Barry Gardiner
MP for Brent West · Labour · United Kingdom
“Sir Desmond, imagine that the top brains in the country’s security and intelligence community produced a report that told you how to save the world. You would want to see it, right? Well, the report we are discussing is not about how to save the world; it is about what happens if we do not.”
“The nuclear threat will rise as clashes between nuclear powers become more frequent. Those are the cold assessments of the Joint Intelligence Committee. The Government were right to think that those assessments might scare people—they scare me—but they were wrong to think that they could hide them from the public.”
“The Minister will know that the grant structure on which UKRI is based gives out grants for a maximum of three to five years. Very few are for five years—most are for three years or under—yet the sort of long-term scientific development that my hon.”
“My hon. Friend is making a superb case for the importance of funding for her deep earth facility. I had the privilege of going to the National Oceanography Centre’s deep oceans facility, and the innovative science there on carbon sequestration is superb.”
“The Prime Minister has spoken powerfully about the devolution of power and giving back control. Will he therefore ensure that the proposals for commonhold and leasehold reform, for which 5 million leaseholders in this country are waiting with bated breath, do give that power and control back to those people, through the right to enfranchi…”
“We know how much land there is in the UK, and we know the extent of our inland waters and seas, so we can know how much we have to do to protect them, as we are required to do by target 3 of the global biodiversity framework.”
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“The Government seem to think that most workers are unskilled or uncertified, but agency workers are simply not there with the relevant skills and certification to perform their work in a way that is safe. I began today at the St Monica Trust, at two sites just outside Bristol, to speak to workers there who have withdrawn their labour because of the appalling offer they have been given of being fired and rehired unless they accept lower wages and terms and conditions. They were earning, on average, between £16,000 and £17,000 a year—about what a Secretary of State’s severance pay is—and they made it clear to me that their main worry and their main reason for going on strike was not actually for their own sake. They were concerned for the welfare of the residents of the residential homes and the retirement village.”
“Last week, at business questions, I raised the issue of redundancies in the Royal Mail. I apologise to you, Mr Deputy Speaker, because I may have inadvertently misled the House when I said that there were 1,400 agreed redundancies and 900 in dispute. The actual figures are that 1,250 redundancies were achieved at Royal Mail and 542 are in dispute. The Leader of the House was good enough last week to say that he would raise the matter of the disruption to service with the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, who I understand is still in his post. Has he done so? If so, will we get an urgent statement from the Business Secretary about the current disruption to postal services across the country?”
“Rwanda and the UK hosted the “Keeping 1.5 Alive” event in Kigali, but at the same time, the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report said that the requirement—the opportunity—to keep within 1.5° had now shifted forward from 2032 to 2025. Given that most major emitters in the G7 are not even meeting the Paris commitments that they made seven years ago, what realistic chance does the Prime Minister believe there is of the G7 stepping up to the plate in the next three years to achieve that turning down of emissions?”
“Each morning, Royal Mail delivery offices around the country are having to decide which streets to rotate and not get their letters. This is because of the wholesale restructuring in Royal Mail, by agreement, involving about 1,400 managers, but a further 900 delivery office managers are now being made redundant and the strain is showing in service delivery. Can we have an urgent statement from the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy on the failure of Royal Mail senior management to implement a restructuring that actually delivers a service for the people of this country?”
“It took two years for the Metropolitan police to get off its payroll the police officers who took photographs of them and circulated them to their colleagues and other people. That is a disgrace. I want to know not what anybody else is doing, but what the Minister will do to sort out racism and misogyny in the force.”
“The Minister’s statement was unworthy of this House, and even of the Minister. The danger is that it takes the focus of the debate away from the failings of the Metropolitan police and puts it on to personal and political responsibility. The Metropolitan police has been failing primarily in two areas. The first, as the hon. Member for Sevenoaks (Laura Trott) ably and rightly highlighted, is violence against women and girls, on which issue I have been working closely with my borough commander Sara Leach. Secondly, it has systematically failed on racism. I am fed up of people coming into my surgery because they are black and have been badly and violently treated or have had spurious prosecutions made against them by police officers. Mina Smallman’s two daughters were murdered in my constituency.”
