FiReControl just keeps on delivering…disappointment

After the latest condemnation of FiReControl from an influential committee, the Fire Brigades Union’s Sharon Riley, executive council member representing fire controls, tells Mike Lowe why FiReControl is such a bad idea and how easy it is to do it better

The FBU’s Sharon Riley didn’t know where to start when I asked her what was actually wrong with FiReControl – the government’s plan to modernise Fire Service technology.

She explains: “It was never something that they consulted upon. It’s something which ministers and civil servants embarked upon without first consulting fire services or the professionals working in fire controls. So it’s a government driven project, top-down, with very little understanding of what it is we actually do.”

She continues: “It’s totally over-spec’d; the buildings, the security levels in the nine regional buildings they built are totally over-spec’d for the risk level of a terrorist attack or whatever the government perceives it to be.

“The project, because it was not spec’d properly, has now spun out of control in regards to cost. Because it was such a large project at conception, it ruled out all current IT providers for existing controls which had been happy with them for many years because it was such a large-scale project.”

FiReControl was designed to replace the existing 46 local control rooms – or controls as they are known in the Fire Service – with nine regional control centres (RCCs). The nine RCCs were meant to be cheaper in the long term, far more resilient and offer more capability to the Fire Service.

Unfortunately FiReControl has been a terrible failure so far. Its national roll out is expected to be over five years late and costs have risen from £100m to £1.4bn. A parliamentary committee said earlier in April that despite it being so bad, it would actually cost more to cancel the project than it would to implement it.

Riley says the FBU has offered an alternative solution to FiReControl since 2004, which simply recommends the Fire Service build on existing controls and use existing technology to connect them for better networking and resilience.

“We don’t see any need to throw the baby out of the bathwater and come up with a whole new design, there’s already stuff that is tried and tested. We would prefer to keep 46 individual, locally accountable fire control rooms which are able to back each other up in case of bad weather conditions and/or a high volume of calls for example. And of course they all have back-up arrangements for doing just that,” she says.

One of the biggest scandals of the FiReControl project is that the technology being adopted is not even new. Riley explains that some of the 46 local controls are already using parts of the FiReControl technology after procuring their own equipment.

“The point being, this stuff is already available, it’s down to the fire and rescue services to decide if it is something they want and they need and it fits in with their way of working,” she says.

“So to say this project will deliver massive benefits in terms of mobile data terminals, automatic vehicle location services, networked controls etc., there’s nothing new. They can have that now if they want. We think, as a union, it would be better to just upgrade those control rooms that didn’t have that, bring them all up to scratch, rather than throwing everything out and starting again.”

She adds: “It certainly would be an awful lot cheaper to upgrade existing control rooms.”

Riley says the government was originally only going to make £8m in savings after spending £1.2bn on the project. But now they won’t make any.

The main reason for the implementation appears to be national resilience, she says, in response to events like 9/11. However Scotland and Wales are not following suit, meaning it is only England that is part of this regionally controlled “legacy” with unnecessary levels of resilience.

“The problem is the perceived level of risk. Ministers and civil servants perceive this level of risk without actually consulting chief fire officers or fire and rescue authorities about what it is they require to deliver their service,” she says.

“The existing fire control service delivers an excellent service and it has never, ever been criticised in any major incident we have dealt with, including the Buncefield fire, the Lockerbie disaster, the Manchester bombings and the 7/7 bombings. We’ve had all these but we’ve never been left wanting. What they are trying to do is sell off that service to the cheapest bidder and basically privatise it.

“Now we’ve got a situation where we have nine buildings sitting empty, costing thousands of pounds a month in rent, which are no use to fire services whatsoever. There is equipment that fire services would require, I’m sure, but they certainly don’t require to be paying for these empty buildings.”

Riley also questions the resilience of relying on just one supplier for your technology requirements. She explains that there are currently three main IT suppliers for fire controls across the country. Resilience is provided by that because if one company starts to struggle, economically or otherwise, then the Fire Service can still get what it needs from another.

“But if you put all your eggs in one basket with the EADS option, which is already proving undeliverable and they’ve already changed their contractor, we don’t think that is a viable option,” she says.

The inability to deliver FiReControl on time means the London 2012 Olympics will not be covered by the best technology, as many local controls have refrained from upgrading in anticipation of FiReControl’s implementation.

Riley says this is a “major concern”, especially because the government is concentrating on London and yet many events will be held in the wider South East and as far afield as Glasgow.

Fire minister Shahid Malik told the Communities and Local Government Committee in February that any shortfalls in technology will be paid for by government in the short-term. But Riley says this simply isn’t the right to way to do it.

“That was never part of the initial budget for the project and that’s another expense that they would have upgraded before anyway and it would have been a lot cheaper. Instead they have to retrospectively bring everyone up to a level operating standard at additional cost again,” she says.

“Yes it is something that needs addressing and no doubt there will be further slippages in the project so this will become even more urgent, making FiReControl a complete disaster.”

Source: http://www.publicservice.co.uk/feature_story.asp?id=13976

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