At last week’s West Sussex County Council meeting, the
Conservatives disgracefully voted down a proposal to review fire & rescue
service response times. Councillor Mike Glennon voiced concern that response
times were increasing and asked for an independent review. This was supported
by Independent, Labour, Liberal Democrat and UKIP Councillors.
Cabinet Member David Barling angrily suggested this was only
proposed because it was election year, but Councillors have been asking for
greater transparency for over two years.
Mr Barling had promised to publish
monthly details of response time failures in 2015, but he has failed to do so.
It should also be noted that the proposer of the motion, and two Councillors who
spoke in support, are not standing in the May elections.
The election is pertinent though, as it is David Barling who
does not want the public to learn the true cost of Conservative cuts to the
fire & rescue service. We should not be surprised though. When the Council
was petitioned not to cut £1.6 million from the fire & rescue service
budget, he callously told Councillors to ignore the 55 extra deaths predicted
by their computer modelling.
David Barling also tried to suggest that this was just about
the Selsey Academy fire and that firefighters had done their best. Yet, this
was a blatant attempt to divert attention from the real problem, which is
County wide. None of the Councillors criticised firefighters, indeed they all praised
them, but Mr Barling tried to use firefighters as a shield for his failings.
County Council figures show the service is increasingly failing
to meet response times, with a 7% increase in failures for life threatening
fires since the cuts. Yet these averages hide the worst response times experienced
in some areas.
Note: the target is 80%
Astonishingly Mr Barling claimed, “financial cutbacks have got
absolutely nothing to do with this, even if they did exist”. Only a fool would
believe that closing fire stations and cutting a quarter of the County’s frontline
fire engines would not increase response times.
Councillor Andy Petch, who is not standing in
May’s elections, said, “the only thing stretched about the claim that West
Sussex response targets are stretch targets is the truth, because for nearly two
thirds of the County we’ve got a very generous 14 minute target.” He added that,
for up to 20% of calls, the response time could be even longer without missing
the target (it only requires 80% success).
Councillor Michael Jones said, “across Hampshire
the target is 8 minutes, across Devon, Somerset, Kent, Norfolk and Surrey the
target is 10 minutes, whilst less than 4% of West Sussex is deemed to deserve a
10 minute response or less”.
Sadly, Councillor Barling and his Conservative cronies only rejected
the review to hide evidence that their so called fire & rescue service
improvements were actually damaging cuts. A case of preferring to keep West
Sussex residents in the dark for their own political self-interest.
