Future Flood Prevention

Debate between Rob Marris and Jim Fitzpatrick

Monday 27th February 2017 Commons Chamber

[Jim Fitzpatrick (Poplar and Limehouse) (Lab)]

I am grateful for the opportunity to contribute, and I am pleased to follow the hon. Member for Louth and Horncastle (Victoria Atkins). I do not want to speak to the whole report or the Government’s response. I shall focus rather on our Select Committee’s recommendation 15 on the statutory duty for the fire and rescue service. This recommendation is consistent with our other recommendations 16 to 21, which all raise concerns about governance, command and control, structures and relationships. The evidence the Committee heard led us to the conclusion we reached. Sadly, however, the Government disagree.

Under recommendation 15:

“We recommend that the Government places a statutory duty on the Fire and Rescue Service in England and Wales to provide an emergency response to flood events and commits the necessary additional funding and staff resources to support delivery of this responsibility”—

a point to which I shall return later. The Government’s response states:

“Fire and Rescue Services in England already have the discretionary powers they need…A Statutory Duty would potentially reduce flexibility with a one size fits all approach, and there are clear advantages to a permissive regime”.

That sounds like civil service and ministerial double-speak or euphemism if I ever heard it.

I am grateful to Pat Strickland in the House of Commons Library for its briefing, “Should Fire and Rescue Services have a Statutory Duty to deal with flooding?” It outlines that the 2008 Pitt review into the 2007 floods said that there should be fully funded national capability for flood rescue

“underpinned as necessary by a statutory duty”.

In a written answer in December 2015, the then Minister with responsibility for policing and fire said that the good response of the fire services to flooding in that year suggested that there was “no need for review”. The Labour Government had arrived at the same conclusion in 2008, but we have seen more and more serious flood events since then, so the situation is changing.

The briefing paper details the law as it stands:

“The Fire and Rescue Services Act 2004 does not place a statutory duty…to respond to floods, although there is a power to do so…the Act sets out the statutory ‘core functions’ of FRA…to provide for…fire safety…fire-fighting…rescuing people and protecting people from harm in the event of road traffic accidents”—

or road traffic collisions in 21st-century jargon. The law in Scotland is different. There has been a statutory duty since 2013, and the Pitt review took a similar view to the one that now exists in Scotland:

“The Review believes that clarifying and communicating the role of each of these bodies would improve the response to flooding. However, we are concerned that the systems, structures and protocols developed to support national coordination of multi-agency flood rescue assets remain ad-hoc. We believe that the Fire and Rescue Service should take on a leading role in this area, based on fully funded capability. This will be most effective if supported by a statutory duty.”

That is essentially the core of recommendations 15 to 21 and, as I say, nothing much has changed.

The Library briefing goes on to examine the history of the proposal and the debates in the House. I would like to focus on the history of the fire and rescue service’s statutory duties. Colleagues might expect that the fire service has always had a duty to attend fires, but it was partly the fire that destroyed most of this Palace of Westminster in 1834 that led to the creation of the London Fire Brigade, which celebrated its 150th anniversary last year. Most colleagues would also probably expect that the fire and rescue service has a duty to prevent fires, and I suspect most would consider the role of the fire service in dealing with road traffic collisions to be a statutory duty. That is not the case. On fire, the statutory duty was created only in 1938. On fire safety, it was the Fire Services Act 1947 that created it. As for road accidents and road crashes, it was the Fire and Rescue Services Act 2004 that created the statutory duty.

When the Government say that the fire and rescue service will deal with floods because it has, it does and it will, that was also the case for fires, fire prevention and road traffic collisions until the prevailing wisdom decided that an expectation was not enough and the Government had to do more than just expect. There not only has to be a legal requirement for a duty; it has to be resourced and paid for, and the Government need to legislate for that outcome.

The Select Committee report makes the case for changes in structures. Part of our recommendations for better preparedness, better governance and stronger resilience is to confer a duty on the fire service to boost all those elements. The Government clearly do not want to proceed in that direction at present.

[Rob Marris]

Does my hon. Friend share my suspicion that the Government’s refusal to create a statutory duty for the fire and rescue service in this regard is driven principally by their desire not to commit resources to this area of endeavour?

[Jim Fitzpatrick]

My hon. Friend perfectly anticipates my next point. I was about to quote a statistic to demonstrate that the Government do not want to proceed in this direction—because staff reductions in fire and rescue services since 2010 have been significant, with nearly 7,000 jobs having been lost. By my estimate, that amounts to 20% of the British fire service disappearing since 2010. Those numbers are very worrying.

Furthermore, the transfer of responsibilities of the fire and rescue service to more and more police and crime commissioners, and budget pressures on both the police and the fire services suggest that there is real fear of further reductions. The fire and rescue service needs to be able to maintain the staff and equipment necessary to continue to play a prominent role in dealing with floods, preparing for them and mitigating them. To achieve that, they need recognition in law. The Select Committee believes that that needs to be done. It is an issue that is not going to go away. I suspect that at some point—perhaps not now—the Government will get the message.