David Simmonds

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Efford. I congratulate the hon. Member for North Durham (Luke Akehurst) on securing this debate, and it is a pleasure to be opposite the Minister. It is a tribute to his intellectual breadth that this morning I heard him on the “Today” programme talking about youth unemployment, and this afternoon he is here to talk about fire services and suicide training. This is an issue that most of us, as constituency Members of Parliament, will hear about when we engage with our local fire services. When I visited the station in Pinner, it was one of a number of concerns that seemed to emerge from the experience of those fire crews and the changing nature of the call-outs. They said that the job used to be predominantly about rescuing people in emergencies and attending house fires, but that they increasingly have to deal with things such as motor crashes and crises when a person has called the emergency services, uncertain about the exact nature of what is going on and the firefighters are the responders summoned. They therefore find themselves dealing with an individual in a moment of crisis, perhaps facing a situation that is outside the normal breadth of their training; my hon. Friend the Member for Keighley and Ilkley (Robbie Moore) set out a powerful constituency example showing how important that is. The Government need to consider carefully how to roll out an appropriate level of training. One issue, and also perhaps a learning opportunity, is the way that the whole range of our public services addresses emerging issues. On suicide prevention, social workers, police officers and workers in various parts of the NHS have a high degree of personal expertise and will have had high-quality training and the opportunity to make a good assessment, based on the evidence, of what works effectively to prepare those individuals for the situations that they may come across. We must avoid reinventing the wheel for fire service professionals, when we may be able to use the learning from effective programmes in place elsewhere to ensure that what is provided is focused and appropriate, and gives firefighters the skills they need when dealing with members of the public in a moment of crisis. It is important in such a debate to remind ourselves about the risks, particularly when we are talking about mandatory training and what that involves. Those of us who have spent a long time in local government dealing with issues such as child sexual exploitation will be very conscious that when everything is a priority, nothing is a priority any more. Recent estimates on the new Oliver McGowan training in the NHS, which is designed to raise awareness and skill levels about people with learning disabilities and how they interact with the health service, describe a potential bill of as much as £1 billion for a day and a half of mandatory training for every single member of staff—3.7 million people across the NHS and social care. That will also have a service impact due to the unavailability of those staff to deal with patients because they are being abstracted to undertake that training. I know that the Minister and the Government will quite rightly have in mind—and the Opposition support them in this—ensuring a proportionate approach and making sure that the people who are in the best position to help individuals going through that moment of crisis are the ones who get the most focused training, but that the general level of awareness across those organisations is raised to the right level.