Police and Justice Bill

I am grateful to my noble friend for giving way yet again. He has just talked about equal partners. Will he run past me again why the fire authority is an equal partner of the police in local crime and disorder? The fire authority has an important and valuable role in dealing with arson and offering fire safety advice and so on, but sometimes its involvement in matters other than flippantly offering to turn hoses on people who are causing disorder is fairly difficult to follow. What I am trying to get at—this comes back to my noble friend’s masterful dismissal of the amendments that I spoke to a moment ago—is that you cannot really claim that these partners are equal. They have a different level of involvement in these issues. Somehow we need to recognise that without pretending that they will all have a legitimate equal commitment in these areas.