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Coastguard Service

I thank the hon. Member for Truro and Falmouth (Sarah Newton) and her colleagues for securing this debate through the Back Bench Business Committee. I also thank Mr Philip Naylor of the Maritime and Coastguard Agency for listening to my pleas to include my area in the recent series of public meetings. My area has a coastline of some 200 miles with two ferry companies and a number of fishermen operating out of it, so it has a significant amount of maritime activity. It was good of Mr Naylor and his colleague, Bill McFadyen, to come to the maritime meeting last Thursday. Before I run through a couple of important issues that were raised today, let me say that my hon. Friend the Member for Inverclyde (David Cairns) is not in the Chamber, although he would have loved to be here. He has made a submission to the consultation, putting the case for retaining the Clyde maritime rescue co-ordination centre. In a document on the planned closure of MRCC Clyde, a shipping industry expert says:"““I honestly believe this is utter madness and will end in disaster.””" The document is first class and worthy of consideration, as is the case made by my hon. Friend. If I repeat anything that has already been said this afternoon, it is because of its importance and significance. We have heard a great deal about local knowledge today, but local dialect is important, too. We have heard many dialects in this debate. Members who live 300 or 400 miles apart are beginning to understand some of them. It is important that we get this matter right. There are two fundamental issues in the entire process: minimising errors and chasing the clock. When we talk about minimising errors, we are referring to the initial information-gathering processes: the location identification, the casualty incident description, the response required, the assurance of effective communication between the casualty or first informants and the resources and co-ordinators. Minimising errors also relates to work-load distribution and the management of resources. Chasing the clock is as it sounds. We all recognise that when HM coastguard receives notification of an incident, the problem or the disaster has already taken place. Given that the incident is being reported after the event, action must be taken as quickly as possible. The race against time starts at the exact time of receiving the call. The time difference between call reception and incident commencement can be anything from a few minutes to a matter of hours. Irrespective of the amount of time that has passed, the search and rescue response is already lagging behind. The remote handling of search and rescue co-ordination from the maritime analysis and operations centre increases the risk of error as a result of the many additional assumptions that the new system would employ in trying to establish area, nature and appropriate response from the initial call. That leads to the insertion of time into the process, which equates to the potential loss of life. It is about that information gathering and handling that information as appropriately and as quickly as possible The hon. Member for Truro and Falmouth mentioned the table-top exercise that took place last year. If we proceed with this process, or any other process—I recognise what my hon. Friend the Chair of the Transport Committee had to say on this matter—all the information that goes through that exercise on its own must be what people will identify as being good, decent information. From what I can gather, that table-top exercise did not provide the full information that is required. I make a plea to the Minister: before we process any of this any further, that that table-top exercise needs to be handled in real time. I accept that the exercise was based on information that came in about incidents on a specific day in summer 2006, but all that was done was a redistribution of each and every one of those incidents on to a map. There was no real-time activity, which would determine how individual sites might handle those cases as they came in. I am not in denial—I recognise that this process is about making financial savings. It must be recognised that the process began back in 2007. There was an industrial dispute, and off the back of that dispute there was an agreement between the two parties involved: the management and the unions. I have not come across a single union member who is opposed to change in the process, provided that it delivers a service with which they are comfortable, and which they believe they can deliver to help to save lives. That is that their duty; that is what they see as being paramount. So, even if there is little that the Minister can do, I hope that he will go back to that table-top exercise and ask for at least part of it to be conducted in real time. I will say nothing more than that because I want other colleagues to be able to make their contributions to the debate.