UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 872-i

House of COMMONS

MINUTES OF EVIDENCE

TAKEN BEFORE

OFFICE OF THE DEPUTY PRIME MINISTER:

HOUSING, PLANNING, LOCAL GOVERNMENT AND THE REGIONS COMMITTEE

THE FIRE AND RESCUE SERVICE

Monday 30 January 2006

MR ALUN EVANS, SIR GRAHAM MELDRUM,

MR DAVE LAWRENCE and MS MARIE WINCKLER

MR DEREK CHADBON, MR ROBERT CAMERON,

and MR ADRIAN HUGHES

Evidence heard in Public Questions 1 - 138

USE OF THE TRANSCRIPT

Oral Evidence

Taken before the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister:

Housing, Planning, Local Government and the Regions Committee

on Monday 30 January 2006

Members present

Dr Phyllis Starkey, in the Chair

Sir Paul Beresford

Mr Clive Betts

Lyn Brown

John Cummings

Anne Main

Mr Bill Olner

Dr John Pugh

Alison Seabeck

________________

Witnesses: Mr Alun Evans, Director of Fire and Resilience, Sir Graham Meldrum, Head of HM Fire Service Inspectorate, Mr Dave Lawrence, Head of Fire Service Improvement Team, and Ms Marie Winckler, Head of Fire Service Effectiveness Division, Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, gave evidence.

Q1 Chair: If I could welcome you to the meeting. Would you introduce yourselves one after the other and your positions?

Mr Evans: I am Alun Evans. I am the Director of the newly formed Fire and Resilience Directorate within ODPM.

Sir Graham Meldrum: Sir Graham Meldrum, the Chief Inspector of Fire Services.

Ms Winckler: Marie Winckler, Head of the FiReControl project.

Mr Lawrence: Dave Lawrence, Head of the Fire Service Improvement Team.

Q2 Chair: Thank you very much. Can I start off by asking you to clarify the Department's attitude towards regionalisation. A number of the reforms, obviously the introduction of the Regional Control Centres and the establishment of regional personnel, training and procurement functions, suggest a deliberate regionalisation agenda and yet in your memorandum you have stated very clearly that you have no intention to "regionalise the Fire and Rescue Service". Could you clarify these two apparently contradictory statements?

Mr Evans: I hope they are not contradictory. The statement in the submission is very much about ministers' views that they do not believe in regionalisation of the service. The last time there was a statement about regionalisation was in the White Paper of 2003 which made clear that regionalisation would only take place if there was a demand for it within any region that voted for an Assembly, and following the North East vote there is clearly no political wish for regionalisation, so ministers have made it clear that there is no compulsory regionalisation. The only exception to that is where there are voluntary agreements on areas where the Fire and Rescue Service feel it would be a good idea to have a regional approach. The most commonly cited one of these is around the resilience and New Dimension planning for responding to mass incidents. All stakeholders within the Fire and Rescue Service agree with that voluntary approach. In addition, if there are areas where in terms of national resilience, and no doubt we will get on to FiReControl, the ministers believe there is a case for regionalisation, we are pursuing that. In terms of any joining up, unification, of Fire and Rescue Service, ministers are adamant that will only be on a voluntary basis. There have been one or two examples of expressions of interest in merger and we are following those carefully.

Q3 Mr Olner: Can I ask in this brand new life, perhaps it depends which side of the map you look at to see where we are going. Police forces are going to be regionalised and it follows that Fire Authorities will as well, but that is another story. In this brave new world, what is the role of the HM Fire Service Inspectorate now that the Fire Authorities are subject to Comprehensive Performance Assessment?

Mr Evans: On the first point, if I may. The fact that there is a proposal that the police might be regionalised does not affect what happens on the Fire and Rescue Service.

Q4 Mr Olner: Not today but it might tomorrow.

Mr Evans: It might do, although in terms of local resilience and regional resilience we have worked across boundaries and across organisational designs of different organisations in the Health Service, the Ambulance Service and in local government, so I think the important thing is to have systems of co-operation at whatever level it is and according to whatever organisation particular emergency services have. I do not think it follows that every emergency service must be organised along the same boundary. Sir Graham might want to say more about the role of the Fire Service Inspectorate, which is changing as well.

Sir Graham Meldrum: The role and, indeed, the title will be changing. Since the Audit Commission have taken up the CPA work, we have worked very closely with them. We have adjusted the establishment and the size of the Inspectorate to meet the new demands placed upon it. From previous staff levels we are about 50 per cent of the size we were before with a staff of 86 when we were carrying out the full inspection work and that is now 40 staff, 15 of whom are dedicated to the Crown Premises Inspection Group. We are left with a very small core working with the Audit Commission. The role in the future will be to continue that work. Indeed, next year's CPA has got a service delivery focus on it and at the moment to that end we are recruiting seconded staff to work with us to carry out the service assessment work, operational assurance as we term it, to ensure that the Fire and Rescue Service is meeting the operational requirements within the Fire and Rescue Service Act.

Q5 Mr Olner: Sir Graham, is that going to remove the tension that exists in many Fire Authorities, particularly with county councils and what have you where your Inspectorate comes along and says there should be a certain level of service and yet the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister funds it slightly differently from what you say is required? Will the new system straighten that out?

Mr Evans: Can I say something on the new system. One of the things we are trying to do in terms of what you have described as the new system, which we are calling a new professional advisory service from April 2007, is to use the expertise of Sir Graham and some of his colleagues but also to look ahead to recruiting a professional advisory service on secondment from the Fire and Rescue Service. So we will have experts from the service coming in to work with ODPM and, rather than as you have described it, which certainly was the traditional way in which inspection went, of Her Majesty's Fire Service Inspectorate going in and saying "This is how it should be done", we have developed what is called a toolkit so that Fire Authorities can come up with their own proposals on how best to meet fire requirements within their authorities and the role of the advisory service will be to work with that process and also use the Audit Commission to audit it according to Audit Commission process and practices.

Q6 Mr Olner: Is that a yes or a no?

Mr Evans: It is partly a yes and a no.

Q7 Mr Olner: There were real tensions before and in any new scheme you bring forward those tensions should be removed.

Mr Lawrence: I think that is absolutely right and the tensions will be removed because the new process is about asking questions about whether Fire Authorities have got a robust process in place, whether it is evidence-based, whether they have done the necessary research and back-up, et cetera. What it will not be doing is going in and coming up with a second opinion as to whether the resources or the assets were right or not, that is a decision for the local Fire Authority. What Graham's team and my team will be doing as part of the CPA process is making sure that is a robust evidence-based set of decisions but it is not to second-guess the Fire Authority.

Q8 Mr Olner: How far down the road are you with progress on the transfer of your advisory and other functions? It will cease to exist in 2007, are you on target?

Sir Graham Meldrum: We are. A lot of action has been taken already. As I say, we have had to deal with some quite sensitive staffing issues to get down to the 50 per cent level. We have now got a project-based programme to consider the rest of the work that we have got to do, which is obviously the professional advice to both the ministers within the ODPM and the senior Civil Service, and we have got to keep that going, and the work associated with the operational assurance. We see that the programme is on time to deliver.

Mr Evans: The target is to deliver by April next year, 2007.

Q9 Sir Paul Beresford: If I could follow up on what Mr Olner was saying. If I was on a Fire Authority I would be desperately confused. We have got the CPA, we have got the Director of Fire and Resilience, we have got the Head of the Fire Service Inspectorate, we have got the Head of the Fire Service Improvement Team and we have got the Head of the Fire Service Effectiveness Division. This sounds like the Marx Brothers' At the Opera. You have got all these different bodies, would they not be better together, working together as one team, talking to each of the authorities at the appropriate stage? I have not thrown the Audit Commission in yet either.

Mr Evans: One of the things we have done is ministers have set up a new Fire and Resilience Directorate which brings together the previous resilience and Fire and Rescue Service Directorate arrangements into one. I agree with you that some of the actual titles are perhaps not the best we might have, so we are trying to have something that expresses that better. In terms of the function of the Inspectorate, as Sir Graham said beforehand, we are trying to have an advisory service which works with us and works with Fire and Rescue Authorities. The Audit Commission - to pick up your other point - had a very clear remit under Comprehensive Performance Assessment, which was to assess the management capabilities of authorities, and under the process that we will be starting as from next summer we will also be assessing the operational capabilities of Fire and Rescue Authorities.

