Malcolm Bruce Challenges Minister Over Met Office Closures in Commons

12.00.00am UTC (GMT +0000) Tue 12th Jul 2005

Malcolm Bruce MP today challenged the Minister in charge of the Met Office to explain the Government's reasoning behind the proposed closure of Aberdeen Met Office during a debate secured by Mr Bruce in the House of Commons.

The debate text runs below.

Malcolm Bruce (Gordon) (LD): I believe myself fortunate to secure this debate on the proposed closure of the Met Office in Aberdeen in my constituency, just a week before the House rises for the summer. The proposal has caused widespread dismay and consternation, as the Aberdeen office is the only civilian weather forecasting operation in Scotland. I express my appreciation for the cross-party support that the campaign to have the decision reversed has gathered.

I note with satisfaction that the Minister has made it clear that the final decision is his. I am glad that I and others will have the chance to press the case with him tonight, although the campaign will not end with this debate.

My first concern has to do with the way that the decision has been handled. Staff learned through an internal e-mail that the option to close all six branches had been chosen by the Met Office board. Internal consultation was then initiated on the basis of a done deal. Not surprisingly, that caused anger and resentment, and the information was then leaked into the public domain rather than announced in an orderly fashion by the Met Office management.

At present, there are six Met Office branches apart from the headquarters in Exeter. The one in Aberdeen is the only one in Scotland, and the others are in Belfast, Cardiff, Manchester, Birmingham and London. Of course, there have been management changes in the Met Office. The decision by Dr. David Rogers to leave following his marriage clearly created a hiatus. I understand that he finishes at the end of this week, and that he may have attended his last board meeting today. It is perhaps worth putting it on record that he stated in his farewell message:

"It has been a privilege to lead the Met Office during this period of transformation"—

an odd word, I think—

"and I believe that I will leave the organisation strongly focused and committed to meet the challenges in the future. I would like to take this opportunity to relay again my personal thanks to all Met Office staff for helping me to determine the new strategic direction for the organisation and for putting in place a clear vision and robust plan for the future. I wish the Met Office, and its excellent people, every success for the future."

The Minister will understand that that has a hollow ring with people in Aberdeen. After all, this time last year Dr. Rogers said:

"I want the Met Office to work with Government to help to mitigate the impacts of severe weather. This goal can only be achieved if we maintain a significant regional presence and my wish to focus on services which improve public safety. Aberdeen Met Office is a great example of somewhere this has already happened. Everything they do is focused on protecting life at sea. This is a model."

What has happened in the past 12 months to produce that complete about-turn? Only last September, a strategic decision was taken to transfer the shipping forecast and gale warnings from Exeter to Aberdeen. In that short time—less than a year—staff at Aberdeen have achieved a 35 per cent. increase in accuracy, for which the team recently received a performance bonus, yet management now want to transfer the service back to Exeter.

I do not know whether the Minister will want to comment, but I can tell him that there is a suspicion that the change of policy was driven by the cost overruns in the move to Exeter. When his predecessor,, Ivor Caplin, accepted the new headquarters at the end of 2003 he described it as

"within budget and under a strict timetable",

yet in a recent reply to me the Minister confirmed that there was a cost overrun of £7.9 million. It is estimated that the option recommended by the board—closure of all the branches—will save £3,652,000 over five years and £20,691,000 over 10 years.

Miss Anne Begg (Aberdeen, South) (Lab): Has the hon. Gentleman made a similar calculation to the one I made? The savings suggested by the Met Office may not actually happen, because there is no guarantee that, if Met Office functions were centralised in Exeter, the business currently done by the Aberdeen Met Office will follow. It could go to a commercial company.

Malcolm Bruce: The hon. Lady anticipates one of my points.

I stress that the difference between the option that the board recommends and option 3—I am not saying that option 3 is the definitive one, but it would retain Aberdeen, London and Manchester as centres of excellence—is a reduced saving of £917,000 over five years and £5.324 million over 10 years, an overall projected saving of £15.367 million. Can the Minister tell us whether it is reasonable to destroy morale and disperse expertise for a projected saving—I take the hon. Lady's point—of about £500,000 a year? That does not seem to make sense, and more to the point—exactly the hon. Lady's point—will that saving really be achieved?

The Minister told me in a written answer:

"It is not therefore possible to provide information on revenue generation by individual civil centres".

Why not? That is a trading fund and if the Government do not know what those branches cost and how much revenue is generated, how are they competent to make any decision that closing them would be a saving rather than a cost?

