Other people's comments on the cuts

For those who are not on Facebook, I thought you may like to see some of the comments made by other people. Many of them are or were in the service so they know how bad the cuts will be:

"One other issue I will add to your list is the apparent gagging of our serving firefighters. It appears that they have been told/warned by officers not to comment. That cannot be within the spirit of free speech or human rights, they also contribute to the tax pot, so why shouldn't they have their say?"

"They are increasing crewing at Littlehampton but failed to disclose at the meeting how much it was going to cost to upgrade the facilities. Littlehampton has plenty of retained and the wholetime personnel would be better being positioned where there is a shortage. The money being wasted by modifying Littlehampton could be used to save services elsewhere. The fire brigade employed an outside consultation company to work on the cuts and obviously they found in favour of the brigade who was the paymaster!! Why if we are trying to save money didn't they do it in house?"

"The outside consultation company, used invited audiences and asked loaded questions to lead to the audience to agreeing to the proposed cuts !! The invited audience were paid £40 each to attend the meetings!!!!!"

"I have just read some of the cabinet papers on the cuts, one of the reasons given to remove appliances from Midhurst, Petworth and Storrington is that the second appliances are often unavailable. What the CFO and DCFO have failed to inform councillors is that this is because of the lack of a robust recruitment system over the past two decades. Recruitment has been left to local firefighters without much resource. No WSFRS Management team, do not blame our frontline firefighters, YOU are to blame for appliances not being available."

"The Conservative administration's idea of democracy does not extend as far as allowing scrutiny committees to actually vote in favour or against the decision."

"Terrible outcome. The councillors are a disgrace. I thought the chairman may have not supported the cuts but that was not to be. I wonder if he would have voted differently if his house had been lost when we attended and put out a bathroom fire years ago !!!!"

"Don't you know that they don't care because they will always give a reason 'it wasn't their Service's fault', when somebody dies. It has happened after closures or changes from being 24/7, and when RDS pumps aren't available anymore." 

"Unfortunately Tony the chief fire officer doesn't care about West Sussex or its residents. It's a shame he is just a hatchet man who is going to use West Sussex as a stepping stone to new heights. If he was a West Sussex resident things would be different."