It was good to see Chichester's MP raise this issue in Parliament last week. Not only are most of the service's off road vehicles 26 or 27 years old, but the previous County Council cut the service's vital Water Carrier capability by 40%.
Whilst the MP's comments, shown below, focus on wildfires, the problems apply equally to all the incidents the service attends. With severe storms and flooding probable later this year, the service will be under even greater pressure.
In 1976 there were, on duty and on call, over 200 firefighters available in West Sussex, around the clock. Today there can be less than 60 at times! Several of the major wildfires in the UK needed more than 100 firefighters at one time, with many more needed to relieve them over several days.
National Resilience or National Desperation?
Chief Fire Officers have been suggesting that fire crews travelling hundreds of miles to other parts of the country, as part of the so called 'National Resilience' scheme, is a success. The reality is rather different. It shows that UK fire & rescue services are not only poorly resourced, they have no resilience.
If the service was resilient, it would not be necessary to desperately rob one fire & rescue service of resources to bale out another distant service. The UK is the only country in Europe that does not have true fire service resilience. Each European nation has, in addition to well resourced fire services, a reserve of vehicles, equipment, and personnel, mostly volunteer, that can be called on for major emergencies.
Normal mutual aid, where neighbouring services help each other out, is fine, but the increasing use of resources from distant fire & rescue services is a clear indication that services are under resourced. It also shows that residents are not being properly protected, which puts lives and property in greater danger.
The summer has highlighted the lack of resilience, and with storms and flooding very probable later in the year, this weakness will become serious. The County Council's failure to maintain an effective fire & rescue service is staggering:
Inadequate resources puts lives and property in serious danger
Need for Fire & Rescue Service is increasing
There are those who would have you believe that emergencies are decreasing, they aren't. The County Council has cut the incidents attended total by not sending firefighters to most calls originating from automatic fire detection systems. Whilst many of those calls turn out to be false alarms, the Council is also delaying the response to those where a fire is detected. That puts lives and property in danger.
Not only is this gambling with public safety, it has hidden the increase in emergencies that need a quick and effective response. This chart, which excludes false alarms, clearly shows that the trend for emergency incidents is increasing. The 3 year average ten years ago was under 4,000 calls per annum. The latest 3 year average is 4,744 per annum.
Honesty & Transparency must be improved
I had hoped that with a new administration at County Hall we would begin to see more honesty and transparency. Sadly, it was not evident at the last Scrutiny Committee, with Councillors still being misled.
The Chief Officer claimed that the service had achieved a 6% improvement in on-call appliance availability in quarter 4. That claim is very misleading as quarter 4 availability figures are always better than quarter 3, so the claim is an illusion.
Full year figures reveal the true position - they are getting worse
There has been a continuing decline in on-call appliance availability over the last 15 years, from 86% to just 41.6% in 2025/26.
Source: WSCC Scrutiny reports
Increasing response times covered up
This decline means that more and more fire engines are not crewed, which is resulting in ever longer response times. This puts lives and property in greater danger. Instead of fixing the problem, the previous administration lowered response standards to hide the scale of their failure.
The previous standard required a fire appliance to arrive, according to risk category, within 8 to 14 minutes. If it did not, then that was classed as a response failure and it was investigated. Now, if it takes longer than 16 minutes for the first fire engine to arrive at up to 10% of calls, those responses will not be classed as failures.
So, instead of a 15 minute response being a failure that is investigated, for more than 800 emergencies each year they can now take 20, 30, 40, 60 minutes or more to arrive. None will be classed as failures and worryingly they won’t be investigated.
West Sussex residents need to be very concerned by longer response times, as the Chief Officer's report accurately says, “evidence shows fires are now burning hotter and quicker than they did”.
If the service is genuinely responding to risk, then improving response times must be a priority.
I appreciate that the Cabinet Member and the Members on the Scrutiny Committee are all newly elected to the County Council, but they cannot let this misinformation and secrecy continue.
Improving response times and ensuring transparency must be urgent
priorities for all County Councillors
