MINUTES OF PROCEEDINGS

of the

EVIDENCE OF:

MID & WEST WALES FIRE AUTHORITY

held at

Committee Rooms

County Hall, Haverfordwest

on

Thursday, 10 April 2003

MR MACKAY: Douglas Mackay, Chief Fire Officer.

MR SULLIVAN: Gareth Sullivan, Vice Chairman of the Authority.

MR THOMAS: Gareth Thomas, Director of Service Support.

MR SULLIVAN: Before we start, can I make apologies for the Chair of the Authority who is unable to be with us today?

I refer you to our written submission of the 19 February 2003. The Mid & West Wales Fire Authority comprises six constituent authorities: Neath Port Talbot County Borough Council in the east, the City and County of Swansea, Carmarthenshire County Council, Pembrokeshire County Council, Ceredigion County Council and Powys County Council. Geographically the Fire Authority covers the largest land mass in Wales and England.

We were set up as a shadow authority in 1995, and since 1996 we have had full authority for the governance of the Mid & West Wales Fire Brigade.

In November last year, our previous Chief Fire Officer, Mr Ronnie King, retired, and Mr Douglas Mackay was appointed.

If you have any questions on operational matters, can I refer you to the Chief Fire Office; and if you have any questions on administration or finance, can I refer you to Mrs Judith Morris or Mr Gareth Thomas.

Our written response dealt principally with the governance of the Mid & West Wales Fire Authority, and how we would approach any governance by the National Assembly for Wales. At our meeting on 10 February, we discussed the matter and at that time, our reaction was a cautious one. In the past, we have had dealings with the Welsh Assembly as part of the Wales Fire Services Forum which is made up of the North Wales Fire Service, the South Wales Fire Service and ourselves. We have dealt in great part with Mrs Edwina Hart, the Minister for Finance, Local Government and Communities at the Welsh Assembly.

In this time, we have produced two important pieces of work. One is called Up in Flames, which deals with arson related issues. The other one is Wired for Safety, which made recommendations about the installation of hard-wired smoke detectors and the installation of sprinklers in domestic dwellings. Wales seems to have taken the lead in the sprinkler initiative.

MR MACKAY: To add briefly to what Councillor Sullivan is saying. It is fair to say that the close working relationship that the three fire authorities in Wales have been able to develop with the Assembly through the Wales Fire Services’ Forum-, which is a forum in which the Members and the three chief fire officers sit- and regular meetings with the Minister, some incredibly productive things have happened, even though at the moment the Assembly does not have policy responsibility for fire. As the Assembly had and continues to have quite high up on its list of priorities, issues such as community regeneration and social inclusion, as they obviously have responsibility for community safety in the round, we found that there was quite a strong community of interest between the things that we were trying to achieve, in terms of reducing fire deaths and injuries, and what the Assembly are trying to achieve in terms of community regeneration and social inclusion, particularly when we reached the conclusion that fire deaths and injuries and fire generally are quite closely associated with issues of social deprivation. For that reason, we found that we were able to work quite closely together.

MR SULLIVAN : One of our main concerns has been related to homes in socially deprived areas and particularly the elderly population. We have established a partnership with Age Concern in the Port Talbot area to set up a system of Home Safety Audits so as to target those individuals most at risk from fire.

LORD RICHARD: Can I ask a few questions on your relationship with the Assembly. You say that you meet them three or four times a year. Is it just the fire service or in conjunction with other people?

MR MACKAY: The Wales Fire Services’ Forum is not an Assembly body. This is a body that consists of the Chairs and Vice-Chairs of the three authorities and the Chief Fire Officers. That body is represented on the Partnership Council by the Chair of the South Wales Fire Authority who also represents the Forum on the Co-ordinating Committee of the Welsh Local Government Association.

LORD RICHARD: When you meet the Committee -----

MR MACKAY: We have made presentations both to the Local Government and Housing Committee of the Assembly, and we also meet on the basis you suggest, two or three or four times a year, sometimes with the Minister.

LORD RICHARD: But it is just the fire service; you are not there with the police and so on.

MR MACKAY: The police meet with the Minister, but at the moment that is a separate meeting.

LORD RICHARD: As a fire service, you meet three or four times a year with the committees of the Assembly, whichever one it may be.

MR MACKAY: That is right.

