Regional fire centre ‘will put lives at risk’
Jan 3 2008 by Chloe Griffiths, The Journal
MOVES to close the North-East’s fire control centres and build one new regional site could jeopardise lives, a union official claimed yesterday.
Pete Wilcox, an official with the Fire Brigades Union (FBU), says the Government urgently need to re-think its plans.
The Government is in the process of replacing the current 999 emergency rooms covering Durham, Northumberland, Tyne and Wear and Cleveland with a single control room at Belmont Business Park in Durham.
Originally the centre was due to open in August 2007, but now the FBU says it is unlikely they will be functioning by the end of 2008.
In the meantime, the project, which is being rolled out nationwide, has gone massively over budget.
FBU officials claim the cost of the programme – originally predicted to be £100m – has now leapt up to £1.4bn.
Mr Wilcox said: “Personally and professionally I believe the regional fire control strategy is the wrong avenue to go down and the Government unfortunately has given us no evidence to prove otherwise.
“The Government said the move would not only save money, but also improve resilience, but every day it overruns it is cutting the money that is saved and I believe it will lead to delays in fire appliances mobilising .
“In other Government departments if something goes wrong people may receive a cheque late, but the big problem with the fire service is that we are dealing with people’s lives.
“It’s no good being minutes late, let along hours or days, because people’s lives can be lost.”
Mr Wilcox says the Government now desperately needs to rethink the entire project.
He says members believe the money would be better spent on improved computer systems, increasing staff levels and more training.
Last year, 95% of firefighters in the North-East said they believed the new centre would damage the force’s ability to respond to emergency calls in a nationwide poll of FBU members conducted by YouGov.
Mr Wilcox says the problems with the system will be particularly evident in the North-East, where the region’s four fire and rescue services deal with hugely diverse issues – from big industrial and chemical plants in Cleveland to rural fires in Northumberland.
He said: “You can’t have a one-size-fit-all solution, you have to look at the individual fire service, what its needs are and what the needs of the community are.
“I don’t believe a single regional fire control room can do that.”
However, a Department for Communities and Local Government spokeswoman said the plans would enable all the fire control centres to be standardised, bringing everyone up to the standard of the best.
She also said the centres would be fitted with equipment which would be able to locate the fire appliance which would be able to get to the scene of an incident the quickest, rather than the one that was geographically closest.
She added: “The £100m figure was an early estimate for the one-off costs of initial implementation of the FireControl project. The £1.4bn figure is the total forecast of providing emergency call handling and mobilisation control services for England for 17 years.”
She added that national completion for the project had been set for 2011.
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Double blow for project
A new report said IT costs had soared from £120m to £190m, with completion of the computer part of the project slipping from next year to 2011.
A scheme to introduce new radio systems to link 3,000 fire service vehicles with other emergency services and bodies like the Ministry of Defence and Coastguard is now due to be completed in June 2009 at a cost of £350m in England, and £50m in Wales and Scotland.
The original completion date was December 2007.
The Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG) told MPs that good progress was being made to completion of both projects, although not as fast as envisaged and with not all fire authorities in support.
MPs welcomed progress on control rooms, but said it highlighted the persistent challenge the DCLG faced.
They added that the DCLG urgently needed to establish a reputation for having enough influence to solve problems in Whitehall that were blocking local success.
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