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Coastguard Service

I am not going to give way, because I am really restricted on time. I apologise. I am not summing up—I have to hand over to my hon. Friend the Member for Truro and Falmouth. Is this just about money? Yes, there are savings required, but if this was just about money, it would not be £4.8 million a year. As hon. Members have said, it is a tiny amount of money. Will there be savings throughout the MCA? Yes, at the top and at the bottom. In my own Department, every single member of staff has had to reapply for their own job. That is the sort of situation that we are working under. Did I come into politics to do that? No, of course I did not, but we have to be realistic about the money and the income that we have to work with. I welcome the Transport Committee's commitment to its own report. I welcome the fact that the Chair of that Committee, the hon. Member for Liverpool, Riverside (Mrs Ellman), has sat through the debate and been part of the debate. I say to her that I will not, under any circumstances—and neither will the Secretary of State—come to any conclusions until her Committee has reported. I promise and I make that commitment. If I can—it is difficult, because bureaucracy is involved—I will try and release to the Committee as much data that I have received, and which has been submitted to us, as I can, particularly the detailed submissions about reconfiguration. I will not release the submissions that are nasty about me, of course. If I can release that data I will do so. If I cannot do that, I might write back to those people who have made submissions and suggest that they send them to the Transport Committee. It is imperative that the Committee see that some of the submissions from the coastguard do not say, ““We all should stay open; everything is perfectly fine””. They actually say, as I have alluded to, nine stations or 10 stations. There are others that say there should be more or less. I think that this is the start of something new in government. Consultation had to start somewhere. I inherited a situation; we started somewhere. We listen. We come out with a service that is fit for purpose in the 21st century. Not everybody is going to happy, because I have got 19 stations and there is a proposal for 10 closures or nine closures. Clearly, not everybody will be happy. There is, however, a sense in the coastguard service, without any doubt if people are really honest, that we have to move on from where we are now. We have to get away from the disputes that have been going on for so many years, which are divisive, and have a service that has the resilience, the modernisation and the service to the front line, which is being left untouched and will be enhanced. Finally, channel 16, under international regulations, will be monitored in the stations. That will not be on headphones, but over loudspeakers. I apologise to my hon. Friend the Member for South Dorset (Richard Drax). I should have come back to him on that. On that note—I am sad that I have to cut my comments short, due to procedure—I will hand over to my hon. Friend the Member for Truro and Falmouth. This is a proper consultation. No deal is done. I have visited many stations and have one more to go. I cannot visit all 19—that is not possible. If hon. Members look at the political make-up of the stations that I have visited, that has nothing to do with party politics—it is to do with my job.