THERE will only be one fire engine based at Hove in East Sussex by April 2016 and just 12 firefighters to cover the whole of Brighton, the Fire Brigades Union (FBU) warned yesterday, as it prepares for a four-day strike.
Jim Parrott, executive council member for South East FBU, said: ‘They are looking to reduce capacity in Brighton and Hastings which are two of the busiest in East Sussex.
‘In the first round of cuts they are taking away one fire engine from Hove.
‘They are then looking to introduce a combined high reach vehicle rescue pump (aerial platform) which will further reduce capacity in two ways.
‘The aerial platform will cover the whole of East Sussex and there are only three stations in the whole of East Sussex. That will further reduce the capacity in the city of Brighton and Hove.
‘There are three stations in Brighton. Hove had two front line appliances and an aerial platform, however the aerial was removed some time ago and they are now removing one of the fire engines leaving Hove with just one fire engine. This will leave only three fire engines operating for the whole of Brighton.
‘A fire engine operates with a minimum of four fighters, so you will have just four firefighters covering the whole of Hove at anyone one time.
‘Hove has a population of 90,000 people, but Brighton and Hove has eight million visitors a year.
‘You could end up with just 12 fire fighters covering the whole of Brighton which stretches right along the coast.
‘The chief officer hotly denies that the cuts will leave just 12 active fire firefighters at any one time, however when we challenged him and asked if he could guarantee that the engines would not be running on the minimum of four fire fighters per engine, he would not give that
guarantee.
‘With our pensions dispute we are now going out strike on Friday evening for four days.We have spent three years in negotiations with government over the pensions.
‘We have proved all their statistical analysis wrong. The retirement age of 60 is unreasonable, most fire fighters will not be able to reach that age.
‘You have a situation where a fire fighter can have 21 years of service under his or her belt and now have his or her pension torn up.
‘They asked us to delay the industrial action for three months while they said they were working out the new pensions proposals, which we did.
‘At the end of the three months they said no change, they are sticking with their original proposals.
‘That has created real anger and hatred of this government.
‘We will continue to look at strike action, we are not going to back down, this is the third time our pensions have been changed since 2006, we can’t back down on this one.’
The strike will begin at 6.00pm on 31 October until 6.00pm on 4 November.