I have already been told that there is a presumption of a revenue loss of only £20,000. Even that implies that more information is available than has been made public. There is evidence that the revenue loss could be far greater and could be even more than the project savings, so the net result of the decision could be to increase the deficit or the loss-making potential of the Met Office—certainly not to boost it. The Minister should take that into account. Over the last couple of weeks, we have already heard that a £1 million contract for Shell has been lost. Other contracts are being bid for, but, against the background that I have described, it is hard for the Met Office to win them, although it is determined to try to do so.

The situation is odd, because there are three private weather forecasters with substantial staffs operating in Aberdeen and they will certainly take a predatory approach to Met Office customers. Indeed, they have already done so—Shell has been won across. Can the Minister give us even the internal estimate of the cost savings from closing Aberdeen and where the main savings will be made? I have spoken to nobody who believes that those savings will be realised or that they can be made without damaging business.

A management document admits:

"While there is still an important human involvement in the forecasting process this is reducing with time and needs to be used in a way that adds real value to the output. The role has evolved and forecasters are now more involved with service provision—interpreting the likely weather impacts and helping users and customers to make best use of the information available and mitigate risks."

That is exactly the role in which Aberdeen has excelled in recent years.

It is also interesting that the Ministry of Defence insists on retaining Met Office operations on its bases in Scotland. If a remote computer can do the job—according to the Met Office's operation in Exeter—why does the MOD need a local operation? Or is its insistence in fact confirmation that local operations really add value and qualitative information?

Mr. Mike Weir (Angus) (SNP): Does the hon. Gentleman accept that many industries in north-east Scotland—fishing, oil and the growing pleasure boat sector—rely on the Aberdeen office and local input?

Malcolm Bruce: That is true. The Met Office is a public service. I realise that it is a trading fund but people perceive it as "our" Met Office providing the information we need for such activities.

The very suggestion that Met Offices can be offered remotely without a professional customer interface is itself damaging for business. Forecasters insist that, although the Exeter technology is a huge innovation, they can still add to it and meet the needs of customers in local advice, customisation and presentation.

Safety is an issue. In Scotland, that means mountain rescue, keeping roads open in the winter, fishing, offshore oil and gas, the pleasure boat industry and the tourist industry. The idea that Scotland, with its now fully established Scottish Parliament, should have no direct access to the Met Office within Scotland is an insult to the needs of the Scottish economy.

Safety is not the only issue, because commercial interests are also important. The Minister should imagine an offshore oil and gas operator trying to plan the installation of a sub-sea system in the North sea. Such an operator will need a local, specific weather forecast that will enable it to determine the weather window to perform that operation. A crane barge can cost $100,000 a day, and two or three days' error in the weather forecast could cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. It would be a pity, in those circumstances, if the Met Office could not continue to provide the service that it has provided in the past.

Forecasters in Aberdeen meet clients daily and can provide updates catered to customer needs within 15 minutes. The Met Office website, which is still effectively marketing the Aberdeen operation, makes a real virtue of that on-the-spot service. It is not credible that such a service could be provided from a location as remote as Exeter.

Jo Swinson (East Dunbartonshire) (LD): Does my hon. Friend agree with my constituent, Mr. Dave Clark, who relocated to the Aberdeen office when the Glasgow office closed two years ago, that the loss of the facility is likely to result in the total loss to the Met Office of highly trained staff and the detailed local knowledge of Scotland's weather?

Malcolm Bruce: I have met my hon. Friend's constituent and he has made that point to me. Many of the staff will leave the Met Office because they want to stay in that location, and competitors are keen to gobble them up because of their track record. All that is clearly demonstrated in the marketing brief for Aberdeen on the website.

The very suggestion that Scotland should lose its only civilian Met Office operation is deeply damaging. I do not have to tell the Minister that Scotland covers 40 per cent. of the land area of Great Britain and probably more than half the maritime area—

Angus Robertson (Moray) (SNP): Not on the BBC weather map.

Malcolm Bruce: I am talking about accurate projections.

Weather can be notoriously severe, even extreme, although today was a beautiful day in Aberdeenshire. Public agencies, especially the road organisations, police, mountain rescue, air traffic, coastguards and others, all rely on weather forecasts that are accurate, flexible and use local knowledge. However good the model, there can be severe variations. The programme is based on readings at 2,500 ft. Conditions might be very different at sea level or above 4,000 ft. I can testify, as can some of my hon. Friends, that Aberdeen airport has notoriously turbulent and highly local wind patterns.

What representations have been made to the Minister by public agency users of the Met Office? What representations have been made by the Scottish Executive? It is ironic that the very technology—it is superb—that gives a resource that can strengthen the branch operation is being used to centralise the service and pull everything to Exeter. Will that not leave the service exposed? There may be two computers, but they could both be disabled. I understand that they share cabling tunnels. Does not safe back-up justify maintaining other centres of excellence, especially when the perceived savings are relatively small and may be completely wrong? What contingencies are or could be in place if Exeter failed? Is there not a danger that public agencies will face a reduced service and possibly greater costs in getting relevant information? What account is being taken of the impact of the closure on such agencies?

