officers could be deployed as retained firefighters to deal with the obvious crisis in that area, but we will leave that for the moment.
The Under-Secretary might be able to explain to the Committee the original purpose of the ban. It is clear that it was about clashes or confusion relating to operational control at a fire scene. The point has been made—I am sure that it has been made to Ministers as well—that in the future, when fire and rescue authorities will have a much broader role and employ all sorts of people who are not operational firefighters, it will no longer be appropriate automatically to exclude members of the police force from employment in some other role. They could perform a support role
or provide specialist input. Not only that, but there seems to be no operational reason to exclude such people.