LORD RICHARD: Who produces an agenda for that meeting?

MR MACKAY: All the participants are at liberty to put items on the agenda, but the agenda is generally agreed between the fire service attendees and the Minister and her civil servants.

LORD RICHARD: Can you tell us what sort of things get on the agenda? I understand what you say about how the meetings take place, but -----

MR MACKAY: I could give two examples that the Vice Chairman has referred to. As a result of these meetings and the discussions that took place, the Assembly set up working groups with a wide range of representatives to produce these two reports. The Up in Flames report looks at arson-related issues, and the Wired for Safety report looks at domestic fire safety issues. Those working groups had a wide range of interest groups: not just the fire service and the Assembly, but local authority housing departments, social services, education and other interests were represented there.

LORD RICHARD: In terms of running the fire service and operating it, who are you responsible to?

MR MACKAY: The Fire Services Act of 1947 on which the modern fire service is based, makes me directly accountable to the fire authority. There are a number of models for fire authorities, but in Wales all three fire authorities are "combined fire authorities". The six Unitary Authorities in our area concede their decision-making to a joint arrangement, to a combined fire authority.

LORD RICHARD: Where are you based?

MR MACKAY: Our administrative headquarters are in Carmarthen, but we have operational command headquarters in various areas. Currently, we have just moved to an administrative structure based on the six unitary authorities in our area, so we have, for example, a county command that covers the City and County of Swansea. Previously, the administrative arrangements were largely based on the arrangements that were in place prior to 1996 where there were three separate fire brigades in the Mid and West Wales area, based on the historical local authority areas.

MR SULLIVAN The authority consists of 23 members across the political spectrum.

MR MACKAY: The authority is made up in proportion to the size of the constituent authorities in terms of its membership.

TED ROWLANDS: The other player in the field is now the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister – ODPM. Are you accountable to them, and, if so, in what capacity and in what way?

MR MACKAY: As Chief Fire Officer I am not accountable to them, and the fire authority are not accountable to them in the sense that they have to directly account for what they do.

Perhaps it would be worthwhile recounting a little of the history. Until two or so years ago, the policy responsibility for fire service in England and Wales had traditionally been that of the Home Office. That had been our traditional policy home, alongside the police and prison service, and all the other bodies that sit there.

When David Blunkett became Home Secretary, the fire service was moved into the Department of Transport Local Government and the Regions. The justification for that at the time was that it placed us alongside services with whom we had a common interest, particularly health and safety and building control. But we were only there for a period of eight months, and then the arrangements in the DTLR came to an end. We were moved to the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister just over a year ago now, which is where we have been ever since.

The arrangements at an England and Wales level are three-fold. Firstly, there is a National Joint Council that determines pay and conditions for the uniformed staff that work in the fire service. Secondly, there is a body called the Central Fire Brigades’ Advisory Council, which is chaired by the government minister with a policy portfolio for fire, which broadly determines standards. For example, they are responsible for determining things like the kind of fire appliances that are acceptable to be used, to ensure that standards of training are at a particular level and so on.

The third thing is that there is an Inspectorate, which is a very similar model to the police inspectorate or other professional inspectorates that are responsible for advising the Minister as to whether the fire authorities are meeting their statutory responsibilities. So the accountability issue is probably through the annual report of Her Majesty’s Inspector to the Minister, to say, "this authority is meeting its statutory responsibilities" or that it is not.

PAUL VALERIO: If it was to be devolved to the Welsh Assembly, what practical benefits would there be for the fire service in Wales?

MR MACKAY: This is probably about the new agenda for the service. Historically, the service has always been about what we do after an emergency. Our work has largely been centred on how we respond after a fire takes place, or somebody’s car crashes, or a building collapses, or whatever. Over the last twenty years in particular, and with gathering pace at the moment, we are moving towards a more holistic approach to risk management, in terms of making interventions prior to emergencies by either trying to reduce the number of fires and emergencies by public education and enforcing fire safety legislation and all sorts of other issues, or by reducing the severity and impact of those emergencies when they do happen by installing smoke alarms, say, so that the building still burns, but the people get out. We are trying to develop a holistic approach to managing down risk.