“The emergency safeguarding measures are provided with a legal basis under the protocol, but under the protocol they can only be temporary. The problem the Secretary of State has is that there is no legal basis within the protocol for a permanent change. She says that she wants a negotiated settlement, and of course we would all seek that, but how is the Bill that she proposes to introduce unilaterally in this House going to change the position in international law, which is that she cannot unilaterally abrogate the treaty that she has signed?”
“The Minister said that 500 new staff were in place and 700 were coming, but what we really want to know is when will the Department be able to return to the three-week standard time that we all expected previously? That is the key issue and that is what our constituents need to know. He said 10 weeks from the end of June. We are way beyond the summer holidays by then. The backlog will have accumulated and those people will have lost the opportunity to go abroad. The key thing is when do we get back to that three-week period?”
“I would like to stress to the Minister that this is not just an issue of people wanting to go on holiday. In my constituency—as you know, Mr Speaker, being so diverse as it is—people have families all across the world whom they have not seen since the pandemic. I have one elderly couple who applied before the new year, back in December. They applied, in fact, before Christmas. They were told that their passport was ready on 24 January, but that they had to send the old passport back in order to get it. By the end of March they still had not had it, by which time they had missed a niece’s wedding and, sadly, a sister’s funeral. It was only after multiple interventions that we eventually got the passport sorted at the end of last month. That is unacceptable—absolutely unacceptable.”
“Yesterday at the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs Committee, Professor Lorand Bartels, professor of international trade law at the University of Cambridge, was asked about the ramifications for trade with the European Union if article 16 is invoked. In the afternoon at the Committee, the Minister for Trade Policy spoke passionately about the problems with the current checks in the Irish sea. However, she was unable to give an answer on the legal basis upon which article 16 could be invoked. May we have an urgent question from the Attorney General about the legal basis for the invocation of article 16?”
“In order to secure that supply of land for building houses that the right hon. Gentleman spoke of, does he agree that it would make sense to reform the Land Compensation Act 1961 so that local authorities can purchase land closer to its existing value, rather than its hoped value?”
“We need to look at what Milton Friedman—quoted by the right hon. Member this morning—described as the “least bad tax”. He was referring to the land value tax. Unless we challenge the 1,000-year land ownership that has given so few people in this country the power over their communities—I note that one such magnate spoke earlier in the debate—and give that power back to the people through a genuine programme of land reform, we will not have the right to talk about power in communities and fairness in our society.”
“By making their lives secure and by enabling them to stand up for themselves. That means having security of income and security of health, and it means someone having the security of having a home they are confident in, where they do not feel trapped and in danger. Power is something that resides in land. It is extraordinary that 1,000 years on from the Domesday Book in 1086, half of the land of the United Kingdom is still owned by fewer than 6,000 individuals. That is why we urgently need land reform. I was delighted when the right hon. Member for North Somerset (Dr Fox) this morning agreed with me that we need reform of the Land Compensation Act 1961 so that councils can buy land at a price closer to its existing value, rather than its hoped-for value. That would free up land in this country for housing, but we need to go much further.”
“The insecurity that climate change puts over all our lives needs to be tackled in a comprehensive housing policy. For all the talk about a windfall tax—and we should talk about it—the cheapest energy is the energy that we do not use, so we should insulate the 19 million homes that need insulation. The Government have known this for years. Every Select Committee of this House has told them what to do and there has been complete inaction. Where in the Gracious Address is the real sense of commitment to tackling this as part of the housing crisis? There has been a 38% rise in street homelessness and a net loss of 22,000 social homes across England. We need the Government to tackle the housing crisis. Looking to the second part of the debate’s title—“Power in Communities”—how do we give power to communities?”
“We have insecurity of income, we have insecurity at work, we have insecurity in health, and we have insecurity in housing. How many times have we had to stand in this Chamber and talk about the plight of those trapped in accommodation where there are known fire safety defects? They are unable to move on with their lives, unable to sell— partly because the EWS1 forms but not only that—unable even to get insurance on their properties, and being charged through the nose by unscrupulous managing agents for scaffolding or waking watches. They wait just to get on with their lives. They cannot have a new child because they do not have the bedroom space. They cannot separate if they want to get divorced. They cannot move to go to a new job. Their lives are frozen because of the failure of the Government to act.”
