May I praise, as I did in Committee, the tone of the debate and the measured way in which it has been taken forward, even though we will obviously disagree on certain issues?
Thirty years ago, I wrote a paper on better collaboration between the emergency services, covering the ambulance, fire and police services. I was wrong, because it should have included the coastguard—as a former shipping Minister, I would say that, wouldn’t I?
Let me say at the outset that I have much sympathy with some aspects of the provisions that have been tabled today. We may be able to look at some of them again and to bring back proposals in the Lords. However, I fundamentally disagree with others, because they would rip the heart out of the Bill—I am looking at the shadow Minister, the hon. Member for West Ham (Lyn Brown), who knows exactly what I mean.
Let me also say that I am enormously proud to be the first police and fire Minister, and that role is perhaps an indication of how seriously the Government take some of the concerns the fire service and the shadow fire Minister have. I actually gave up huge swathes of my policing portfolio, including responsibility for the National Crime Agency and organised crime, to other Ministers, so that I could take on this portfolio. The work has taken up a huge amount of my time—that is not just because of this Bill—because I have been on an enormously steep learning curve from when I was a fireman all those years ago. The job has changed, although some of the semantics and language have not. Some things have changed enormously fast, but some have not changed as fast as we would perhaps all like.
Because we have a fantastic fire service, there has been a decrease of 17% in fire-related fatalities and of 50% in reported fires over the past 10 years. I am concerned about the correlation between those two figures, and I have asked my officials to look at that. As the shadow Minister said, there is an increase at the moment. We should not take one year as an example, and there may be, very sadly, some one-off events. I vividly remember, as roads Minister, going to the terrible fire on the M5 following a road traffic collision where many people survived the RTC, got out of their vehicles, and sadly lost their lives to fire.
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Members of the fire service, the police and the ambulance service are amazing creatures. We often send them in one direction while we go in the other direction. The group of people who work in the fire service and in our other emergency services are a special breed. Many of them are ex-armed forces due to some of the training that we give in our armed forces. Sadly, not as many are coming through as there were in my time: I left the Army and went straight into Essex fire and rescue services. I applied to the Metropolitan police and the London fire service. I got accepted into both, but Essex offered me a flat. If the Met had offered me a flat, I probably would not be standing here now and would have retired a couple of years ago.