The part of the job that we do after the fire, we tend to do more or less on our own, because no-one else comes rushing into the building with us. But the part of the job that we do before the fire, in terms of reaching communities and individuals that are at risk and reducing that level of risk, we have to do alongside other agencies because we can only reach them when working in partnership with other agencies. The Vice Chairman gave a very appropriate example of that, which is our work with the voluntary sector and the statutory housing sector, to reach people at risk in the home. That means us working very closely alongside – increasingly closely alongside other agencies in Wales, which almost invariably are the responsibility of the Welsh Assembly, particularly local government – and other areas that may not be quite so obvious, where we might need to work with health, who are again often dealing with the same risk group as us. To give an example of the link between what we do and our business, and the link with social deprivation, if someone is poor, however we define that, they are far more likely to have a fire. They are probably also far more likely to have a poor diet; they are far more likely to use deep-fat frying, for example, as a regular means of cooking, which increases the risk of fire. So we have a community of interest also with health, in terms of reaching the same group. They want to encourage people to have a healthier diet for health reasons, and we want to encourage people to have a healthier diet for fire reasons, because it reduces risk, given that a high proportion of serious fires in the home are caused by people cooking using fat. It is quite a complex relationship.

At the moment, being semi-detached in policy terms from the other agencies makes that much more difficult.

PAUL VALERIO: If it were to be devolved, do you see it being devolved to the Welsh Assembly still using the existing local government to support it; or would you see that changing to – dare I say it – an ASPB, or some other organisation – or would you perhaps have a Welsh fire service covering the whole of Wales?

MR MACKAY: In the previous discussions, the Minister has given a commitment on behalf of the Assembly to the existing three Welsh fire authorities that the Assembly has no wish to take direct responsibility for service delivery, and gave an assurance that the existing structure of the three Welsh fire authorities, which have only been in existence since 1996, would remain. I think there are some quite strong views amongst the Welsh fire authorities on that.

MR SULLIVAN: The fire authority as it stands at the moment – includes representation from all the constituent authorities and is the bridge between the Fire Brigade and the Welsh Assembly Government.

LORD RICHARD: Thinking about what you were saying, that the Assembly would not take responsibility for day-to-day running and that it would still be the responsibility of the three authorities. How is that going to fit?

MR MACKAY: As I see it, the Assembly would take responsibility for broad joined-up policy direction, in terms of their overall responsibility for community safety. I think it would then be the responsibility of the fire authorities to ensure that that is translated into appropriate policy and direction in terms of how fire brigades would operate. That is just a personal view, but I do not necessarily see that as the responsibility of -----

LORD RICHARD: What actual change would there be in the way you operated?

MR MACKAY: In terms of the way the fire authority operated, they would have a much more direct link to the Assembly in terms of direction and the policy priorities of the Assembly. Currently, we are caught between the policy priorities of the Assembly and the policy priorities of the ODPM. We are subject to "best value" legislation, and currently we are obliged to work to the English statutory guidance on best value, which is very, very different now, not just in approach and timeframes, but in terms of its philosophical approach. The Assembly has moved to the Wales Programme for Improvement, which is very much an authority-led approach to improving services, whereas the English framework, which I am subject to, is very audit and inspector-led, in terms of the so-called comprehensive performance assessment that is being introduced in England.

At the same time as working with these other agencies, where I am perhaps trying to do joint service reviews across a particular service, working to a different philosophical approach to different timeframes and to different political masters, it makes the day-to-day operation and the framework for service improvement much more complex than it needs to be. That is just a practical example of that.

LORD RICHARD: You are saying you are removing the irritation of the Deputy Prime Minister, and you would substitute for that the non-irritant behaviour of the Assembly. That is the hope.

MR MACKAY: I do not find the Deputy Prime Minister irritating.

LORD RICHARD: You want to take his office away and substitute the Assembly. That is the effect of it.

MR MACKAY: Not in totality, no. Given that there are only three fire authorities in Wales, frankly it would not be very sensible to have a separate fire service Inspectorate, for example. It probably would not be very sensible, unless we are going to move to regional pay bargaining arrangements, to have a Joint Council arrangement for negotiating the frameworks for pay and conditions. It may not even be particularly sensible to have a separate Central Fire Brigades Advisory Council, although that is more of a debating point because there may be some issues relating to standards that are different in Wales. For example, if we are going to have different standards for social housing in Wales than we have in England, that may have certain implications for what we would advise, as Fire Authorities, in terms of fire standards and so on, particularly if we are going to have a holistic approach to risk reduction.