“We do not have it; we need to. There is insecurity in health. I tabled an amendment to the Queen’s Speech in which I talked of the 6.1 million people who have been referred to a consultant and are waiting for treatment. Today that figure was uprated by 300,000, with now 6.4 million people who have been referred to a consultant still waiting for treatment, over 2 million of them waiting more than the 18-week maximum period and 300,000 waiting for more than a year. When the Minister winds up, let them not say that this is because of the pandemic, because we already knew that it was building up. The figure was 4.43 million before the pandemic even started—and that was because of a decade of underfunding of our health service.”
“But it has balloted, and, on an 88% turnout, 97% voted in favour of strike action, because the situation is disgraceful. Yet the management of the college are now calling in those workers one by one, putting pressure on them by saying, “What are you going to do if you don’t have a job because you’re failing to sign this new contract? What are you going to do at the end of the week if you can’t pay your rent or feed your kids—if you’re one of those people who need to use food banks?” That is the pressure that is being put on people by insecurity in employment. That is why all the things that my hon. Friend the Member for Middlesbrough (Andy McDonald) talked about—all the things that he put together in the employment rights green paper—are so vital if we want to have equality and fairness at work, as the title of this debate says we should.”
“I almost felt sorry for the Minister who opened the debate, because, as must have been obvious to so many of us, he was embarrassed because he knew that what had been committed to—what had been promised—had just slipped away, and he knew that he had no power to do anything about it. But there are people in the Government, in the Cabinet, who did have the power to do something about it, and they failed. These choices should have been made in the Queen’s Speech to protect people in work. This week, 127 people at Richmond upon Thames College—the entire teaching staff—were told, “You’re fired unless you sign a new contract taking 10 days off your entitlement. Go away and think about it.” Of course, because of the trade union legislation it was not possible for the union to fight back immediately—it had to consult, ballot and notify.”
“The insecurity in income is extreme, and it has been exacerbated by the fact that, even on the Government’s own figures, 900,000 individuals, many of whom have disabilities, will become worse off as a result of the transition from legacy benefits to universal credit. That is why the Government should have had at the heart of the Gracious Speech the need to restore the £20 cut to universal credit to protect the income of those adversely affected and to make sure that any recovery was not on the backs of the poor. There is insecurity in work. This debate is entitled “Fairness at Work and Power in Communities”. Well, as so many of my colleagues have said, the gaping hole at the centre of the Queen’s Speech is the fact that there is no employment Bill, promised 20 times by Government Ministers—no legislative solution.”
“Friend the Member for Liverpool, West Derby (Ian Byrne) has been calling for for months. That should have been at the very centre of the Gracious Speech, because we cannot feel that we are doing our job as politicians, and I hope that Government Ministers feel that they cannot be doing their job as a Government, when there are people facing hunger on that scale in our country and when so many of our fellow citizens—millions—are reliant on food banks. This is not the Britain that we should aspire to be part of, and it is certainly not the Britain that any Government Minister should aspire to be a Minister in charge of.”
“Indeed, we now find that we are the fastest-shrinking economy. We have gone from 0.8% growth at the beginning of this year to -0.1%. That is a shrinking economy. The Bank of England projects 10% inflation by the end of the year. Meanwhile, real wages have been falling and 2 million people are going without food for more than a day, sometimes because they do not have the money to buy it, sometimes because they do not have the money to cook it and sometimes because they do not have the will to take it out of the mouths of their children. [Interruption.] It is shameful, as my hon. Friends say. We are the fifth-richest economy in the world, and it is shameful. Let us examine these insecurities. This year’s Queen’s Speech, coming from any Government with any compassion, would have put at its core a right to food, as my hon.”
“I pay tribute first of all to Her Majesty the Queen. It was a great sorrow to me that she was not able to give the Gracious Speech in person earlier this week. We have been privileged to live in the Elizabethan age. Most Members of Parliament serve many sovereigns; we have had the privilege of only serving one. The Elizabethan age began as one of upheaval after the second world war. It became an age of opportunity and equality with the Labour Government and the equalities Acts from the 1960s. Now, however, it is becoming an age of insecurity—insecurity of income, insecurity of housing and insecurity in health, food and work. Since the Prime Minister boasted last year that the UK was the fastest-growing economy in the G7, it has become the slowest-growing economy in the first quarter of this year.”