My understanding is that the Met Office trading fund has been set up to enable it to compete on fair and equal terms with the private sector. How come competitors see the need for major operations in Aberdeen? Indeed, they are poised to fill the gap if the Met Office leaves.

In the light of these arguments, I hope that the Minister will consider all the options during the consultation. Will extra options be considered or is the consultation on the four options previously considered? Will the Minister recognise that opinion across Scotland, as demonstrated in this debate, is strongly of the view that we require our own civilian Met Office operation and that Aberdeen should be retained as our centre of excellence? To be frank, if the Minister were to close that operation, which has achieved great things in the past 15 years, it would be an act of vandalism that the Met Office would ultimately regret. It would not solve the financial problems of the Met Office but compound them. It would devalue the Met Office as a truly national British service, rather than something, however superb, based about as far away from Aberdeen as anyone can get and still be on the mainland of Britain.

The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Defence (Mr. Don Touhig): I congratulate the hon. Member for Gordon (Malcolm Bruce) on obtaining this Adjournment debate and I welcome the opportunity to talk about the work of the Met Office, and the Aberdeen Met Office in particular. I am grateful to him for giving me advance notice of the main issues that he wanted to raise, and I will attempt to answer his points. If I fail to answer anything, I will consult Hansard tomorrow and write to him if I need to do so.

I recently launched a consultation exercise on the options for change of the Met Office's structure. I should like to explain the background of those changes, together with the context in which they are being considered. I plan to visit the Met Office in Exeter later this month, and I will take the opportunity while there to discuss the issues involved with the Met Office executives. I have also agreed to meet representatives of the Prospect trade union, and I expect to meet parliamentary colleagues on this matter in the near future.

I have written to the hon. Gentleman and to other hon. Members whose constituencies or constituents may be affected by any change to the Met Office's current structure and organisation. I do, however, need to make it clear at the outset that no decisions have been taken or are assumed. I have initiated a 90-working-day consultation period, the purpose of which is to find the most effective and efficient way for the Met Office to carry out its civil forecasting task. I welcome any representations, and I shall make my decision after considering and evaluating all the representations that I receive.

The Met Office's primary function is vital: to understand the science of the weather and the environment. It does an important job in providing forecasts and information and helps to save lives and protect property. We look to the Met Office, as the national meteorological service, to provide timely, quality weather forecasts, particularly in respect of predicting and broadcasting warnings of severe weather.

The Met Office has continually invested in improving its computer forecasts through the increasing understanding of the science and the utilisation of massive supercomputer power. That helps to maintain its reputation for excellence and to ensure that it can deliver the weather services that we require now and in the future.

Lembit Öpik (Montgomeryshire) (LD): As the Minister knows, I am a great admirer of weather forecasting and, indeed, of weather forecasters. On the science, does he accept that, while the supercomputers are important, there will always be an element of expertise, which other hon. Members have already mentioned? The great strength of sharing that experience across the country is that the local expertise that brings in the business is effectively on site in those regions to deliver results. Will he accept representations, including from Wales, about the case for maintaining that regional expertise in its current locations?

Mr. Touhig: Of course I will be happy to receive representations. I know that the hon. Gentleman has a particular insight into weather forecasting that is denied to the rest of mortal man, and I congratulate him on that.

Investments in satellites and weather radars have resulted in significant advances in how the atmosphere is observed. Advances have also been made in numerical weather prediction mathematical models. At the same time, technological advances, particularly in telecommunications, continue to enable increasing efficiencies in the production process. While the Met Office continues to put a very high premium on the skill of people, the human role in the forecasting process has changed and continues to change significantly. The forecaster is now more focused on providing a service to customers. By interpreting the likely weather impacts, forecasters help people to make best use of the information available, especially when it comes to the risks of severe weather.

It is important that we build on the Met Office's investment in technology, telecommunications and modelling. That is the reason for reviewing the production process and is the background to identifying the options for the way ahead. The options under consideration range from no change to the current structure and process, to the full centralisation of forecasting and the full automation of all commercial services. They also include the centralisation of production, but with the creation of two or three centres of excellence to deal with specific sectors of the Met Office's customer base and the production and services range.

The Met Office board has expressed a preference for the centralisation of forecasting and the partial automation of forecast production for commercial services. However, I can assure the hon. Gentleman, given the concern that he has raised today, that I shall fully, carefully and impartially consider all the options that are being consulted on in the light of representations that I receive.