Q10 Sir Paul Beresford: Okay. If you go and assess those presumably you are requiring your local Fire Authority to produce figures to do assessments, to use their own team to provide information for you. One of the things the local authorities find is that when the CPA arrives it kills any work at the top echelons of that local authority for weeks. With potentially the four of you, plus the Audit Commission arriving, you are just going to swamp them with bureaucracy.

Mr Evans: We are working hard to design a system which is not over-bureaucratic and, as I said earlier on, we rely on something called a toolkit.

Q11 Sir Paul Beresford: It is over-bureaucratic now?

Mr Evans: I think in the past it has been rather, yes.

Mr Lawrence: There is no case for any of us arriving en masse at a Fire Authority. In fact, what the Fire Authority has in CPA terms is a single team and that CPA team comes in, does its job and produces its report. What we then do is pick up and discuss with the Fire Authority how to handle the performance improvement and drive that forward. It is an holistic approach. They certainly do not see three or four different people arrive, they see a single team that produces a report and then another single team that talks with the Fire Authority as to how to take it forward.

Q12 Sir Paul Beresford: So it is this week Team A, next week Team B and so on?

Mr Lawrence: No, I am sorry, I am saying it is not. I am saying it is a single team.

Q13 Sir Paul Beresford: You just said the CPA and the Audit Commission go in, they produce a report, you pick it up and you go in.

Mr Evans: The CPA reports were done last year and the operational assessment will be done this year, so there has only been one a year.

Sir Graham Meldrum: We will work with the Audit Commission on the service delivery. As they do with the Social Services and Education, the service delivery element will be one member who will be part of the Audit Commission team. The burden of inspection has been lifted from Fire Authorities. We used to go and spend a week in a Fire Authority inspecting in-depth, that has gone.

Q14 Sir Paul Beresford: That has been replaced by the CPA.

Sir Graham Meldrum: The Audit Commission report is the one report that will be produced with our people we have seconded working with the Audit Commission. There is only one team and that is it.

Chair: Can we move on to FiReControl and Firelink.

Q15 Alison Seabeck: Just to set the scene for the Committee, could you explain to what extent the FiReControl and Firelink projects are interdependent and how they will be managed within the Department?

Mr Evans: I think one of the things we have done which is a very positive step forward as part of the merger of the two directorates is to bring together Firelink and FiReControl under one senior responsible manager, which is me. Clearly these two projects developed from different backgrounds. One went back to when the Fire Service was in the Home Office when there was a desire for a unified fire control system and on the other side was the Fire Control, the Regional Control Room system that came out of the Mott MacDonald report more recently. Ideally, we would not have started from the place we are. What we have done is unified the two projects under one senior manager, ie me, we have brought together one level of governance for both projects reporting to me. When we get to the stage of roll-out, we will have one unified testing system so that the system is tested end-to-end from the radio system to the control room and we are looking at other ways of unifying the two projects. If your question is why are there two, ideally there would not be but we are where we are.

Q16 Alison Seabeck: Has it not taken rather a long while for you to reach the conclusion that they ought to be integrated more closely? A lot of the submissions we have received expressed concerns, and some of those concerns go quite a way back. Why has it taken ODPM such a long time to think perhaps they ought to be more closely linked?

Mr Evans: I may be the wrong person to answer that because I have been pressing for the two to be unified for a long time within the Department and ministers and the Permanent Secretary have now taken this decision to unify the two. I do not know whether Marie wants to add anything more about this. I would agree with the Committee's view that the two need to be treated as one programme and that is what we are trying to do at the moment. There are clearly benefits from that.

Ms Winckler: I think there is still a lot of work to be done at regional and at local level. Now that we are part of the same directorate we are working on the detail of that. We are aware that we are less united, or we have appeared less united, at headquarters and less unified than the Fire and Rescue Services have at local level and at regional level. Now we want to work with them in detail on setting up arrangements that are absolutely streamlined all the way through.

Q17 Alison Seabeck: Is it your view that coming to this decision on the need to unify the two as late as you have, you have allowed the local authorities or other elements in the package at times to obstruct and delay in a way which is now less possible because you are able to drive it through from the centre?

Mr Evans: I do not agree with that. What we have done on Firelink is drive through a quite complex radio communications project with support across most stakeholders within the Fire and Rescue Service and now we are coming up to the contract award on that project with a clear roll-out timetable for it. FiReControl has been more complex because there has been greater opposition within parts of the service to it. The two parts of the organisation, either in one directorate as we are now or the two beforehand, have worked very closely at strategic level, at regional level and in terms of communicating the benefits of the two. Certainly we do have a difference of approach within the service as to how much acceptance there is for each of the two projects and that is something we are working on.

Q18 Alison Seabeck: In relation to the delays to Airwave which were obviously linked into the Firelink project, you are now expecting that announcement imminently, are you, as to confirmation of the bidder?

Mr Evans: We agreed who the preferred bidder was back in November and we are now going through the final stage of the negotiations. We expect to announce the agreement on the contract within the next month.

Q19 Anne Main: You said you have been pressing for a considerable period of time for integration and it was being resisted. Who was resisting it and why?

Mr Evans: I did not say it had been resisted. I said I had been pressing for it for some time and the resistance, if there was some, was partly due to the inertia of the system because for the historical reasons that I set out - we now get rather into the theology of the way in which the ODPM was set up - the Firelink project was in one directorate and FiReControl was in another. The pressing that I made was that I thought it was a good idea to put the two together in one directorate, which they have now done.

Q20 Anne Main: So they were not communicating with each other?

Mr Evans: They were communicating but you can always improve communications.

Q21 Mr Betts: How much is the FiReControl project going to cost?

Mr Evans: About 500 million over a ten year period. I cannot answer that question exactly because we have not yet signed the contract. Sorry, FiReControl you said. I beg your pardon. 986 million over a 15 year period.

Q22 Mr Betts: That is capital?

Mr Evans: No, in total. That is capital and resource costs of local authority running costs.

Ms Winckler: That is the total cost running the FiReControl service over that period including the costs of the project.

Q23 Mr Betts: So is there a split between capital and revenue?

Ms Winckler: There will be, yes.

Q24 Mr Betts: Is that available?

Mr Evans: The capital cost is not available on Firelink or FiReControl until the contract is agreed and the nature of the negotiating contract procedure we have is in order to get best value for money one is still negotiating up until one signs the contract and that is a perfectly normal procurement procedure. It is not a reason for keeping figures back; I do not even have them.

Q25 Mr Betts: How long will it be before you do have them?

Mr Evans: On the Firelink side I would think ----

Q26 Mr Betts: FiReControl.

Ms Winckler: We are in discussions with bidders at the moment but we would hope to have final costs later this year. We do not want to be too precise about timing when we are in discussions with bidders.

Q27 Mr Betts: If you have not got the final costs, have you got the Final Business Case?

Mr Evans: We have got a strategic outline business case which is the top level business case which we have shared with the service and that makes a number of assumptions about costs but, again, I come back to my earlier answer that you will not have a Final Business Case until we have finished negotiations with the three competing bidders and reached a contract and that will be in mid-summer, early autumn.

Ms Winckler: You were asking about capital. We gave a figure when we were asked for capital costs of £160 million as the one-off costs of the project, but that included some resource items like the "new burdens" given to local authorities.

Q28 Mr Betts: It might seem a little strange given the degree of concern in the service and people have different views about Regional Control Centres that you have not got a final cost or a Final Business Case but you are absolutely certain it is going to work.

Mr Evans: Again, we do have a strategic outline business case as it is called, and that is all you can have at this stage. By the nature of the negotiations you will not have a full business case until you know the costs.

Q29 Mr Betts: Is that publicly available?

Mr Evans: Yes, and it has been consulted on very widely with Fire and Rescue Authorities.

Q30 Mr Betts: So we could have a summary of that?

Mr Evans: Certainly. You could have the whole thing if you want.

Q31 Mr Betts: That is probably quite long.