TED ROWLANDS: You do not want to come off any of the three major national bodies, even though you have devolution, but stay within all three.

MR MACKAY: That would be the view of the authority, but that would be a matter for the Welsh Assembly Government to determine, how they would properly be represented on those bodies. For example, the fire service is fully devolved in Scotland. There is a separate Scottish Central Fire Brigades Advisory Council, but there is not a separate Scottish National Joint Council for pay and conditions. The Scottish fire service, through COSLA in this case, is represented on the National Joint Council, but they have their own Central Fire Brigades’ Advisory Council; and, indeed, Scotland have their own Inspectorate, but Scotland is a bigger area and has a larger population than Wales.

TED ROWLANDS: The capital funding would get transferred to the Assembly, would it? That is what you would want to see.

MR MACKAY: Yes.

PAUL VALERIO: If you were devolved, would it make it easier for better co-operation with other emergency services than exists at the moment? For example, with the first response units, Wales is a large rural area that does not have the same kind of problems that England does.

PAUL VALERIO: Would that give you more flexibility?

MR MACKAY: Operationally, yes. Obviously, health is a devolved matter, but the police are not. No doubt you will collectively be considering that issue as well. I think that there is a link between the role of the three. We co-operate very, very closely with the other two emergency services on a practical day-to-day level, but we recognise that currently there are different governance and funding models in place, and different geographical boundaries. All those make the kind of co-operation that we would wish to undertake sometimes more difficult.

PETER PRICE: Can you give examples of that?

MR MACKAY: Yes. We would like to share premises. It makes a lot of sense, given that the infrastructure of an ambulance station is not that different to that of a fire station; and even the infrastructure of a police station is not that different in terms of car-parking, people coming and going and training facilities and offices. However, at the moment, because all the funding routes are different and the political approval routes are all different, it is quite difficult to get all the pieces into place, even on relatively small projects. For example, we are just extending a fire station in the rural community at Crymch, on the edge of the Preseli Mountains, which will also accommodate a police office, where they can go and do their interviews and surgeries and all the rest of it. As I am sure Gareth Thomas will outline, the process that led to this successful conclusion was convoluted to say the least, even though it is a relatively minor project in capital terms.

MR THOMAS: We also have a fairly significant project proposed for Aberystwyth, where we would like to share a new facility on a new site with both the ambulance service and with the coastguard. Interestingly, we have three different sponsoring departments for the three services in place, and getting all the programmes together and getting all the approvals to synchronise is extremely difficult. In fact, I suspect that we are going to lose that project because the developer is getting impatient with the time it is taking to put all the pieces in place.

PETER PRICE: Is there a case in Wales which is distinctive because of the proportion of Wales that is very rural, a greater case for combining services; and, furthermore, is the service that you are most likely to combine it with the ambulance service, which is devolved?

MR MACKAY: There is the political element to that, and there is also an operational element. People sometimes think that perhaps having a combined ambulance and fire service would be pretty radical, but it would not be. In many areas of England and Wales there were, up until 1974, fire and ambulance services. In Birmingham, the fire and ambulance service was in existence until 1974, when health and fire went their own way in the local government re-organisation.

In terms of the first responder initiatives that were referred to a moment ago, where fire-fighters respond to life-threatening emergency calls in areas where there is not full-time ambulance cover, or in a remote rural area, those synergies are immensely strong and work exceptionally well. There are huge differences however. The arrangements for health are so different now to those for fire, and the funding and financial frameworks for the two services are very different which makes that kind of joint working more difficult than it needs to be.

PETER PRICE: But the nature of the Welsh arrangements is that if the responsibility for finance across the board, including capital finance, was devolved to the Welsh Assembly, it should then be a much simpler operation to be able to pull together these combined services, as I understand what you are saying, and that there is an even more important case for it in rural areas such as greater parts of Wales, in your own area especially. Is that a fair summing-up?

MR MACKAY: There is a strong operational case, yes.

MR SULLIVAN: We work together on road traffic accidents and use the services of the air ambulance to transfer people from Mid Wales to any accident and emergency centre, for example.