Mr. Alex Salmond (Banff and Buchan) (SNP): When the Minister says that no decisions have been made, is that a result of his ministerial intervention, as opposed to what the Met Office board has previously said? Will he take the final decision after the consultation period?

Mr. Touhig: The hon. Gentleman might think that, but I could not possibly comment. I say in answer to a point made by the hon. Member for Gordon that the way in which the announcement was handled, given its nature, was not one of our most brilliant successes, and I am truly conscious of the impact that the situation has had on morale. The decision will rest with me, once I have taken account of all the representations that I receive. If anyone comes up with an option that is not one of the four, obviously I will want to consider it. Governments can get things wrong—not often, but sometimes.

I assure the hon. Member for Gordon that proposals for future forecasting have no financial relationship to the costs of the recent Met Office relocation to Exeter. The relocation was budgeted and paid for. The Met Office needs to identify efficiencies continuously so that it can ensure its future as a trading fund.

The hon. Gentleman was concerned about why the costs and revenues of individual centres such as Aberdeen could not be identified. The answer is that the production of weather forecasts is an integrated activity that involves several agencies in the Met Office. Civil centres are one part of the process and do not operate as self-standing profit-and-loss units.

The situation at military aviation stations is different from that at civil centres. Military pilots require direct, immediate and face-to-face briefings on the likely impact that the weather will have on the safety and effectiveness of operational sorties, so intensive consultancy occurs between the military and the Met Office.

Malcolm Bruce: Does the Minister not accept that for people in the environment of the North sea, whether they are involved in fishing, maritime activities or offshore helicopter activities, the same factors apply? Their inability to call up information that the military can access is anomalous. Surely a national Met Office should provide such information to the civilian sector.

Mr. Touhig: Other people made that point during a discussion that I had earlier today and I shall take it on board as part of the consultation process.

As yet, I have received no representations on the proposals from public bodies or the Scottish Executive. In respect of the operations centre that is based at Exeter, I can assure the hon. Gentleman that all the necessary business and operational resilience, and plans for continuity, are in place.

The hon. Gentleman asked why the shipping forecast was transferred to the Aberdeen office in 2004. The decision was based on bringing together marine forecasting in a single unit. There has since been no step change in the shipping forecast, so I am not clear what improvement in accuracy is being claimed since the transfer. The proposal to consider further centralisation as one of the options builds on the process of rationalisation and improvement.

The costs of implementing any of the options are included in the consultation document, including, for example, the small number of redundancies that could result from centralisation, which the Met Office would of course have to fund. I require the Met Office, like any other trading fund, to maximise the profit that it makes from its commercial work with the private sector. The aim is to return shareholder value to the taxpayer.

The hon. Gentleman has raised other issues separately with me. He has expressed concern that the removal of forecasting capability from Aberdeen would diminish the quality of weather predictions. I hope that he will understand if I do not comment about that now, but I will take account of what he says as part of the consultation. Consultation with Met Office customers will, however, form a key part of the overall consultation process. I shall take fully into account any issues that they raise before I reach a final decision. I understand fully hon. Members' representations on the impact of further possible change on Met Office staff and their families. I appreciate that that is unsettling and am conscious that uncertainty is the most difficult thing for them to handle.

Miss Begg : Some of my constituents relocated from Glasgow to Aberdeen and have settled down there with their families. I re-emphasise that the uncertainty is resulting in low morale. Perhaps I can also make it clear that they are not going to move from Aberdeen again. Their expertise is likely to be lost to the Met Office and they will work somewhere else.

Mr. Touhig: I understand my hon. Friend's concern. However, when the Met Office relocated from Bracknell to Exeter, about 1,000 people relocated. There are difficulties and pressures, but we have to face those if we are to take the option that the Met Office board prefers.

I emphasise that the consultation will be open, full and impartial. I look forward to meeting the hon. Member for Gordon and others who wish to make representations. As I said, the consultation will be inclusive, involving the full range of Met Office stakeholders. It is then up to me to reach a decision on the way ahead after careful consideration of all the options. It is my ambition and desire that the consultation is as wide, open and transparent as I can possibly make it.

I pay tribute to the work of the current chief executive, Dr. David Rogers, who is leaving on 15 July. His decision to resign follows his recent marriage and his wish to pursue a career path that allows him and his wife to spend more time together. I can confirm that his decision to leave is entirely personal and is not related to the options and proposals that we are discussing.

I have started the 90-day consultation. I am inviting everyone and his uncle to take part so that we have their views. That is the best way to proceed. At the end of the day, I will have to consider the options and come forward with a proposal. Again, when I do that, I am sure that I will be answerable to the House for my actions.