Mr Evans: In answer to your other question, which was the important part of it, you said will you go ahead regardless of what the figures are, no, one would not if the negotiations proved it was not value for money. The whole point of this negotiation process is to use three bidders to work with them, to work with the Fire and Rescue Service on determining the specification of the project, and at the end of that using competition to negotiate the best possible deal. If that did not deliver value for money then of course one would not go ahead, but we are fairly confident that the business case will deliver that value for money, which is why we are committed to it.

Q32 Mr Betts: Why did the FBU in its evidence to us say that the outline business case identified "a high risk of total project failure"?

Mr Evans: I am not responding to what the FBU said in their submission.

Q33 Mr Betts: I am asking you to, I think that is reasonable.

Mr Evans: Of course it is reasonable, but as I said ----

Q34 Mr Betts: The FBU have said that is what is in the outline business case, "a high risk of total project failure". Are you saying they are wrong?

Mr Evans: I do not think there is a high risk of business failure as the FBU put in their business case. They made a number of statements about Government IT projects which I think were not necessarily accurate. Where there is a challenge, which I would agree with them, is in delivering business change within the Fire and Rescue Service, which is the big challenge of this project as well as the IT.

Ms Winckler: There was a section of the business case which discussed projects in general and that paragraph referred to high risk of total project failure, not in relation to this specific project but in a discussion of projects in general and it was taken as though that applied to the whole business case but it did not, it was taken just from that paragraph which was a general discussion of projects as a whole.

Q35 Mr Betts: You would accept it is one of the most complicated IT schemes the Government has introduced, or is thinking of introducing.

Mr Evans: No. I think the challenge of FiReControl is to get an IT system which is deliverable across regional level. If you go around the country, and I think we probably have not made enough of this, there are systems in Norfolk, West Midlands, Merseyside, which deliver this type of capability. There are systems overseas, in Sweden, which have a regional control type system. The challenge of this project is to deliver an IT system which replicates the type of system that works in those small authorities I have named on a larger scale and are backed up and more resilient.

Q36 Mr Betts: One further question on FiReControl. We have talked about the costs and you have not got them absolutely but you have indicated the region that the costs are likely to be in. Those costs are going to be borne by Central Government, are they?

Mr Evans: The costs will be borne by a combination of Central Government and local government. Central Government will meet all of the new costs of the capital investment and the IT and fitting out and all of the new burdens cost that will fall to local authorities under FiReControl.

Q37 Mr Betts: How much is that of the 986 million?

Mr Evans: £160 million is the total one-off costs and the rest is running costs on 15 years.

Ms Winckler: The costs of the accommodation lease will be borne by Fire and Rescue Authorities.

Q38 Mr Betts: How much will this scheme cost local authorities out of their own resources over that 15 year period?

Mr Evans: I do not have that figure but nothing more than they are paying at the moment.

Q39 Mr Betts: So there will be no extra costs at all to local authorities?

Ms Winckler: There will be additional transitional costs ----

Q40 Mr Betts: How much?

Ms Winckler: ---- which the Government has agreed to bear.

Q41 Mr Betts: Is there any cost to local authorities which Central Government is not bearing?

Mr Evans: In addition to what they pay for at the moment for Fire and Rescue Control Rooms?

Q42 Mr Betts: Yes.

Mr Evans: No.

Q43 Mr Betts: Absolutely nil?

Ms Winckler: The Government has said it will bear the transitional costs and it is bearing the costs of the installation of the technology. The Fire and Rescue Authorities will be paying the costs of running the Regional Control Centres.

Q44 Mr Betts: And that will be no greater than it is now?

Ms Winckler: That will be no greater than it is now.

Q45 Mr Betts: That is an absolute guarantee, is it? These projects have a habit of over-running from time to time. Any overrun costs will be borne by Central Government, will they?

Mr Evans: That is what we said, yes.

Q46 Mr Betts: Every single penny of every cost will be borne by Central Government?

Ms Winckler: The Government is paying for the technology.

Q47 Mr Betts: If the technology costs go up, if the transitional costs go up and in the end it proves more expensive to run, that cost is picked up by Central Government, is it?

Mr Evans: If the additional costs falling on Fire and Rescue Authorities go up beyond the existing amounts that they pay for Fire Control Rooms the Government will meet those costs.

Q48 Mr Betts: Let us go to Firelink now. You were talking about having a system of Regional Control Centres which you said has worked in other places and you are pretty confident about the technology. We know, do we not, given the course you have chosen to go down with Firelink that the communications system the police have got, which is the same technology, has been an absolute disaster in many parts of the country?

Mr Evans: I am not sure the police would say it has been an absolute disaster but ---

Q49 Mr Betts: My constituents who try and contact South Yorkshire Police's control centre would and the police have acknowledged it is bad, they have had major problems with it.

Mr Evans: Certainly there are some complaints about Airwave in police forces, I readily accept that.

Mr Betts: Not some complaints. If you go and talk to the Assistant Chief Constable, who has been responsible, he will demonstrate the system was a complete disaster when it was first installed and it did not run properly for months and still does not run totally effectively.

Q50 John Cummings: That situation is reflected in Durham, so it is not just a one-off in Sheffield. There is an awful lot to be learned from mistakes that are being made at the present time. I hope you are taking them on board.

Mr Evans: We certainly are taking them on board. What the Fire and Rescue Service did and what we did was in terms of learning the lessons from the police procurement because there were a lot of criticisms of the Airwave procurement in the NAO report and from the Public Accounts Committee and they said the best way in which these lessons can be learned and the shortcomings avoided is by competition. We negotiated up until the end of last year with two competitors, one of whom was Airwave and the other was EADS, and I can assure you we got much better output performance specifications and commercial terms, project management terms, from Airwave negotiations than the police negotiation got.

Q51 Mr Betts: So this system is going to work a lot better than the police communication system, is it?

Mr Evans: Yes.

Q52 Mr Betts: Will there be any cost to local authorities through that?

Mr Evans: The answer is the same as with FiReControl. There will be costs but we will meet any additional new burdens. In actual fact, there will be a number of savings to local authorities because we are meeting all of the capital costs of the system which will save them a lot of costs they currently have to pay on renewing and renovating their clapped out systems.

Q53 Mr Betts: We will know what the total costs are very shortly when you complete your business case.

Mr Evans: As I said when I answered the other question wrongly, the total costs are about 500 million over a ten year period. Ten years because that is roughly the assumption we are working on on the lifespan of the technology. As with FiReControl, once we have gone through the final negotiations we will know a figure from the contract and then we will be able to answer exactly that question.

Q54 Mr Betts: When will that be?

Mr Evans: I would think early summer. May, something like that.

Q55 Anne Main: Briefly on the point you have raised so well, Clive. I really would like an in writing assurance about the costing because it seems to me the police have been asked - I had this confirmed last week - to pay £17 million towards the start-up of the amalgamation of police forces and that is going to fall on them taking out a loan and ultimately on the taxpayer. I remain a little sceptical that the Fire Service would have a different degree of treatment in terms of similar sorts of start-up costs that the police have got. You are saying there is a categoric assurance there will be no extra burden on the taxpayer but the police will have to pass one on. I just wonder why you can give us that assurance.

Mr Evans: I can give you that assurance but ----

Anne Main: The police ----

Q56 Chair: Can we stick to the Fire Service.

Mr Evans: I cannot answer questions on police financing.

Anne Main: But we are talking about similar systems.

Q57 Chair: Can you let him answer, Anne, please.

Mr Evans: I will answer it again. I thought I gave it clearly to Mr Betts. I will guarantee that additional burdens falling on local authorities from the implementation of Firelink will be met by Central Government. If you want it in writing I will ----

Chair: We will have it in writing because it will be in the evidence which the Department will agree is a true record.

Q58 Mr Betts: In terms of the actual impact on the ground of the Regional Control Centres, what impact will there be on the number of staff employed? Are we going to see a significant reduction?

Mr Evans: I will ask Ms Winckler to confirm but I think the current number of staff employed in Fire and Rescue controls is about 1,500 and the number we envisage under FiReControl is about 1,000 nationally, so it is 500 less.

Ms Winckler: Those are full-time equivalent numbers. There are about 1,500 at the moment and we expect it to go down to about 1,000 but the decisions on the final starting levels are not for the Department, they are for the Fire and Rescue Authorities as employers.

Q59 Mr Betts: Are those figures, roughly speaking, agreed with the various Fire Authorities up and down the country?

