This amendment relates to Schedule 1 and the provision for a police and crime commissioner to seek to take over the fire and rescue authority. In essence, it provides that no order may be made to do that until,
“the Secretary of State has conducted a review assessing the funding required by the fire and rescue service to ensure the minimum level of cover needed to secure public safety and maintain fire resilience”.
The amendment then lists five matters on which the review must assess the impact of the minimum level of cover.
The fire and rescue service nationally has already had to reduce spending by some 12% over the course of the last Parliament. I think that was a cumulative cash cut of some £236 million. On the basis of the last local government funding settlement, the fire and rescue service would be required to cut spending by a further £135 million by the end of this Parliament. There has been a reduction of some 7,500 in the number of firefighters as a result, and there is an issue as to the viability of the service under the Government’s spending plans. According to the National Audit Office, there was a reduction of just under a third in the amount of time spent on home fire checks over the last Parliament, and the NAO said that the Government did not know what impact this would have on public safety. It is also the view of the NAO that because the Government refuse to model the risk of cuts, they will only know that a service has been cut too far after it has happened—that is, after public safety has actually been put at risk.
6.30 pm
I am not sure what the up-to-date figures are, but the figures for the period between April and September 2015 showed a significant percentage increase in the number of fire-related fatalities compared with the same period in 2014, a 10% increase in non-fatal fire casualties resulting in hospital treatment and a 7% increase in the number of fires attended by the fire and rescue service. This is after a great many years of the number of fires, casualties and deaths reducing. Yet the Government now want to pass responsibility for fire and rescue services to police and crime commissioners, who already have equally stretched budgets of their own, a reduced number of police officers and a heavy workload, without the Secretary of State even being required to assess what level of funding police and crime commissioners will need to keep the public safe and maintain the resilience of the fire and rescue service for which they are taking over responsibility.
There is, surely, a vital need to ensure that such a proposed takeover does not lead to funding for the fire and rescue services reducing still further. Those residing within the area of the fire and rescue service being transferred presumably have a right to some statutory assurance that the funding of the fire and rescue service will not be allowed to reduce still further as a result of the takeover. One would also have thought that a police and crime commissioner taking over responsibility for a fire and rescue service would want to be satisfied that the funding being provided for a service about which he or she knew relatively little would be sufficient to at least provide the minimum level of cover needed to secure public safety and maintain fire resilience, and that the Secretary of State had addressed this issue before deciding to make the necessary order. Our amendment seeks to address that issue.
I have one final point. The Minister has spoken previously about consultation and about seeking the agreement of the parties involved to a police and crime commissioner taking over responsibility for a fire and rescue service—or at least seeking to reach that agreement. Could the Minister take this opportunity to be a little more specific about the extent to which there will be a statutory requirement to consult in these circumstances? If there is one, who will be consulted? Will it cover, for example, the organisations that represent the employees of the organisation concerned? I beg to move.