SIR MICHAEL WHEELER BOOTH: You are putting a point that worries me, in view of the Bain report. You are saying on the one hand that there has been an enormous amount of re-organisation; a coming-together of authorities, putting apart of authorities and responsibilities over recent years. That would seem to suggest you should leave well alone. On the other hand, the Bain report says that the review team– Bain – endorsed the proposal that the Welsh Assembly be given policy and funding responsibility for the fire service in Wales. "The present split in policy responsibility for the fire service and capital and revenue funding between the Welsh Assembly Government and ODPM provides scope for confusion, delay, uncertainty and tension. It militates against the effective planning of the fire service." Those are very strong words indeed. They would point towards following Bain.

MR MACKAY: I agree with Professor Bain. The start of the piece you have quoted – the proposal he is referring to is the proposal that came from the Welsh Assembly when Professor Bain’s team went to speak to the people from the Assembly. As far as I understand it, the proposal has come from the Assembly. The words that are used in the report about confusion and all the rest of it endorse some of the things I spoke about earlier in terms of the tensions and having the two bodies at principality level saying, "we have got some responsibility for you".

SIR MICHAEL WHEELER BOOTH: In your letter to us, following the meeting on 10 February, in the third from last paragraph, you say: "The Authority wishes to reiterate its previously declared policy position in expressing cautious interest." That seems to me to mean "wait and see who is going to win".

MR MACKAY: It could be interpreted as that. I think it is because there was not a clear policy proposal on the table. There still is not one, because all that is in writing at the moment is what is in Professor Bain’s report, because that reflects, as I understand it, the discussion that Professor Bain’s team had with the people that they spoke with at the Assembly when they went there. That is why some of the devil is in the detail. Running alongside your work, of course, is the preparation of the Government’s White Paper on the future of the fire service, which will be published in June or July. That may or may not also have proposals within it for devolvement of responsibility for fire to Wales. That is why the authority were, I think, saying, "we want to know exactly what the proposals are before we firmly jump one way or the other".

LORD RICHARD: There are three authorities. Your interest is cautious. Do you know what the interest of the other two is like? Is it warmer or cautious?

MR SULLIVAN: Inconsistent, Chairman.

TED ROWLANDS: How much capital funding is involved each year out of the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister? Is it a Barnet style formula or a bid that you make each year? What happens?

MR MACKAY: The system is the same as in local government generally. There is an allocation of basic credit approvals, which across the three fire authorities in Wales probably amounts to less than £5 million a year.

TED ROWLANDS: The sum total of the Deputy Prime Minister’s handle on the affairs is about £5 million a year.

MR MACKAY: In terms of capital funding, but historically a lot of use has been made of supplementary credit approvals to fund particular capital projects that government wants to see carried through, for example the centralising of control rooms, whereby there has been a huge move over the last 25 years to reduce the number of control rooms that exist in the service. That has largely been achieved through the issue of supplementary credit approvals.

TED ROWLANDS: If you took a five or ten-year average, you are getting out of his budget in capital terms, or the Department in Whitehall’s budget, £5 million.

MR THOMAS: It is somewhat less than £5 million between the three brigades.

VIVIENNE SUGAR: I apologise for being late. It seems to me that the thinking about further devolution is not as precise as we would want it to be. Other people have given evidence that the reason they want to see transfer of powers is to tidy things up. You seem to be putting forward a model that is still a mixture. I am not clear whether you are talking about retaining some things for administrative convenience, like a national inspection service and a pay body – but how can you do that if you transferred all of ODPM’s powers to the Assembly – or are you talking about only transferring some? In that case, there is a distinction between primary legislation, which would apply to the whole of the UK, and secondary, which is about tailoring the way of implementing it to local circumstances. I am not clear which way it could go.

MR MACKAY: That is a fair question, which perhaps I can answer by using the example of the Inspectorate again. Under Professor Bain’s proposals inspection services will transfer from Her Majesty’s Inspectorate, to Audit Commission, Wales. I would anticipate those services being procured by the Assembly, because it is the Minister who will get the report at the end of the year, saying that the fire services in Wales either meet the requirements of the Assembly, however they are laid out, or they do not. I think they would have a contracting arrangement, or almost a client relationship with either the England and Wales bodies or the UK bodies. If there are only three fire authorities, and something in the region of 5,000 employees in total, it does not, to me, make much sense to have your own national pay-bargaining arrangements. You need to have some sort of relationship with England and Wales, in the case of inspection and audit, or with the UK arrangements in the case of pay-bargaining. On a question of scale, I cannot see it being very cost-effective or very necessary to have those arrangements at a Wales level.