Ms Winckler: They are based on an organisational design for the new centres which has been agreed with the Fire and Rescue Service in a series of discussions and consultations, yes.

Q60 Mr Betts: Will the Regional Control Centres perform all the tasks and duties that are currently performed within the various authorities' control rooms?

Ms Winckler: They will perform all the functions that are related to the control service. They will not perform what are currently deemed to be out-of-scope functions because at the moment control rooms do some functions to use up spare capacity which are not related to the control service. The new centres will do all the functions related to the control service itself but they will not do what are called out-of-scope functions.

Q61 Mr Betts: So some extra duties are going to have to be passed on elsewhere in the Fire Service?

Ms Winckler: They will be functions for which the Fire and Rescue Service will have to find a home, yes.

Q62 Mr Betts: And staff. So the saving of 500 staff in the control room is not a true total saving, is it?

Ms Winckler: How they choose to fulfil those functions is up to them.

Q63 Mr Betts: You are saying there are 1,500 staff doing a particular job in control rooms at present, there will be 1,000 staff doing some of that work in the Regional Control Centres in the future. You are going to need some of those staff who are supposedly being saved to carry on doing the jobs that will no longer be done in the Regional Control Centres, are you not?

Mr Evans: It depends which authority you are in. If you take London, for example, which has probably the highest call volumes, they are taking a call roughly every 30 minutes so they are pretty much fully occupied. In some authorities control room operators will be taking a call once every two hours or so, so that is five or six calls a day. In some of those authorities there are other activities that they do. In terms of answering your question on the number across the country, one cannot do it because it depends how each individual Fire and Rescue Service manages their service.

Q64 Mr Betts: Wait a minute. You are deciding centrally we are going to have these Regional Control Centres throughout the country, it is a central decision, the implications are worked out locally but the total cost of the project has to take account of the extent to which some of the functions currently carried out in control rooms are displaced within the service. It has to do that otherwise it is not a proper cost.

Ms Winckler: The business case does take account of ----

Q65 Mr Betts: How many people will have to do the displaced tasks? You must have a number in there of whole-time equivalents to do the costings.

Ms Winckler: At the moment I cannot recall a specific figure for the number of people doing out-of-scope functions.

Q66 Mr Betts: Can we have a figure?

Ms Winckler: We can certainly go back and look into that but I cannot give it to you off the top of my head.

Mr Betts: Can we have a note on that.

Q67 Dr Pugh: A very quick question. The Fire Minister, Jim Fitzpatrick, said that the move to Regional Control Centres will improve response times. We are in an age of evidence-led policy now so you must surely have presented him with some clear evidence that indicated that was the case because it was not just a guess, was it? What was the evidence?

Mr Evans: FiReControl will improve response in three ways at least: firstly, it is more resilient so the system will be ----

Q68 Dr Pugh: I am not asking for the case to be made, I am asking what research base you produced to Jim Fitzpatrick which made him say Regional Control Centres will necessarily improve response times. What evidence was shown?

Mr Evans: The research base was around response times at the moment plus capability of technology in particular areas compared with the response times and the known capability of the technology that we are developing.

Ms Winckler: At the moment response times are not measured in the same way as they are going to be measured in future. Response times are measured from the time a call is received in the station and the appliance gets the call in the station and sets out. The situation is going to be very different in future, not least because of the introduction of Integrated Risk Management Planning and the fact that appliances are not all going to be in the station, they are going to be out on the road where there is the greatest risk and there will be dynamic mobilising direct to the appliance. So you are not comparing like-with-like, you are moving into a new situation.

Dr Pugh: I totally accept that. I do note that what you have not said is that there have been any extensive pilot studies done or large international comparisons made before the theory of Regional Control Centres was put forward. Thank you.

Chair: We are really short of time and I want to get to resilience. John, can I ask you to only ask question seven, we will leave question eight to ministers I think.

Q69 John Cummings: Would you tell the Committee what criteria have been used to decide where the Regional Control Centres will be located, please?

Ms Winckler: There was a public consultation on the criteria which related to resilience to such characteristics as whether the site was on a floodplain or whether it was in sight of low-flying aircraft, proximity to fibre-optic network, those sorts of criteria, and we went out to consultation on those criteria. Those were the criteria that applied to the consultation.

Q70 John Cummings: How extensive was the consultation?

Ms Winckler: We consulted Fire and Rescue Authorities and Regional Management Boards and the Practitioners' Forum.

Q71 John Cummings: How will the location of the RCCs affect joint working in the future? Will the new RCCs be co-located with police stations or other emergency service control centres?

Mr Evans: There are no plans to do that at the moment. The liaison between the new RCCs and other agencies will work the way in which it does now but it will be improved because of the technology. The only example that is different from that is in terms of when the London control room comes in we are working on whether or not there is any extra co-operation we need in terms of preparing for the London Olympics.

Q72 John Cummings: I want to come back very briefly to the consultation. It was basically a closed form of consultation, you did not go out to public consultation, was it not?

Ms Winckler: We consulted Fire and Rescue Authorities and Regional Management Boards. It was a stakeholder consultation.

Q73 John Cummings: But not a public consultation. It was an incestuous sort of consultation.

Mr Evans: With the main stakeholder within the service.

Ms Winckler: The documents are on the website.

Q74 John Cummings: Who did you consult with? The police? Ambulance?

Ms Winckler: We did not consult ----

Q75 John Cummings: Local authorities? Councils?

Ms Winckler: We consulted the Fire and Rescue Authorities. We did not consult the police and the ambulance but the criteria were drawn up in conjunction with those who deal with national security, so to the extent that those affect police and ambulance they would have been relevant.

Q76 John Cummings: So was it just a paper exercise to give it a smattering of consultation?

Mr Evans: No. It was consultation with those members of the stakeholder community who are most interested in it.

Q77 John Cummings: Not the public? Not the local authorities representing the public?

Mr Evans: Local authorities, elected members contributed to it.

Q78 John Cummings: They were invited to?

Ms Winckler: Yes.

Q79 John Cummings: So local authorities were invited, that is the question I am asking?

Ms Winckler: Yes, they were consulted and did respond.

Q80 Anne Main: What lessons have been learnt for the Fire and Rescue Service from the attacks on London on 7 and 21 July and also the Buncefield disaster? How has the Government responded and how has the Fire Service responded?

Mr Evans: The Fire Service responded extremely well to both of those incidents you mentioned. In terms of London there has been a lessons learnt process on all of the issues from command and control, from multi-agency working, from sustainability of resources. In Buncefield we have done a lot of work on the mobilising of other Fire and Rescue Services from throughout the country, liaison with local authorities, regional working in response to major crises, effects of that crisis on the oil supply industry and aviation fuel to Heathrow, and there will be a full lessons learnt document on that within a few months.

Q81 Anne Main: What tests have been made of the equipment procured under the New Dimension programme? Have staff had sufficient training in using this equipment? Does that training extend to retained firefighters?

Mr Evans: There is an enormous programme of training and testing of the equipment to test its robustness, and that is carried out in partnership with the Fire and Rescue Service, they have come and looked at all of the equipment in prototype before we bring it in. We have a full programme of training funded by the Department so that Fire and Rescue Services do not have any extra costs incurred. The Retained Fire Service is involved in this process.

Q82 Anne Main: Many of the current reforms have been framed against the backdrop of 9/11 and 7/7. What evidence does the Government have for believing that these reforms are equally appropriate say, for example, in rural areas as they are in metropolitan areas which might be perceived as having a greater risk of a terrorist attack but rural areas have their own particular needs?

Mr Evans: I think that is quite a good point. Rural areas have just as much threat, if not possibly more, from natural disaster, floods and things like that. If you look at the experience of the last 18 months, we had the Boscastle floods in the summer of 2004, the Carlisle floods in 2005, we had 7/7 in the summer and we had Buncefield. Three of those were outside of Central London and one was in Central London. I think the response has been equally good from the Fire and Rescue Service and other agencies working together in all of those. I would say that we have a flexible and appropriate response mechanism and that New Dimension equipment, for example the high volume pumps, has been used at Carlisle and Buncefield and if they had not been there we would not have had the capability to deal with those two disasters.

