THE Fire Brigades Union (FBU) has said a new report that calls for Staffordshire Fire and Rescue to be merged with the police is a threat to the independence of the service.
Entitled Is there a case for full integration?, the report was commissioned jointly by the Staffordshire Police and Crime Commissioner (PCC) Mathew Ellis, Staffordshire Police, Staffordshire Fire and Rescue Service and Staffordshire and Stoke fire authority.
Rich Williams, secretary of the FBU in Staffordshire, said: ‘There is virtually no support for PCCs and certainly none to enable them to take over the fire and rescue service, such a move risks undermining public confidence in the accountability and governance of our emergency services.
‘PCCs pose an intrinsic threat to the independence and effectiveness of the fire and rescue service. Although the emergency services work together effectively, at many incidents, there is no operational reason for police and fire services to merge.
‘Police officers and firefighters perform very different roles – police officers have the power of arrest whereas firefighters do not. This distinction is an important aspect of firefighters’ relations with local communities.
‘The worry for firefighters is that mergers will undermine the public’s trust in the impartiality of the fire service, which they rely upon to gain access to people’s homes for vital fire prevention and emergency rescue work.
‘Enabling PCCs to take over fire and rescue service under the auspices of ‘efficiency savings’ is the next step in the government’s ideologically driven, cost-cutting agenda. Regrettably, merger proposals do nothing to invest much needed resources in fire and rescue services, or develop the role of firefighters to better meet today’s challenges and deliver safer, healthier and more resilient communities. Increasingly, firefighters are responding to new and emerging risks such as the threat from terrorism and the impact of climate change.’
The union has criticised the report for failing to address concerns around the future of the fire control room operated by Staffordshire and West Midlands fire services that cost £3.6m to set up just three years ago. The report also makes no mention of the cost of work required to make any takeover viable.
Meanwhile, FBU general secretary Matt Wrack has warned that budget cuts are undermining the effectiveness of fire services in England and Wales. Fire services’ budgets in England have been cut by 17% since 2010, according to National Audit Office figures.
And a BBC Radio 5live investigation has found response times in some areas have got worse in 2016, which Wrack says is putting lives at risk. 5live Investigates found that austerity cuts since 2010 have resulted in 3,382 fewer fire fighters, station closures and some appliances being taken off the road.
Figures suggested four out of five brigades had seen worsening average response times between 2009/10 and 2014/15. Wrack said: ‘There is very long-standing evidence that the longer it takes to get to incidents, the more likely people are injured or killed.’
Merseyside Fire and Rescue Service chief fire officer, Dan Stephens, confirmed it ‘simply isn’t possible to minimise the impact on response times for second and subsequent appliances when the overall number of appliances is reduced’.
He said this was ‘one of the inevitable consequences of the cuts. The fact that we are taking longer to get to incidents means there are people being injured or killed who would otherwise not have been.’
