The recent scrutiny committee meeting was again marred by false claims and refusals to answer legitimate questions from County Councillors.
False claims
Cabinet Member Duncan Crow claims that targeted prevention and protection activity is responsible for reductions in accidental dwelling fires, fire injuries and no fire fatalities in the first quarter of 2021-22. Yet there are no figures for the number of accidental dwelling fires shown in the report, and no figures are provided for injuries and fatalities in previous quarters for comparison.
Perhaps they are lower this quarter, but it is dishonest to claim that it is because of prevention and protection activity. I hope they have a beneficial effect, but there is no evidence to support that claim. Fires are random events, so chance and the effectiveness of the service's response play a much larger part in reducing fire injuries and deaths. Sadly, that response has become much less effective as a result of Council cuts.
Councillor Crow has been Cabinet Member since 2019, so does he accept responsibility for last year's increase in fire deaths, or will he just claim credit for no fire deaths in the first quarter of this year and during 2019-20?
Attendance times not the success claimed
The Cabinet Member also claimed that attendance times for the first fire engine to arrive at critical fires were a success. Yet he failed to mention that target times in West Sussex are up to 40% longer than in Surrey and 75% longer than in Hampshire. With such a low bar set, they ought to have been met nearly all the time, not just 91.5% of the time. That means some people are waiting over 14 minutes for help to arrive at fires that pose a serious threat to life.
Councillors spotted discrepancies in the figures shown in the report for 2020-21, but did not get a satisfactory explanation from Deputy Chief Fire Officer Mark Andrews. In one table the figures for 2020-21 are mistakenly shown as being for 2021-22, which Mark Andrews described as a gremlin.
However, he dodged the important question about how the attendance rate claimed for the year 2020-21 was 93.3%, yet in the quarterly breakdown for the same year, no quarter achieved that result. The highest achieved was 92.4% and the lowest was 89%, so the correct total for the year appears to be 90.3%, the same as three years ago. It begs the question, how accurate are the other figures in these reports?
Councillor Crow glossed over the failure to attend critical special services, such as road traffic collisions with people trapped, in the required time. This had a failure rate of over 20%. The response target for the often vital second fire engine at critical fires was also missed by over 20%.
Not surprising when the County Council has removed a quarter of front line fire engines and crews.
It is also worrying that the boost to attendance times from the pandemic last year is coming to an end. Now that furlough has ended and more people are returning to their workplaces, instead of working from home, the availability of On Call Firefighters will reduce. The first signs are shown in this report. Availability in the first quarter of 2020-21, compared with the first quarter of 2021-22, shows a drop of over 16% from 78.5% to 62.1%.
Councillor John Turley pointed to the omission of the target times from the response targets in the report, which made it difficult to put the figures in context. The Chief Fire Officer, Dr Sabrina Cohen-Hatton, said, "something we can look at adding in". No idea why she said that, as target times have been shown in previous reports. What she should be investigating is the reason they were left out of this latest report.
Joint Fire Control cover up continues
Councillors John Turley and John Milne raised concerns about recent system failures in the Surrey based Joint Fire Control. Sadly, once again, they did not get satisfactory answers. Councillors have still not been given the detailed report they requested after the first serious failures in December 2019.
The Chief Fire Officer said that she would not discuss it in public and would speak to Councillor Milne outside the meeting. Even more worrying was that she then said she would not share that information with other Councillors on the scrutiny committee.
The only justification for not being open and honest about these failures would be if it revealed vulnerabilities that could be exploited by people with malicious intent. Yet Councillors were told that the problems had been fixed and would not reoccur, so if that it true, there are no vulnerabilities to exploit.
Even if there was a security justification to keep information from the public, which seems unlikely, that is no justification for withholding it from County Councillors. They are ultimately responsible for the service and reports can always be marked 'confidential' and, if lawfully justified, meetings can go into closed session where the press and public are excluded.
It really is hypocritical for the Council to claim it is open and transparent when it allows heads of service to cover up problems by refusing to be open and transparent.
Bad enough that the public are kept in the dark but wholly unacceptable to keep their representative County Councillors in the dark.
East Sussex told about West Sussex problems,
but West Sussex County Councillors are not
Whilst West Sussex County Councillors have not been given details of these failures, which directly affect emergency response in West Sussex, it has emerged that East Sussex's Chief Fire Officer has been kept fully informed. Minutes of an East Sussex Fire Authority meeting provide more detail about the December 2019 failures than has ever been provided to the scrutiny committee. They include confirmation that:
- Crewing at the joint control room was inadequate on some occasions.