“Three British citizens—Saeed and Sakil Dawood and Mohammed Aswad—were murdered in the communal violence in India 20 years ago. Their families have been asking that the remains of the bodies, which are held by the authorities, be returned to them in this country. The Prime Minister knows of the issue and has been asked to do something about it. Did he raise it when he spoke with Prime Minister Modi?”
“We are seeing an economic crisis and a cost of living crisis, and that will put increasing pressure on families. Over the next 18 months, I think the projected need for 63,000 families will be blown out of the water, because so many families will be in crisis and will not be able to cope, and the result will be increasing pressure on fostering services.”
“The Social Market Foundation has said that, in the next five years, we need 63,000 new families to make their homes available to children, yet it predicts that at current rates there will be 40,000—23,000 short of what is required. I hope that the Minister will say how the Government are preparing to meet the problems of recruitment and retention. How is he ensuring that his Department will assist local authorities with the pressures that they face, and how will it assist potential foster families with the pressures that they face in taking on that responsibility? I hope that the Minister will also turn his attention and that of his Department to why this is happening—why there is an ever-increasing need. There has been, I think, an 11% increase over the past seven years in the number of children needing foster care.”
“The Competition and Markets Authority carried out a study of children in social care. I have to say that I found it difficult to read about the final report of its study of the “children’s social care market”. “Market” is not a word I want to use about children or the care of children—“service”, yes, but not “market”. However, on recruitment, the CMA said: “The difficulty…is greatest for carers needed to look after children with more challenging needs… The degree of challenge also varies geographically.” The study considered not only areas such as my own in London, but rural areas and the challenges faced by parents there. It is clear that not everyone who wants to be a foster carer has the resources—whether that is a spare room, the spare time or the financial stability—to be able to do so.”
“Of course, in a city context, that is a function of the demand for housing. If someone wants to be a foster carer, they need a room for the child. The cost of living pressures in London, where both adults in a household need to work simply to maintain a property, are reducing the availability of people who would otherwise desperately wish to become foster parents, as we have heard. For our more vulnerable and needy children in care, having a carer at home for most of the time makes a huge difference to the stability of the placement. That is very difficult if both potential parents have to go out to work simply to maintain their rent or mortgage commitments. In Brent, we are actually turning away people who want to foster and have good skills because they simply do not have the physical space in their homes to accommodate a child.”
“He will no doubt tell us that the number of carers is also at an all-time high, but he knows that the number of children in need of care is at an all-time high. The question that he must answer is not a technical one of provision and so on; it is this: why are so many children in need of fostering care? What is breaking down in our society that means that we have an all-time high and we need even more places than we have? What stress are families are experiencing and what pain—social and economic—are they going through that means we need so many more fostering places because families cannot cope on their own? I contacted my own local authority and asked for its experience. It told me about the ageing profile of the foster care workforce. In Brent, we are finding it difficult to recruit newer and younger foster carers.”
“We have heard today about the power of love and how it can transform lives. It can change a child’s life and set it on a new path. I pay tribute to all those from the Fostering Network who are here in the Public Gallery for the work that they do. I salute them. That service often is not in the vanguard of the public’s imagination, but clearly, what we have heard today means that it should be. It is extraordinary work and it takes extraordinary strength, resilience and compassion to do it. That is what this debate has brought out. Let me turn to the debate itself and look at the annual fostering statistics. Ofsted has told us that the number of children in care is at its highest ever level in England. I know what the Minister will say.”
“Mr Robertson, as Chair, you have a very privileged position, because you hear in Westminster Hall debates some truly remarkable stories. We have heard some today. I pay tribute to my hon. Friend the Member for Jarrow (Kate Osborne) for the work that she has done on this issue and for securing the debate, but that is trite—there is no merit in securing a debate. The merit lies in what she said and in the experience that she brought to it. Similarly, I was hugely moved by the words of the hon. Member for Kirkcaldy and Cowdenbeath (Neale Hanvey). That is what is remarkable: sometimes, we learn so much more about our colleagues in this Chamber than we ever expected to. We also heard from the hon. Member for Stoke-on-Trent North (Jonathan Gullis), who spoke of his own experience in secondary school.”
“The Government have to have a co-ordinated response that covers more than recruitment and retention, because that is just patching up the problem afterward; they must have a proper response to why so many children and so many families need this support.”
