County Councillors again fail West Sussex residents

Committee Chairman Cllr. Kevin Boram and Chief Fire Officer Sabrina Cohen-Hatton

At the recent meeting of the Fire & Rescue Service Scrutiny Committee, Councillors failed to insist that Surrey County Council honour their agreement to meet specified performance standards in their fire control. Instead of answering all '999' calls within 7 seconds, they have dropped the standard to let them take longer than 10 seconds to answer one in twenty emergency calls. The standard for the time taken to notify fire crews of emergencies was also cut.

No justification was given for this performance cut, just a misleading link to a target figure in a working agreement between all the emergency services and British Telecom. It was claimed that now the fire control is handling emergency calls for three authorities, they need to align West Sussex with East Sussex and Surrey Fire & Rescue Services. Sadly, that is simply an excuse to drop adequate West Sussex standards to suit the inadequate standards of others. This is not about fire control personnel not performing well, they do, it is a senior management and Cabinet Member failure.

West Sussex residents deserve high standards, not Surrey's low standards.

Consultation results withheld from Scrutiny Committee

The committee was told that the results of the public consultation on the Community Risk Management Plan had been discussed by the Chairman, the Cabinet Member, and the Chief Fire Officer. Yet no explanation was given for not publishing the results, or for not providing them to the Scrutiny Committee. Keeping the committee in the dark stops them doing their job properly. 

Consultation results should be published now.

Rural areas are not low risk

There was a worrying contradiction with the Chief Fire Officer talking about rural areas being 'low risk', but also referring to the problem of fire deaths in rural areas. She claimed the trend was for victims to be deceased before the alarm is raised, yet no evidence has been produced to substantiate that. Of course, sometimes, that is the case but there are also instances where it is not, which makes a quick response from fire crews vital if lives are to be saved.

She is quite right that it is better to stop fires starting with the use of prevention activities, but the reality is they cannot stop every life-threatening fire. Research has shown that the optimum response time, to save lives and to confine the fire to the room of origin, is between 5 and 10 minutes. Opportunities to do that diminish rapidly over 10 minutes, yet County Councillors have only made provision to arrive within 10 minutes for just 2% of the County. For 37% of West Sussex, it is 12 minutes, and for 61% it is a staggering 14 minutes. 

Yet, in the last quarter, they failed to arrive within these lengthy times at over 13% of critical fires.

Examples of risks found in rural West Sussex

Just a few examples of the many risks in rural areas - historic buildings, nursing homes, boarding schools, business and industrial parks, food production centres, hotels, and million pound plus homes. There are also many more modest family homes, caravans, both holiday and residential, properties occupied by those who are vulnerable, including those who cannot escape a fire without assistance, areas of deprivation, fuel depots, chemical storage, firework manufacturing, farms, heathland, woodland, areas of outstanding natural beauty, and sites of special scientific interest. All are in danger when fire breaks out. 

West Midlands

West Sussex

A 14 minute target is far too long, failing that target is unacceptable.

Why rural lives, business, property, and environment don't get a quick and effective response

West Sussex Fire & Rescue Service's ability to provide a quick and effective response continues to diminish, and that is fundamentally the fault of County Council cuts to frontline resources. In addition to the removal of eleven frontline fire engines and crews, they fail to ensure the remaining 35 fire engines, at 24 fire stations, can be crewed all the time. This map overlay shows the only 10 fire engines, at 8 fire stations, that have had crews available for more than 95% of the time. The other 25 fire engines only had crews available  for between 15% and 91% of the time. 

It really should be no surprise that rural response has become so poor.

Based on four year average to 2019/20

When the Chief Fire Officer talks about 'low risk', she is really referring to areas that have fewer fires. However, they pose no less of a risk to those who live and work there than fires in urban areas. The actual risk to lives and property may depend on a building's construction, occupancy, and fire safety measures, but it does not depend on geographic location. However, once a fire does break out, in any part of West Sussex, the speed of response can significantly alter the risk to lives and property.

The danger increases for every extra minute it takes firefighters to arrive. 

A little good news

It appears that with the budget now set, additional wholetime personnel will be recruited to extend cover from 5 days to 7 days a week at Day Crewed fire stations and on the Crewing Optimisation Group (they help fill crewing deficiencies on Retained fire stations). This will obviously bring some improvement to response times, particularly in the Adur and Mid Sussex district areas, but it will not reverse all the damage caused by County Council cuts.

More firefighters are needed to properly protect West Sussex residents

Chief Fire Officer unaware of pandemic severity

I really don't understand why the Chief Fire Officer said that nobody could have predicted the scale of the impact of the pandemic. Whilst the public were unaware, those in senior positions in the emergency services should all have been fully aware. Government has known this for over fifteen years, which is why pandemic continued to be shown as the potentially most damaging threat on the National Risk Register. 

As for the scale of the impact, as far back as 2010, pandemic planning assumptions had identified that a pandemic could result in between 50,000 and 750,000 additional deaths, and cause significant disruption to us all:

National Risk Register 2010 version

Government has kept Responder Organisations (NHS, emergency services, utilities etc.) fully informed on these threats and the likely consequences. Despite the terrible harm that the Covid pandemic has caused, the reality is that the scale was far from the worst that should have been planned for. It thankfully appears that WSFRS reacted and coped well with the impact of the pandemic, but it is unclear how much of that was the result of effective pre-planning and how much was improvised response to a crisis, something the service is traditionally very good at. 

To those who have had experience of Government pandemic planning, it is painfully obvious that this Government's preparation and response was inadequate. So, it is no surprise that they would like the public to believe it could not be predicted. It was predicted, the harm was predicted, and all Responder Organisations should have been prepared. It would be unwise for the Chief Fire Officer to support the fiction being promoted by the Government ahead of the public inquiry. It certainly won't help when the Government attempt to pass the buck to Responder Organisations, and others, for the failures to prepare and to respond effectively.

Pandemic consequences were predicted 

All Chief Officers should have been aware

Misinformation and secrecy continue at Fire & Rescue Service Scrutiny Committee

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?

Source: Home Office fire statistics

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?

Inaccurate figures in Performance Report for 2020-21

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. 

Chief Fire Officer, Dr Sabrina Cohen-Hatton, 

won't tell Councillors about failures that could put lives at risk

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. 

Extract from the Fire and Rescue Services Act

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.

Incidents attended (note - the number of emergency calls received is greater than incidents attended)

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.