First of all, I make the House aware of my job as a leader of Wiltshire Council, which is on the register of interests. I have looked at these clauses on collaboration of emergency services and I would have preferred the Government to have been stronger. On considering
the opportunities to collaborate, I quite agree with the noble Lord, Lord Harris, that there is a lot of good collaboration already going on, not just between fire and police but with local authorities as well. In Wiltshire, there are police stations in all the main hubs; they are not just front offices. We have guns and CS gas and response cars outside. That has meant that some of our major police stations have been able to close, saving huge amounts of public money. In Wiltshire, we also do all the police’s IT and we manage their project management. It is quite usual to see the chief constable and the PCC in my offices, working together with my officers. That is good collaboration. This should continue and the Government need to encourage more authorities to do that more readily.
There are, however, barriers to further collaboration. In Wiltshire, we would have loved to have joined both fire and police under our PCC. That would be the best use of public resources, not just financial, but people and assets as well. But we cannot do that now, because Wiltshire fire and rescue, earlier this year, joined with Dorset fire and rescue. Dorset police work with Cornwall and Devon. Wiltshire police work in collaboration on major crimes with Avon and Somerset and Gloucester. There are two PCCs—the whole thing is a muddle. The barrier is that there is no co-terminosity between different public service authorities and this is, I think, probably getting worse. If Wiltshire or any other authority were to ask to change the joining up of fire authorities or police authorities to make them co-terminus with the local authority, would the Minister listen to that request so that we could perhaps have properly joined-up public services? Health is a thing on the end; I think that is a more difficult discussion. In Wiltshire, we could get fire, police and a local authority working very closely together, saving huge amounts of money. Can we look at the areas that are barriers to doing that?