Regionalisation of Emergency Fire Controls – Letter to Prime Minister David Cameron

CIRCULAR: 2010HOC0336MW

14 May 2010

TO: ALL MEMBERS

Dear Brother / Sister

REGIONALISATION OF EMERGENCY FIRE CONTROLS – LETTER TO PRIME MINISTER

Members will be aware from our long running lobbying and campaigning that the Conservative and Liberal Democrat parties have both expressed very clear opposition to the Regionalisation of Fire Controls in England. The two parties now form the new Government.

Attached is a letter to the Prime Minister seeking a commitment from the Government to honour the pledges made on this issue prior to the election; the text of the letter also appears below.

Yours fraternally

MATT WRACK

GENERAL SECRETARY

 Download the letter to the Prime Minister as a PDF

Text of letter to the Prime Minister:

14 May 2010

The Rt Hon David Cameron MP

Prime Minister, First Lord of the Treasury and Minister for the Civil Service

10 Downing Street

London

SW1A 2AA

Dear Prime Minister

FIRE AND RESCUE SERVICE – REGIONALISATION OF EMERGENCY FIRE CONTROLS

I am writing in regard to the new Government’s stance on the CLG FiReControl Project (Regionlisation of Emergency Fire Controls).

In the light of comments made before and during the election by Conservative spokepersons, firefighters will be watching closely the steps taken by the new Government. You may recall that you were asked by a Firefighter (Graham Donaldson) in Yorkshire on 24 April about the Fire Service. You said:

“One thing we would do to try and stop waste is the Regionalisation of Fire Service, the so-called ‘Fire Control Scheme; it was going to cost £100 million, it’s now costing £420 million. We will want to stop that in its tracks.”

We also noted comments on FiReControl in Conservative policy green paper, Control Shift: returning power to Local Communities (February 2010), which stated:

“We will… abandon plans to regionlise Fire Control (while providing new measures to enhance resilience in the case of a national emergency).” It added: “A Conservative government will follow the Scottish example and ditch this botched project, where such regional 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.” (p.27, p.31)

We are also aware of Liberal Democrat opposition to Regional Controls. In March this year, the then Party Spokesperson Julia Goldsworthy told the FBU’s Firefighter magazine that the Government should think again over FiReControl. She said:

“The Liberal Democrats are opposed to the Government’s plans to centralise Fire Control. This project will  mean vital 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. WE have called for the project to be stopped and for existing Control Rooms to be upgraded as necessary to ensure the communications benefits sought by Government are dleivered by local Fire Brigade Control Rooms, as they will be in Scotland and are in Wales, without the need for Regionlisation.”

Given the wide political agreement between both Government parties on this issue, we would like an understanding from you that the FiReControl project will be scrapped, with a timetable for this process and for the upgrading of existing Control Rooms.

Your faithfully

MATT WRACK

General Secretary

Fire Brigades Union

cc:

The Rt Hon Nick Clegg MP – Deputy Prime Minister, Lord President of the Council

Eric Pickles MP – Secretary of State Communities and Local Government

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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

FiReControl: ‘Will this waste of our money never stop?’

Late and way over budget, a plan for new fire control centres is just one example of Whitehall profligacy, says Philip Johnston.

Established by William Gladstone in 1857, the public accounts committee of the House of Commons is one of Parliament’s more venerable institutions, the guardian of the taxpayers’ interest in the way the executive spends our money. In almost 10 years as a most assiduous chairman, Edward Leigh has probably seen more waste than all of his predecessors put together. He has written a valedictory letter to his fellow MPs before he retires, lamenting the failure of public servants “to apply basic management disciplines” and their apparent insouciance when “the odd £100 million goes missing”.

As Leigh points out, huge cuts could be made in public borrowing if the Government took an axe to great swathes of bureaucracy and stopped squandering vast sums on useless schemes. To reinforce his point, here is a story that just about sums up everything that has gone wrong with the public sector in the past 13 years.

It concerns the Government’s woeful efforts to establish a £1 billion network of nine state-of-the-art regional fire-control centres in England. All the familiar ingredients are there: the waste of taxpayers’ money on an ocean-going scale, incompetent management, political naivete, wildly over-optimistic promises, IT failures, the liberal use of outside consultants and the refusal of anyone in Whitehall to listen to the experts. The same toxic cocktail has poisoned many projects in recent years, but this one is a classic.

You know something is amiss when a good deal of time has clearly been spent on the branding. This scheme is known as FiReControl (an amalgam of fire and resilience), as if the upper and lower casing somehow imbues it with special qualities of modernity and innovation when it merely disguises yet another turkey. It began life in 2004, with the aim of centralising on a regional basis the fire commands of some 46 brigades around the country – not to deal with routine incidents but with the big existential events such as a 9/11 terrorist attack or flooding on a grand scale.

At the time, the estimated net cost of setting up the system was about £72 million and it was due to be installed early in 2008. Today, the final bill is expect to be at least £240 million, while the buildings due to house these gleaming new regional HQs lie empty at a cost of £40,000 a day in rent. Not a single fire engine has been linked to the control network, and won’t be until the middle of next year at the earliest.

Even that timetable is not set in stone, and given the delays that have already occurred there are many in local government and senior fire officers who doubt it will ever get off the ground. There is talk of pulling the plug on the whole project, but this would cause serious problems for some brigades that have not modernised their own command operations while they waited in vain for FiReControl.

One of the key selling points for the new system was its alleged crucial importance during the Olympics in 2012. But it may not be ready in time and the London boroughs are adamant that if it is not up and running within a year they want it delayed until after 2012 to avoid the risk of having no command and control at all during the Games.

In other words, if it is not scrapped altogether there is a chance it will not be fully functional until 2014 – some 10 years after it was first proposed, which would be something of an achievement even by this Government’s standards.

In addition, far too much equipment has been ordered to deal with the likely threat: the London centre, for instance, has had 72 CCTV cameras installed. Something that was originally supposed to be about rationalisation, efficiency and saving money has grown like Topsy and is now much more expensive than before.

What is so depressing is that this project was imposed by Whitehall diktat (possibly for political reasons, given Labour’s regionalisation agenda) with no obvious understanding of what was actually required by the people who would use it, whose views were simply ignored. Needless to say, the Government is in denial over this. Shahid Malik, the eighth minister to oversee the project, says he hopes it will be ready by mid-2011 but there are no guarantees. “The problem was that there was a concept and a vision but the detail was not there,” he told MPs recently. To top it all, the Government has refused to let MPs see an independent assessment of the scheme on the grounds of commercial confidentiality.

This project, and many others like it, have driven Edward Leigh and his committee to distraction these past 10 years. They have issued umpteen reports demanding better management, improved controls, fewer gimmicks and greater accountability for failure (fat chance). They want far more care to be taken with our money. Yet the waste goes on and on. This week, the Commons select committee on local government will publish what is likely to be a scathing report into the FiReControl fiasco. It is due out on April 1; but remember, this is no joke.

source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/philipjohnston/7533673/Will-this-waste-of-our-money-never-stop.html

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