VIVIENNE SUGAR: Would the cost of the administration of a Welsh pay-bargaining body be offset by savings in the pay bill?

MR MACKAY: It would depend how effective the negotiators were, I would think. Again, I touched on that earlier. At the moment, we have national pay-bargaining arrangements, with the exception of small London weighting allowances, for example: a fire-fighter in Norfolk earns the same as a fire-fighter in Pembrokeshire.

If the signal set in the Chancellor’s budget yesterday about tracking separate RPIs on a regional basis, is a harbinger to regional pay negotiations in years to come in the public sector, then you may well be right.

PETER PRICE: Primary legislation has not been the focus of what we have been talking about; it has been very much a policy which is executive decision-taking, you might say, and finance. Do you envisage that if we move down the road of policy devolution, that it would carry with it any need for different primary legislation affecting Wales?

MR MACKAY: I cannot see the circumstances in which there would be a need for different primary legislation. What I will say, though, is that the existing primary legislative framework, which is the Fire Services Act, 1947, much of which, if the signals coming from ODPM are carried through in the White Paper that is due to be published in the summer, will change. A very, very significant change is already happening. The framework that determines how the fire authority deploys its resources, which is currently based entirely on what it does after there is a fire, has gone within the last week, or nearly gone. There is a new framework out to consultation from the ODPM in terms of developing this more holistic approach to reducing risk. The members of my authority, for example, are due to have a seminar in a few weeks’ time to discuss that issue because it is the biggest thing that has happened in the fire service, alongside the Bain review, which it has largely come from, in fifty years. That will affect Wales as well as England, obviously, and it is a huge issue.

TED ROWLANDS: Will there be a very Welsh dimension to that, or will it be very similar to England? How different would it be to roll out a framework like this?

MR MACKAY: I cannot see it being dramatically different. What is represented in the proposals is a new philosophical approach. It is not a prescriptive approach where you could say, "we will not do this little bit of it in Wales". At the moment, the approach dealing with fires is that you assess the level of risk, and depending on that, you send more or fewer fire engines more quickly or more slowly; it is as simple as that. That is the basic framework for risk assessment. The new framework for risk assessment is immensely more complicated than that, and we are still working through what the implications are likely to be. Very briefly, it says that one has to assess risk both according to potential life risk as well as property risk, whereas the existing framework is only based on an assessment of property risk. This approach is based on the experience of war-time blitz fire-fighting, where you ask: "If there is a fire in this building, is it going to burn to the ground, or is it going to spread to a neighbouring building? If it is, it is a very high risk, and we send lots of fire engines very quickly. If it is not going to burn to the ground or spread to a neighbouring building, we will send a fire engine quite slowly." It sounds primitive, and it is; but that is the framework we have been working with for many years. The new framework says we assess life risk as well. Under the existing framework, a hospital full of patients is the same sort of risk as a hospital that is empty and about to be demolished. That is what the existing framework says.

The new framework also proposes that we should assess risk dynamically; that is, we should recognise that a town in the middle of the night may be a different risk to what a town is in the middle of the day. It may be high, or it may be low, but we assess according to the nature of it.

The third thing it will encourage us to do is to integrate the work that we do before the fire, in terms of reducing risk, with the work that we do afterwards in terms of reducing the effects of it. It is a fundamental shift.

VIVIENNE SUGAR: Can I press you on your answer to Peter’s question about the distinction between primary legislation and policy. When Councillor Sullivan was speaking earlier, he mentioned houses in multiple occupation. In Wales there was a campaign for many years for compulsory registration of HMOs, compulsory inspection, and so on, which could not be brought to full fruition because it required primary legislation. I wonder whether you agree with that statement and whether there are other areas of primary legislation where you would want the Assembly, in order to fulfil its social policy objectives, to have the power to make variations.

MR MACKAY: I probably misunderstood the initial question, or perhaps did not answer it very well. If the Welsh Assembly were to have primary legislative responsibilities, then the fire authority and I, would be pressing them very hard, for example, to make the installation of hard-wired smoke alarms a legislative requirement. At the moment, of course, the Assembly does not have that power, so we lobby elsewhere.