- West Sussex had received a series of hazard reports from firefighters about mobilising failures.
- Haywards Heath and Burgess Hill crews were mistakenly sent to a road traffic collision in Eastbourne
- Worthing crews were mistakenly sent to a fire alarm call in Brighton.
The Council's constitution says that the purpose of scrutiny committees is to hold the Executive to account. The Cabinet Member and Chief Fire Officer are part of the Executive and must be accountable. Ignoring the constitution and refusing to provide information to Councillors on the Fire & Rescue Service Scrutiny Committee is unacceptable.
I have written to Committee Chairman, Councillor Kevin Boram, to voice my concern that the committee will be unable to do their job effectively if they are denied information and given inaccurate answers. I await his reply with interest.
Chief Fire Officer confused about responsibilities
When Councillor Turley suggested that Councillors should be told when the system is down, the Chief Fire Officer claimed that she had "a statutory responsibility to ensure that we are able to respond to emergencies", which includes "being able to take emergency calls." She also said she would not inform Councillors of directly operational matters.
The statutory responsibility she referred to is not placed on the Chief Fire Officer, it is placed on the fire & rescue authority, which is West Sussex County Council. The Chief Fire Officer's responsibility is to the County Council, her employer, and refusing to provide information to County Councillors is failing in her duty.
There is no moral or lawful justification for the Chief Fire Officer to withhold any information from the scrutiny committee. If they require information, be it operational or not, then it must be provided.
Critical National Infrastructure failure
It was sadly ironic that the Chief Fire Officer referred to the mobilising system as a 'key piece of critical national infrastructure'. She mentioned it when she was trying to justify not answering legitimate questions, yet both Surrey and West Sussex failed to follow the Centre for the Protection of National Infrastructure’s (CPNI) guidance to ensure that call taking and mobilising was reliable and resilient.
Following Freedom of Information requests, West Sussex were unable to produce any documentation to show that they had required partners or suppliers to comply with the CPNI guidance. Surrey said that they held no information related to the CPNI guidance. It is quite irresponsible that essential Government guidance has been ignored in this way.
Merseyside fire control cannot 'take over' if Joint Fire Control fails
Councillor Boram asked if Merseyside fire control can take over if there is a catastrophic incident in Joint Fire Control. Unfortunately, Deputy Chief Mark Andrews misled him by saying, 'yes that's exactly right'.
Merseyside cannot take over, they can answer '999' callers but cannot send any help. No help will be sent unless they can make contact with the joint fire control that has been hit by the 'catastrophic incident', or is overwhelmed by emergency calls. There is simply no guarantee that help can be sent to people in distress when '999' calls are diverted.
Councillor Boram also asked if Merseyside could cope with the increased call volume when the Joint Control becomes responsible for three fire & rescue services (East Sussex, Surrey and West Sussex). This was a very pertinent question, but Councillor Boram did not receive an answer.
So let me help Councillor Boram, Merseyside deal with an average of 15,700 incidents a year. Joint Fire Control will deal with an average of 30,500 incidents a year. So he is right to be concerned, Merseyside could well be overwhelmed by a sudden tripling of their workload. If severe weather was affecting the UK, that increased demand could be even greater.
I don't think Mark Andrews deliberately misled the Chairman, I just think that like many other senior officers he lacks depth of knowledge of control room operations and of resilient telecommunications. An issue that has been evident throughout the control room fiasco and the reason the Council has not provided emergency call taking and mobilising arrangements that are properly robust and resilient.
Councillors keep being told that there are contingency plans to deal with failures, yet reports suggest cobbled together measures have had to be used when systems fail. These include control room staff having to remember to contact personnel on fire stations via someone's mobile phone, something that has, on occasion, been forgotten. Another is On Call Firefighters having to be contacted via public messaging applications. None of these are reliable or resilient and cannot be considered adequate contingency arrangements.
Despite assurances at the meeting, I have yet to hear confirmation from West Sussex firefighters that all these problems have been fixed. It does not matter if the failures are a result of human error or technical failures in the fire control, or communication failures between control and stations, or equipment failures at fire stations or on fire engines, such failures are unacceptable.
These failures put lives at risk and the Fire & Rescue Service
Scrutiny Committee must not accept being fobbed off.
They must demand transparency and rapid improvement.