“I am so glad that my right hon. Friend makes that point. I wrote on a piece of paper comments about geographic dislocation, but I have been unable to find it. It is important because this debate is about connectivity with the child’s environment—with his or her roots—and making sure that there is stability and continuity, which are undermined in exactly the way he describes. The funding of local authorities is absolutely central to this question. My local authority has lost £180 million in Government support over the past 10 years. That is the scale of the crisis local authorities are facing. I am not saying this to make a plea for my local authority; I am saying it because we have an increasing crisis in caring for our children.”
“I noticed that the Minister was coming to the last couple of pages of his notes, and I just wanted to ensure that he addressed the point about the independent fostering agencies that was put to him by the shadow Minister, my hon. Friend the Member for Dulwich and West Norwood (Helen Hayes). Indeed, his colleague, the hon. Member for Ruislip, Northwood and Pinner (David Simmonds), also made the very same point. That point is crucial, because those agencies are offering higher rates to a diminishing number of foster carers. That is putting an inflationary pressure on the whole system, which is feeding through to local authorities and making it extremely difficult for them to find the number of carers required. Can the Minister say specifically what he and the Department are doing to address that issue?”
“Although established 160 years ago, the Land Registry has been able to establish the ownership of only 83% of the land of England; the ownership of the other 17% is unknown. Unlike Companies House, the Land Registry does not have an open access register and anyone wishing to establish who does own the 83%, by purchasing copies of all the registered titles, would have to pay £72 million for the privilege. So can we have a debate on the Land Registry?”
“I welcome the fact that the Secretary of State is considering injunctive procedures where consultation has been ignored and not respected by the employer. It is just a shame that his party failed to vote for it in October. Will the Secretary of State say if the statutory code he is introducing will create any new criminal offence? If so, what is it, who can enforce it and what is the penalty? Alternatively, does it, like previous codes of conduct, simply issue a set of recommendations that bad companies can ignore?”
“I agree with much of what my hon. Friend is saying. For instance, I too believe that it is a woman’s right to choose. One of the features of a physical consultation was that it gave the woman an opportunity to do so in a free environment. Does my hon. Friend share the concern that I know exists among many of our constituents that if the consultation is done by telephone, it is possible that a woman who is being coerced will not be understood to be being coerced by the consultant who is dealing with her? It is important that, in preserving the right to choose for the woman, we do not allow a situation in which that woman could be coerced, by a coercive partner, into making a choice that is not her own.”
“After Peter Hebblethwaite admitted to the Select Committee that he had broken the law and would do so again, the nation has concluded that he is not a fit and proper person to be a director of P&O, or indeed of any company. When will the Government also reach that conclusion and disqualify him? When will they seek to ensure that workers onshore are not treated with the same contempt as those seafaring workers have been, and make sure that people cannot be fired in such a way, whether they are working for Weetabix, Tesco, Sainsbury’s, British Airways, British Gas or any of the other companies that have done the same thing over the past two years?”
“Can the Chancellor explain why, in the fifth richest country in the world, and under his stewardship of the economy, this morning’s news reported that a mother would not accept potatoes from a food bank because she did not have enough money to boil them?”
“The bad apple defence or the isolated incident excuse will no longer wash. Our constituents are no longer able to trust the police, including constituents such as Teresa Akpeki, whose brother was the victim of a hit-and-run accident. The police, when they attended the body—this was an NHS worker collecting samples—did not reach into his pocket to find his ID card, but phoned the Home Office to find out whether he was an illegal immigrant, because he was black. The Minister now needs to launch an inquiry into the way in which the Metropolitan police is dealing with ethnic communities, and if he fails to do that, the confidence of our communities in the police up and down this country is going to be rock bottom.”
“The hon. Lady is absolutely correct: nothing in my Bill would ultimately have stopped fire and rehire, and that was with the full cognisance of the 22 unions that supported it. As she knows, however, there were measures in the Bill that would have prevented the current situation.”
“The first thing I want to do is express my solidarity with the 800 seafarers and their families, and pay tribute to the RMT and Nautilus for the swift support that they gave their members, along with the whole of the TUC. I am pleased that Ministers and Tory Members have said how disgraceful P&O’s behaviour has been, but they have said how unacceptable such practices are on previous occasions. It appears today, from both their words and their body language, that they are embarrassed. Maybe somebody has been saying “Shame on you”. It is almost as if it is more about justifying this disgusting treatment of summarily firing the workforce and justifying why they did not outlaw it five months ago when they had that opportunity.”