Q83 Mr Olner: Is it not frightening that the larger you grow, you only have one form of resilience? The fact is if you have got many Fire Authorities and they all build in some resilience that means you are able to tap on a national basis the spare of all those little bits but if you have just got a few big bits there is not going to be enough resilience to go round, is there?

Mr Evans: I think there is a balance between how much you want to have capacity in every Fire and Rescue Authority and how much you develop this on a risk basis. As I said right at the beginning, one of the things on New Dimension, which is accepted across the piece from fire officers to local authorities to FBU, is the need to plan for New Dimension type incidents on a regional basis. In the crises that we have had, like Carlisle, like Buncefield, we have needed to bring in resources from across the country but we have always had enough resources.

Q84 Mr Olner: Will you in the future when you have not got so many Fire Authorities? Will you have enough resilience in the future?

Mr Evans: We believe we will have.

Q85 Mr Olner: It is only a belief?

Mr Evans: I cannot give you a cast iron guarantee, we do not know what crises we are going to have. The interesting thing about Buncefield was the risk assessment had been for a fire with one tanker blaze but in actual fact we had 20 and Hertfordshire and other Fire Services put that out and we had enough foam from across the whole country. I do not know whether Sir Graham wants to say anything more on preparing for disasters we have not yet thought about.

Sir Graham Meldrum: I think the proof of those major disasters so far has been the value of providing the equipment for the New Dimension of terrorism project regionally provided throughout the whole of the Fire and Rescue Service. What we have done is supplemented the capability for dealing with incidents. Before 9/11, and questioned by the minister after 9/11, we had to admit for that huge scale of incident we did not have the equipment that would have met that demand for high volume pumping, for instance. Now it has been provided it was possible to deploy it at Buncefield and extinguish the fire. Previously in a number of areas we had to address the situation on a new scale, such as mass decontamination of the public. I think we have gone from having a very limited capability prior to 9/11, because that was how it was perceived as a risk, to now possibly the best in the world in terms of our capability for dealing with such an incident.

Q86 Dr Pugh: Moving to fire prevention, your written evidence says that prevention culture is now "embedded in the FRS". Is that a pious hope or are you looking at some real evidence that shows that is so?

Mr Evans: The fire prevention mechanisms that we have done and the investment in fire prevention, arson control and other initiatives show that there is wide experience across all different authorities in fire prevention and our challenge, if there is one, is to ensure that best practice is shared as widely as possible because not all 46 authorities are as good as each other.

Q87 Dr Pugh: It is differently embedded in different places?

Mr Evans: Different qualities of embeddedness, yes.

Sir Graham Meldrum: In the last ten years we have seen the move away from the Fire Service looking at purely legal fire prevention, fire safety measures and looking at the role simply from intervention to one of being prevention in the true sense of the word. We have made a huge commitment towards the whole of preventing fire in the first place with the formation of the Community Fire Safety Centre. That has resulted in the very pleasing result of seeing a fall taking place in fire deaths to the lowest this year we have seen for 45 years.

Q88 Dr Pugh: In terms of that very desirable development, do you think the new resilience duties the FRS have got are going to impact upon or distract from that mission, as it were?

Sir Graham Meldrum: I think the fact that out of all the changes that have taken place the new Fire and Rescue Service Act, the 2004 Act, put a requirement upon the Fire and Rescue Authorities to ensure they carried out community fire safety changed the whole way people look at this. In the past it was something you could do, it was an add-on, now it is a duty on every Fire and Rescue Authority in the country to carry out community fire safety work. It is not something people are doing reluctantly. There are some amazing initiatives taking place up and down the land. There have been 330,000 home fire safety visits taking place where smoke detectors have been fitted into people's homes, particularly people who vulnerable, the elderly. There have been some amazing initiatives with young people in the community as well. It is an amazing change of culture that has taken place in the Fire Service over a very short period indeed.

Q89 Sir Paul Beresford: Is there prevention built into the funding formula?

Mr Lawrence: Yes, there is. One of the huge changes, both in terms of the finance and the activity of FRAs, is the prevention role is now seen as being equal and in some areas more important than the intervention role. In other words, if we can prevent it happening in the first place this is clearly the way forward. Local Risk Management Plans and the results of those do feed into the finance formula.

Q90 Sir Paul Beresford: So the old system of more fires, more money is sliding to one side?

Mr Lawrence: Indeed so.

Q91 Dr Pugh: Just to pick up on some minor issues relating to prevention. Is there a greater role for the retained firefighters in this particular line of work? Is there not an importance to be attached to how firefighters are trained because obviously teaching people how to prevent fires is rather different from rescuing people from fires and different personal qualities are required?

Mr Evans: In addition, some of the activities of the Fire Service are now made a legal duty, including rescuing people from road traffic accidents, for example. They take up more time than fighting fires. It is important to get the balance of training right between traditional fire fighting and these other duties and preparing for New Dimension type disasters.

Sir Graham Meldrum: It is true to say that in the new entrant training course the community fire safety aspect plays a big role. Also, the Government has put a lot of money into it. There has been a £25 million grant to Fire Authorities to fund smoke detectors in vulnerable communities, 11.3 million put into arson and, of course, the national television advertising campaign, one of which is running at the moment, which we found have had a considerable impact on the reduction of fire deaths.

Q92 Dr Pugh: I am not sure if you dealt with the issue of retained firefighters.

Sir Graham Meldrum: The retained firefighters in many ways are the true community fire safety officers because they are part of the community. We have found throughout the country some very good initiatives have come forward from retained firefighters to take forward community fire safety within the area they serve.

Q93 Dr Pugh: It is an increasing role.

Sir Graham Meldrum: It is an important part of their work.

Mr Lawrence: We did have a major review of the Retained Service which reported in January 2004 and that is now with the Chief Fire Officers Association and ourselves to drive forward. I would like to echo that, I think the retained are an absolutely vital part of the service for the future and how we develop that from the community safety perspective is one of the key challenges over the next year or two.

Q94 Chair: How soon do you think we can see concrete changes as a result of the discussions that you are having with the chief fire officers?

Mr Lawrence: On the retained?

Q95 Chair: Yes. Is that just going to sit there or are we going to see some action?

Mr Lawrence: We are going to see some action.

Q96 Chair: How soon?

Mr Lawrence: The position at the moment is that the Chief Fire Officers Association are preparing a business case for putting in priority order what came out of the retained review. I would expect that to be with us in a matter of weeks.

Q97 Chair: And then?

Mr Lawrence: Then there will go from that an action plan to be discussed on taking it forward. I would expect over the next month or two to see some real developments on that front.

Mr Evans: If I might add one final point on the retained. One of the issues is recruitment of retained and it is a big challenge to make sure we keep up the level of recruitment because it has become increasingly difficult to encourage people in some areas into the Retained Service.

Q98 Lyn Brown: Despite the fact that diversity was specifically mentioned in this Committee's Terms of Reference, there is no mention made in the ODPM's written submission of this issue. Furthermore, the ODPM Annual Report for 2005 states that the Service Delivery Targets to increase the percentage of black and minority ethnic communities' representatives and women amongst staff was not met. Can you tell me why the Department did not meet its SDA 2000 targets on increasing the numbers of women and ethnic minority within the service?

Mr Evans: Progress on meeting the targets clearly has not been good enough and is something we have got to address over the coming years. The one thing I would say in response to your question, which is not ducking the issue, is that there are some authorities, and I will pick out London in particular, who have done very good work of going into the ethnic communities and recruiting from those areas. Although the progress has not been good enough, has not been nearly good enough, there are pockets of good performance and good practice around the country and one of the big challenges is to make sure those aspects of good practice are replicated much more widely. It is a long-term problem and it is something that needs extremely good communication and good project management from the centre working with local authorities.

Q99 Lyn Brown: Why did the Department not set itself new targets?

Mr Evans: I am not sure I can answer that.

Sir Graham Meldrum: We are actually reviewing the targets now with the stakeholders. They have examined the previous targets, looked at the progress that has been made and there have been a number of reasons for this, one of which is there has been quite a reduction in recruitment that has taken place because of changes in the Fire and Rescue Service. As we speak we are preparing a report that will go to our ministers within the next few days which will look at the employment target strategies and do a milestone review, point out where we are and suggesting that working with the stakeholders we need to review the targets, not to make them stretched targets but achievable targets. Particularly with the recruitment of women firefighters, the target was set ambitiously at 2010 at 15 per cent of the workforce and it has not been met, and is not going to be met. Rather than a target where everybody just says, "We are not going to meet it", because of the change in the way recruitment is taking place, we want to set a target that will stretch but will be achievable.

