Fire and Rescue Services Bill

Part of the debate – in the House of Commons at 7:29 pm on 26 January 2004.

Alert me about debates like this

Photo of John Gummer John Gummer Conservative, Suffolk Coastal 7:29, 26 January 2004

I think the Minister will find that rather difficult. They are asking themselves what is the region to which he has accorded these powers. It is, in fact, a region established by the last Government to make it easier to administer national priorities through a regional office. That was a compromise that fitted most of the Departments that then had regional organisations, but it did not happen to fit the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, which had a different regional organisation. That was partly because it was quite difficult to exert MAFF's individual, direct influence in distant areas, not least the far south-west. I remember keeping open an office down in Truro simply because it would have been very difficult to deal with it as other Departments dealt with other regions.

I do not think that the Minister has thought fully about whether the specified regions are the right ones, if the service is to be regionalised. It is surely not logical for him to say that because they are the regions that he has decided to use in another context, it is convenient to use them in this context. I am not even sure whether he has thought this through in the context of terrorism and similar civil issues. In any event, it does not strike me as sensible to say that what has been decided in that context should apply to the fire service.

We must ask whether Mott MacDonald has been sold a pup. I suspect that it has been told to produce something that merely meets a series of financial requirements. I agree with my hon. Friend Mr. Hammond, who suggested that it was difficult for a consultant not to know what the Deputy Prime Minister wanted. The Deputy Prime Minister wants better reasons for regionalisation than he already has. He must find something for the regional offices to do; he must find a reason for the regions. We know why that is. First, he is politically and personally committed, for reasons that he has never found it easy to explain. Secondly, this is the only way in which the Government can surmount the difficulty in which they have landed themselves with a half-thought-out devolution proposal.

We must ask ourselves whether these regions fit the provision of fire services. I do not think that the Government have argued their case for any one of them, and I believe that we can argue the case against most of them. It does not fit the south-west, it does not fit the south-east, it does not fit the eastern region, it does not fit the west midlands, it does not fit the east midlands, and most of us would say that it does not fit the other regions either; but it is just possible that someone might support it there.

In those circumstances, why are the Government shoehorning the whole nation into a system for which they know no one will vote? That certainly applies to at least three quarters of it. Otherwise they would already have announced referendums—but they have announced them only in areas where they think they have a hope of winning. They know that they have no hope of winning anywhere else, so what are they doing? They are removing democratic control from people, partly to encourage them to vote for a different form of democratic control because that is what they want.