“The Minister for lassitude whispered in the ear of his colleague the other day that this issue was not about fire and rehire, but those measures would have protected the workers in this situation and the Government now need to act. They should take this opportunity. They have had a rap over the knuckles and they have been embarrassed. Now they must legislate.”
“It was a measured, sensible approach, and if the Government had any concerns about it, they could have been ironed out in Committee, as my hon. Friend the Member for Sefton Central (Bill Esterson) said. But the Government were not prepared to do that. There was also the facility in my Bill to make complaints about the failure to follow good practice. The Bill was all about instantiating good practice and penalising bad practice. That would have meant that where an employer had not followed the rules properly, not obeyed the statute, not consulted or engaged openly with their workforce or not negotiated transparently, a complaint could have been made to the central arbitration committee and ultimately an injunction could have been made to restore the jobs of the people who were fired. That is not about rehire; it is all about fire.”
“Let us get it round the right way, so that we have consultation at the beginning of the process and a statutory obligation on the employer to consult, to negotiate and to be transparent. Incidentally, that happens to be in clause 1 of my Bill. The hon. Member for Newbury (Laura Farris) referred to proposed new section 187B, but she knows very well that this was not about a duty of disclosure on employers that was completely open-ended. No, it was a very specific one. It involved information that would be in accordance with good industrial relations practice that the employer should disclose for the purposes of the consultation and “without which the appropriate representatives would be to a material extent impeded in carrying on consultation with the employer”.”
“I do agree with my hon. Friend. It is clear that nothing currently in the law could have stopped this incident from happening and that, whatever the outcome, 800 families are suffering as a consequence. Had it been clear in statute and had the company known that it could not take advantage in such a way, it would not have done so. It is the Government’s lassitude on this matter that has led to where we are now. I do not want to engage in recriminations about who said what. Let us try to be positive and think of a way in which we could develop a law in this country that could solve these problems. The first thing, to which the Minister alluded earlier, is the importance of negotiation and the fact that the negotiations that ultimately took place in previous disputes were positive.”
“My constituents have been disgusted to find out about the treatment of child Q by the police, but they are also desperately concerned about the fact that this is not an isolated incident. In Brent North we saw the vile treatment of the dead bodies of two black sisters, Bibaa Henry and Nicole Smallman, by the very police officers who were supposed to be safeguarding the crime scene, and I am currently dealing with two other disturbing cases of police racism on behalf of my constituents. Colleagues on both sides of the House are also desperately concerned about this issue. I am second to none in my admiration for the thousands of police officers who keep us safe on our streets, but something must be done about racism in the Metropolitan police, and I ask the Leader of the House for an urgent debate on the issue in Government time.”
“For how long are the Government prepared to allow companies such as P&O to treat loyal workers with contempt while they leach off the UK taxpayer? The Minister will know that there is a £146 million deficit in the pension fund for P&O retirees, yet P&O’s owners, DP World, just spent £147 million on sponsoring the European golf tour. After taking £10 million from taxpayers for furlough and demanding a further £150 million from the public purse to keep its operations going, the company paid out £270 million to shareholders in dividends and is now trying to fire 800 loyal workers. Does the Minister accept that P&O is taking him and the Treasury for fools? Does he regret the Government’s failure to back the measures in my private Member’s Bill that would have prevented these 800 seafarers from being treated so disgracefully?”
“Does my right hon. Friend share my concern about a case in my surgery at the weekend? A young woman went to the police to report violence by her partner against her. She was concerned that the officer did not treat the matter seriously enough and made a complaint against the officer. Subsequently, she was then charged with stalking the person who had committed violence against her. I am afraid that this is the way our police in London seem to have got things entirely the wrong way around.”
“The Giorgidze family, the Reckon family and many others in my constituency have family members and loved ones now in Poland or on its border. They want to know what conversations the Foreign Secretary has had with her counterpart in Poland about swift flights to bring those family members to the UK and—perhaps equally importantly—what conversations she has had with the Home Secretary on that matter.”
“Will the Minister simply confirm that where an emergency service worker is off duty but an emergency occurs and they respond to that emergency, Harper’s law will apply to them?”