Q100 Lyn Brown: You say that there is going to be a report ready in a matter of days. Is it possible for this inquiry to receive a copy of that report? Secondly, can you and do you use the CPA process to take action on issues around diversity? Would you not accept that in order to make progress on issues of diversity there needs to be a real change of attitude throughout the whole of the Fire Service? Can you tell me what you are doing in order to make that change of attitude happen?

Sir Graham Meldrum: We have got the CPA process to include the diagnostic area relating specifically to equality and diversity, so that was part of the CPA process. We have also done a lot of work with the Commission for Racial Equality in relation to ensuring that the service is delivering its requirement under the Race Relations (Amendment) Act. It is true to say that in many areas we are finding that progress has not been made as quickly as it should have been, that there is a need to re-examine quite a number of areas. We cannot sit here and say that we have made great progress in equality and diversity when you are talking about 2.4 per cent of a workforce, both in relation to women and to members of the black and ethnic minority community. That is not good enough. I chair the Diversity Happens Programme Board which is a board made up of stakeholders. We are now re-examining the way to take all of this forward in the light of the lack of progress that has been made in order to get the stakeholders to sign up to ensure that this is driven forward in the future.

Mr Evans: There is an issue, and it is an important one, about the way in which you manage this in that there is a limit to what the ODPM can say has got to happen and will happen. This is about a cultural change out there in the service. In other areas we are criticised for having too much intervention and too many targets. What we have to do is set the right culture, the strategy from the centre, but it must be for local rescue authorities to make the changes and then we have to encourage those and show where there has been good practice, and I mentioned London, and show people that this can be achieved, but it is not something that can be done entirely from the centre.

Q101 Lyn Brown: Given that you failed to mention it even in your submission and given that it was within the terms of reference of this committee, are you confident that you are setting the right culture and a strategy to obtain the changes needed?

Mr Evans: I am confident that from now on the things that Sir Graham has set out and the fact that we will set new targets from the centre but working with authorities will give us the ability to do this. I come back to the fact that the proof of this will be in how well the service at grass roots levels responds to this, not in how many targets we set from the centre.

Mr Lawrence: We did make this a clear part of the CPA. We are certainly not happy with the results. It is part of the performance improvement planning for the CPA process and we certainly expect that the next round of CPA action will pick up on this. We are recognising that there is an awful lot more work that we have to do in order to encourage FRAs to be more successful than this.

Chair: Thank you very much indeed. If you could make sure that you provide the written additional material that was asked for earlier on, we would be grateful.

Witnesses: Mr Derek Chadbon, National General Secretary, Mr Robert Cameron, President of the RFU and serving retained firefighter in Essex, and Mr Adrian Hughes, RFU Vice-President, Serving Retained Fire Officer in Charge, Reynoldston, Mid and West, Retained Firefighters' Union, gave evidence.

Chair: I am sorry that we are starting late but you will understand that we wanted to explore fully the questions with the ODPM officials and I thought it was more important to do that than stick rigidly to time.

Q102 Lyn Brown: In your view why has so little progress been made on the retained review and what do you think are the key aspects for reform?

Mr Chadbon: Good afternoon, everybody. It is a difficult problem. We start from the background where the focus of the Fire Service has always been on the full time service; that has always been a problem. The retained service part of the Fire Service is very important. As you probably know, it covers 60 per cent of the fire stations in the UK and about 95 per cent of the land mass but until now, and it is still the case, retained have had no involvement in brigade planning and no involvement in the setting of the policy, and that is reflected in what I think all the observers have referred to over the last few years as the second class status of people in the retained service. We had some very encouraging prospects in December 2003 when the then Minister set up the retained review which we contributed to and supported. Unfortunately, it has not yet gone anywhere and I think the reason why it has not gone anywhere is partly because of the status of the retained and the fact that they are still not seen as a priority. They are seen in some brigades unfortunately as a necessary evil and that is not in any way being derogatory. The problem now is that the review has taken place but there does not seem to be the commitment out there in the service to do anything about it. We have been heavily involved in it, and I had a meeting recently with CFOA and the ODPM to see where we could get the thing moving. CFOA have done a review of brigades to see what action they have taken themselves on the retained review. Only 48 per cent of the brigades responded to that inquiry, which I thought was pretty appalling. They were asked, "What have you done about implementing the changes in the retained review?", and only 48 per cent responded to CFOA. Of those the majority said they had not done anything. What you come back to is the lack of impetus within the service because of the imbedded nature of the culture of the service. The culture of the service is that principal officers are generally drawn from the whole time service. The focus is on the whole time service. I can speak from personal experience, if it helps, because I worked in the Fire Service at one stage before doing this job as a principal officer, the head of the non-uniform staff, but also as a retained firefighter. Constantly you had to push the fact that the principal officers' management team did not consider the retained when they were dealing with strategic issues. I used to have to say, "Hang on a minute. You have agreed a policy. It will not work for the retained". This was a brigade where 38 of the 40 fire stations were retained. That is the culture that exists in the Fire Service, I am afraid.

Q103 Lyn Brown: What are your priorities for reform? If there was just one thing you could change what would it be?

Mr Chadbon: I would put retained personnel into a position where they could advise on and ensure that strategic thinking took account of the retained perspective.

Q104 Alison Seabeck: Where do you think the main obstacles have been to the successful rank to role assimilation process?

Mr Chadbon: The obstacles are similar to those that we have talked about, the problems of the focus of the Fire Service being on the whole time service, but it appears that in a number of brigades, and we gave some examples of this in our submission, this has been used as an opportunity to downgrade in particular the role of retained officers in charge. There has always been some difficulty on the fire ground, particularly in rural areas, where, on a station area which is retained, a retained pump turns up with a retained officer in charge, and then if there is a larger incident you get more appliances turning up, one of which may be a whole time pump with somebody of equivalent rank, and sometimes, not always, that causes tensions. What is happening is that in rank to role many brigades (not all of them) have brought in retained officers in charge, some officers as watch manager B, but many have made them watch manager A so that they can be slightly below the position of whole time officers. It is this cultural issue again, I am afraid.

Q105 Chair: If your two colleagues wish to respond please feel free to do so.

Mr Chadbon: Adrian Hughes is the officer in charge of a retained station and perhaps there is something he would like to mention about that.

Chair: Maybe in answer to one of the questions.

Q106 John Cummings: To what extent has the retained service been involved in or consulted upon the development of the Integrated Risk Management Plans?

Mr Chadbon: We as the Retained Firefighters' Union have been consulted by some brigades but it depends whether we are recognised by those brigades or not.

Q107 John Cummings: When you say "recognised" what do you mean?

Mr Chadbon: Recognised for consultation or negotiation. Some brigades recognise us for consultation; some recognise us for negotiation and consultation. Where we are not recognised for either it is very difficult for us to get our point of view over. We can do it through the public consultation but on the ground retained firefighters have been involved in some brigades in the local input but generally we have found that it is not retained-friendly. The IRMP process up until now has been largely about maintaining the status quo.

Q108 John Cummings: Does the question of consultation rely upon the whim of the authority of a particular Fire Authority or chief officer?

Mr Chadbon: Yes.

Q109 John Cummings: Or the particular committee?

Mr Chadbon: It relies upon the committee and the Chief Fire Officer in the brigade.

Q110 John Cummings: In your experience where does the decision not to involve you come from? Does it come from the chief officer?

Mr Chadbon: The Chief Fire Officer usually but sometimes we have had chiefs who have recommended, or have said they have recommended, that we be recognised and it has been turned down by the Fire Authority. I think a lot of this is down to pressures locally and the pressures come from the other main union, the Fire Brigades Union. If they are against us being recognised in some cases that stops it happening.

Q111 John Cummings: So obviously they have not been making adequate use of the retained service in relation to the IRMPs?

