The Fire Brigades Union has wasted no time in calling on the new government to abandon the regionalisation of emergency control rooms under the Fire Control project.
In a letter sent to David Cameron just two days after he became prime minister, the FBU’s general secretary, Matt Wrack, called on the government to give an undertaking that FireControl will be scrapped, with a timetable for the process and for upgrading existing control rooms.
Fire Control came under heavy criticism last month in a select report by MPs. With the new government’s focus on cutting £6 billion of public spending this year, projects such as Fire Control are likely to come under the spotlight. Both Conservative and Liberal Democrat parties have previously called for the scrapping of regional control centres. The Conservatives did so earlier this year in a policy green paper which said:
“A Conservative government will follow the Scottish example and ditch this botched project, where such regional control centres have not yet gone live. We will instead upgrade a small number of existing fire control centres to enable them to act as national ‘super centres’ in the extreme case of a national emergency.”
Similarly, the Liberal democrat spokesman on fire safety, Julia Goldsworthy, told the FBU’s Firefighter magazine in March this year that the government should think again over Fire Control, saying:
“The Liberal Democrats are opposed to the government’s plans to centralise fire control. This project will mean vital local knowledge is lost and this could risk the response time to incidents. The project has already proved to be too expensive and is likely to make the service less rather than more responsive.