I accept that there is a difference between policy in the amorphous sense and the power to make primary legislation. Were the Welsh Assembly Government to have the responsibility to make primary legislation, then I think it is self-evident that that should extend to fire, because there would be cross-overs from legislation that they were making in other areas, particularly in housing.

SIR MICHAEL WHEELER BOOTH: What is your relationship with local government? I notice the composition of your authority: you have a Labour absolute majority, unlike in the Assembly, where of course it is a coalition to produce the government.

MR SULLIVAN: Within the Mid & West Wales Fire Authority?

SIR MICHAEL WHEELER BOOTH: The figures there are 15 Labour; PC 5, Conservative 2, and Lib-D 2. I think that is the wrong one.

MR THOMAS: It is 13/10.

MR SULLIVAN The ruling group is a combination of Independents; Liberal-Democrats and Plaid Cymru.

SIR MICHAEL WHEELER BOOTH: Relations are pretty good between the actual Fire Brigade and the Authority.

MR SULLIVAN: I can only speak in respect of the relationship between my authority, which is the City and County of Swansea. I would say the relationship is improving. There was a certain amount of – I will not call it suspicion, but there was a certain amount of uneasiness within the City and County of Swansea – not in terms of running the Brigade, but more so when the budget was constructed. That has been overcome.

LORD RICHARD: You have a coalition of Independents, Liberals and Plaid, as the majority.

MR SULLIVAN : Yes.

LORD RICHARD: There is an actual coalition, is there?

MR SULLIVAN: Yes. It works very well, actually.

LORD RICHARD: On the face of it, it is a surprising group of different parties, which are fighting for the same lobby.

MR MACKAY: Can I comment on that from an officer perspective? I came into the Authority three years ago, and was quite surprised to find the political make-up as it was. But from an officer perspective it works very well because there is very little party political dogma associated with fire, as there is with many other areas of public service provision. It is not as problematic as may first appear.

TOM JONES: You said that your work increasingly was becoming involved with social deprivation and -----

MR MACKAY: Yes, it is changing.

PAUL VALERIO: There are more geographical rivalries rather than political, are there not?

MR SULLIVAN Not within Mid & West Wales Fire Authority – perhaps within the forum, yes.

TED ROWLANDS: Mr Mackay, you said one of the diverging areas between England and Wales is in the area of best value and the Wales Programme for Improvement. They were going in different directions. One was much more targeted, and this is different. If the situation stayed the same and those divergences remained, what practical implications would that have?

MR MACKAY: Some of the more obvious ones. We lobbied, in some cases successfully, to get things changed. For example, up until last year, as a fire authority we had to publish our best-value performance plan before the end of March, whereas the unitary authorities in Wales, had to publish their best-value performance plans by the end of June. It meant that ensuring common objectives could be joined together was that much more difficult. We now have concurrent planning cycles, so that makes that a little bit easier.

The underlying philosophical approach is now very, very different. The English approach is very much audit-led, rather than authority-led. Rather than an authority determining its agenda and saying, "these are the issues that the authority will focus improvement efforts on"; the English approach, as I see it, allows someone else determine what the authority’s approach to performance improvement should be.

TED ROWLANDS: Is the Assembly a softer touch than these Englishmen?

MR MACKAY: Far from it – no. I do not think that that is the case at all. Talking with colleagues in the unitary authorities, it is a very different approach, but it gives the political responsibility to the politicians in the authority, and the managerial responsibility to the managers in the authority, rather than saying, "we will get somebody else to do that for you; they will come along and tell you what is best". I think it is just the opposite: I think the Welsh Programme for Improvement approach is far more challenging, in that it puts the responsibility where it should be.

PETER PRICE: You refer in your paper to the proposal to move from levying to precepting. Does this have any significance in terms of the devolution aspect, or is that a financial detail that we can stay out of?

MR MACKAY: Where things stand currently, precepting will only be introduced for fire authorities in Wales should the Assembly decide that that is an appropriate road to go down; whereas precepting is already being introduced in England for combined fire authorities. You might say that in a sense it is a financial detail, but from the Authority’s perspective it alters the nature of the relationship between the fire authorities and the constituent authorities. It alters the nature of that relationship – although it might just be seen as a financial detail.

LORD RICHARD: It is a financial detail unless and until the Assembly gets authority.

MR MACKAY: Yes.