Mr Chadbon: We feel that experience recently has shown, and particularly in some recent strikes (and the one in Suffolk was the most recent), that there are huge opportunities for the more flexible use of retained firefighters. We had the situation in Suffolk where the retained ran the brigade and covered the whole of the county on 22 occasions when the FBU were on strike, and that did not involve any troops or anybody else, and we feel that the automatic response from that should have been a review of the IRMP in that county on the basis of, "Hang on a minute. This makes one heck of a difference to the assumptions that we have made in the past". We feel there is a huge opportunity there. I would go as far as to say it probably underpins a major opportunity for making a more effective and efficient Fire Service outside the metropolitan areas by making better use of retained under IRMPs.

Q112 John Cummings: Can you give any practical examples of the problems you have experienced with the implementation of IRMPs?

Mr Chadbon: We have had generally an unwillingness to consider more flexible use of retained personnel and I will give you an example. In Norfolk there were plans to change a day crewing station into a shift station. We responded to the IRMP and said that we believed the station could effectively and efficiently be run on a retained basis completely. In the last couple of weeks, because of the announcement of the Government grants, that particular brigade has had a shortfall and needs to consider what it is going to do with its council tax in the future, and immediately (it was not in the IRMP) out of the air was plucked doing away with four retained appliances. We said, "Hang on a minute. Where did that come from because that was not in your IRMP in the first place?" As a result of a number of people having a go at that, that has now been stopped but we have still got this day crewed station which we believe could be run far more effectively by retained.

Q113 Chair: Could you clarify which authority it was you were talking about?

Mr Chadbon: That was Norfolk.

Q114 Anne Main: Could I particularly ask Mr Hughes and Mr Cameron to give me some input into this? We have been assured that all the key stakeholders were involved in consultation processes. Are you telling us that the Retained Fire Service has sometimes been excluded from a consultation process that you think you should have been involved in?

Mr Hughes: Almost certainly. It happened on a national basis. There is a lot of good practice in the UK Fire Service and there is an awful lot of bad practice as well. Where you have a management structure that is primarily based on whole time employees, where your chief officers and senior management work their way up through the ranks from firefighters and they have all been whole time, they have got a very limited understanding of the needs and capabilities of the retained service. We continually find that policy has been developed which works very well for whole time employees but when that is just bolted on to the retained service it does not work as well or it is very difficult to work.

Q115 Anne Main: Are you saying that perhaps the ODPM is not aware that you have not been included or fully included in this consultation process?

Mr Cameron: There are difficulties for brigades to communicate correctly and thoroughly with the retained because they do not have the experience of doing the job in the first place in many instances. That gives them a communication problem about how to involve them and drive something through to make change for the better.

Mr Chadbon: Can I give you an example? I know you are going to see this Fire Authority tomorrow. One of the recommendations in the retained review, which has been around for nearly three years now, was that there should be a retained liaison officer in each brigade. Going back to the previous question, I believe that would be a key way of moving the retained forward. A number of brigades have appointed retained liaison officers but they are all full time personnel. We had a situation where, when this came out in February last year, one of the retained liaison officers in Devon was asked about this and he said, "I do not know anything about it", so we gave him a copy. We had to give the retained liaison officer in that brigade a copy of the retained review team report.

Chair: We will bring that up tomorrow. The Clerk is noting it so that one of us will definitely bring it up.

Q116 Alison Seabeck: We have listened to evidence from the ODPM who described the retained firefighters as being the true community firefighters, but the evidence you have submitted, including stories from places like Halstead and others, suggests that actually you are being left out of the loop. Why do you think you are not being involved in the community safety work as you feel you should be?

Mr Chadbon: Again, I think it is a focus issue, and a financial issue as well, which is an interesting one because generally retained income has gone down over the last two or three years. The effectiveness of community fire safety has essentially driven down call management by introducing automatic fire alarms, reducing the attendance, and has considerably reduced the income of retained firefighters. That money in many cases has been used elsewhere. Again, we know of brigades where they have had surpluses and my colleague, Rob Cameron, comes from Halstead in Essex, which is one of the examples that we used. The example we gave was where the station wanted to get involved in community safety in the early days and met with very little support. They are now doing it but there are financial problems so perhaps Rob would like to expand on that.

Q117 Alison Seabeck: You would like to see the money that you are saving because of the success of prevention recycled?

Mr Chadbon: Yes, because it is about recruitment and retention of retained firefighters with awards and incentives, is it not?

Mr Cameron: I am glad to say that we have now become very involved in community fire safety and do home fire safety visits; that has been most successful. The new personnel that have joined stations have come from a different background where this has now become the norm for them. We are not getting quite as many fire calls but they are doing an awful lot of home fire safety visits. Over the Christmas period we did a little community event in the high street of our town and from that our fire appliance took on 24 or 25 home fire safety visits, just from our asking members of the public. In go the teams, in go the smoke detectors, and that is making a terrific difference. Unfortunately, on the funding side of this the pay that is then claimed by the retained firefighters can often mean that the money that the fire station is then claiming out of the budget will be increased quite substantially and I have some concern that for this to carry on in the present format it will mean that we will require an additional bit of funding.

Q118 Chair: Is your fire station entirely made up of retained firefighters?

Mr Cameron: Our fire station has approximately 23 personnel and is entirely retained.

Q119 Mr Olner: Before I come on to regional control centres, for the record and to give the committee a feel for this could you give us the percentage in the UK between retained firefighters and ordinary brigade personnel? Do you make up 25 per cent of firefighters or 30 per cent or what?

Mr Chadbon: Roughly one-third of firefighters are retained covering two-thirds of the fire stations in the UK, because retained are obviously on duty all the time whereas whole time are working shifts. One third of firefighters are retained, two-thirds of the fire stations are covered by retained and about 95 per cent of the land mass is covered by retained, but that is because the city centres are covered by whole time employees.

Q120 Mr Olner: Thank you. It is useful to get that on the record, Chair, so that we know what we are dealing with. On the regional control centres do you think that is going to affect retained firefighters? You have said before that retained firefighters tend to be fairly locally based. How are your members going to feel if they are suddenly dragged some considerable miles away from home?

Mr Chadbon: No, I do not think so. Retained firefighters are fairly used to reorganisation within fire brigades. We find that that happens every two to three years. The officers that we report to and the headquarters that we report to on a local basis change every time brigades have reorganisations, which seem to have been fairly frequent over the last few years. I do not think that regional fire control instead of local individual brigade control will make a lot of difference to retained firefighters. It is not something that we have found is a problem. I would add that a few of us who are a bit long in the tooth were around in the last big reorganisation of control rooms in 1974 when we went from over 200 control rooms down to the current numbers and we heard some of the same concerns raised then but generally they have not come to fruition.

Q121 Mr Olner: So there are absolutely no problems as far as you can see? There will be no impact from regional control centres on rural areas?

Mr Chadbon: No, none at all.

Q122 Mr Olner: You state in your written evidence that the whole control centre restructuring project is being adversely affected by the "failure of all parties to engage in the process". Can you elaborate on what you mean by "all parties"?

Mr Chadbon: Everybody except us, I think. There seems to be a concerted effort by other unions, by Fire Authorities, even within CFOA (the Chief Fire Officers' Association). I have seen individually many Chief Fire Officers speak out against regional controls but the Chief Fire Officers' Association as a professional association has spoken in favour of them. My understanding is that they do not have the support of all of their own members and I think this is what has added to the complications and the difficulties over control changes, that it has been a process that has not taken everybody along with it. It seems to me very concerning as to how it is going to operate. Is it going to work if so many people who are vital to that process are not keen on the outcomes?

Q123 Mr Olner: So how can the ODPM convince firefighters of the benefits of regional control centres?

Mr Chadbon: I think they are going to have great difficulty because the main opponent, the Fire Brigades Union, is demonstrating its opposition to any change, any modernisation, and I do not think controls are any different from that.

Q124 Mr Olner: Can I stop you there, Mr Chadbon? As I understand it, the Fire Brigades Union is not the dominant trade union in the control centres.

Mr Chadbon: I do not know. I would have thought it probably was. I do not know for certain.

Q125 Mr Betts: Can I follow up on Firelink, which obviously goes hand in hand, I should think, with the control centres? Have you had any involvement or consultation in terms of the new communications systems that we are looking at for the future, because your members are going to have to use them, are they not?

Mr Chadbon: Yes. The technology is starting to come on, again, in a brigade that just happens to be the one that I know well. Norfolk has been at the forefront of testing out the new arrangements. It is a rural brigade but they have got most of the technology already up and running and I understand it is running very well, but our involvement has been minimal.

Q126 Mr Betts: So you have not officially or formally been consulted? It is just that you happen to know about that because your members are involved in it?

Mr Chadbon: Yes.

Q127 Mr Betts: Have they been consulted at local level in Norfolk?

Mr Chadbon: No, and to some extent I can understand why. I think it is an area that our members are not going to be too bothered about. They just want tools that work and we do not have members in the control room. The whole thing on controls and radios has been focused on the personnel themselves in the control room. It has not focused on the rest of the people in the Fire Service. There are 60,000-odd people in the Fire Service and you heard earlier that there are 1,500 in control. I feel very sorry for those people because it has not been handled in a way that is in their best interests. We have got consequences for 1,500 people dominating the outcome for 60,000 people. There is something wrong somewhere.

Q128 Anne Main: Just following on from that, do you think that on the consultation and, as you say, listening to people this is a case where the Government is getting a full picture of what it is really like on the ground in how to use these things or do you think they are getting selective evidence which they are forming a view on? Do you feel that we are getting a rounded picture to make an informed decision on this? That is really what I want to know.

Mr Chadbon: No, I do not, but I do not think that applies generally on the reform of the British Fire Service either. It is not just concentrating on controls.

Q129 John Cummings: Would you tell the Committee what your assessment is of the CPA process which has been conducted by the Audit Commission? Do you think the CPA effectively provide for a Retained Fire Service perspective?

Mr Chadbon: It is an interesting one. We did an exercise on just one involvement there was by the retained in the CPA process because, as I say, we tend to get left out - second-class citizens. The feedback we had from our members was that in some cases they had been involved on a local basis and they had seen some good outcomes. In a number of cases they were not involved. We had a couple of brigades where the retained who said they were expecting a visit from the CPA all went on leave on that drill line rather than face up to the process for fear of getting it wrong. Others in the same vein tried to have an input into the CPA process but were shouted down by the brigade officers who were there, who kept intervening and saying, "I do not think these retained really understand what you are asking. Let me answer the question on their behalf", so there was very much a process of stage management as far as the retained were concerned. My local station were supposed to produce a station plan for the auditors when they came down. The evening the auditors came down to the station the station plan was presented to the officer in charge by one of the whole time officers who said, "Here is your station plan. Just make out that you wrote it when the Audit Commission come down". That was the process that went on. In some it was very good. Some brigades said yes, it was excellent. They did have a confidential process. There was nobody else there. In other places it was very much stage-managed by brigade management who wanted to ensure that the answers that the retained gave were in accordance with brigade policy.

Q130 John Cummings: So is the report worth anything at all?

Mr Chadbon: We think it is. We think it is a start but we do not think it goes far enough. It needs to start looking at areas like making maximum use of retained, having more flexible working arrangements, more flexible duty systems, ensuring that IRMPs reflect the opportunities that are there. We are not sure that that is going to happen even under the new inspection process because at the end of the day the decision is still down to the Fire Authorities and if they decide to do what they want then that will be it.

Q131 John Cummings: Are you satisfied with the arrangements that will take the place of the Fire Service Inspectorate?

Mr Chadbon: Yes. I think the inspectorate as it is at the moment has outlived its purpose and has to change.

Q132 Alison Seabeck: Your written evidence highlights progress in co-responder arrangements in areas covered by retained firefighters. Many of those are rural so there is a good chance that you are likely to be first on the scene and therefore the use of co-responder arrangements seems to make sense. Could you give us some examples of how that is working and your wider experience with it?

Mr Hughes: My own station has been carrying out co-responder duties since 1998 and it has been tremendously successful. There are widespread benefits to the community, to the Fire Service and to members of the crew on each station in doing that. My own service, Mid and West Wales, now operates 14 co-respondent stations. It is a partnership with the Ambulance Service. We have a greater understanding, the Ambulance Service have a greater understanding and the Fire Service directly, because of co-responder. It is very difficult to quantify success but I think it is reasonably safe to say that each co-responder station saves between five and ten lives a year and that is just the high profile ones.

Q133 Alison Seabeck: Do the people you are working with who are using co-responders feel that they are being asked to be an alternative to the Ambulance Service?

Mr Hughes: Not at all. We are working with the Ambulance Service in partnership. There is always a paramedic response immediately, as there would be normally. We are working over and above that with the Ambulance Service. It is not trying to do anything instead of the Ambulance Service. It is very important to realise that. It is an extra level of service.

Q134 Alison Seabeck: Has joint working with the rest of the Fire Service, knowing that there are elements within the rest of the Fire Service which feel uncomfortable about working with co-responders, inhibited the retained firefighters from doing this?

Mr Hughes: Oh yes. The Ambulance Service drive the location of the stations, depending on needs and their cover, and quite often where they have a gap in the cover there is a fire station. There have been quite a number of instances where the Ambulance Service would have liked a station to become a co-respondent station and, for a number of reasons, they have decided that they are not going to take part in the scheme, historically at least, because since the new Fire and Rescue Services Act there have been a lot of changes. Earlier on, yes, definitely that was the case.

Q135 Alison Seabeck: So on the basis of your experience where you can identify a number of lives saved every year, where co-responders are not being used you can probably say that there are a number of lives being lost every year because the Fire Service are not working with the Ambulance Service in some areas?

Mr Hughes: I think it is safe to say that about some areas, possibly because the Fire Service co-responders are only one of a whole range of co-responder schemes the Ambulance Service utilise. There are instances, which are quite ridiculous, of a fire station that has not participated in the co-responder scheme whereas the local postmistress and a number of local residents have taken up the co-responder scheme, and when somebody is seriously injured or has a heart attack or a life-threatening emergency the local community scheme comes along with better equipment and training than the Fire Service. It is very difficult sometimes under those circumstances, because it is subjective, to prove that a co-responder intervention saves a life. Sometimes it is quite clear but it is a subjective assessment of the value. I think it is quite safe to say that at least five and perhaps even ten lives a year per scheme are saved.

Mr Chadbon: There is a pattern there, I hope you can see, that retained firefighters are community firefighters living and working in their community. They want to make things happen, they want to be flexible, they want to see things happen that are the best for their community. They have been restricted from doing that in the past because of their lack of involvement at strategic level. They have been restricted because of restrictive practices in the Fire Service. They have been stopped in many places from doing co-responders and other flexible ways of working. They are not fully engaged in community safety, so therefore we have a bunch of men and women in the British Fire Service who are very willing, whose work role is changing and whose income is changing; generally their income has dropped. We do not know where that money is going, but we can see great opportunities for feeding that back into the system for the benefit of the local community by enhancing the service. This is where the British Fire Service is getting it wrong at the moment.

Q136 Dr Pugh: Can we briefly touch on civil resilience? Have retained firefighters been offered training in the operation on New Dimension equipment? If I could generalise the question a little bit, how will the new duties on firefighters under the Civil Contingences Act affect you on a day-to-day level?

Mr Chadbon: It is a mixed bag. I would say that generally retained firefighters are not being used and trained and made operationally responsible for New Dimension because the Fire and Rescue Service is largely retained. In places like Lincolnshire and the Isle of Wight, for example, retained are very heavily involved and form a major part of the resilience response. In other areas the additional ODPM money has been used to recruit additional whole time firefighters and build new fire stations completely for housing and training on resilience where the alternatives have not been considered.

Q137 Dr Pugh: So it could be said, say, in an urban area where, because they have an adequate number of whole time firefighters, that the retained firefighters in those circumstances could be completely cut out of the loop?

Mr Chadbon: Yes, and it has happened in a number of authorities. I do not know what my colleague Robert Hughes' experience is here.

Mr Hughes: If there was an incident in London we would attend as a support, plus we have had training on that.

Q138 Dr Pugh: But in the circumstances there, the specific urban environments we are talking about where you are not involved to any great extent in planning for resilience, you would attend but you would be attending in an untutored or unprepared fashion; is that right?

Mr Hughes: Yes, I would agree with that.

Mr Chadbon: It is a very mixed bag.

Chair: Can I thank you very much for your evidence. It has been most useful.