Secrecy and cover up continue like a cancer in West Sussex

The control room fiasco gets worse

In my last post I referred to the Freedom of Information requests, which were submitted to both Surrey and West Sussex fire & rescue services, about the control room fiasco. Both of them should have provided the requested information by the 18th February, but they did not. Surrey did reply on the 18th but said, “Unfortunately, there will be a short delay in issuing the response to this request.” West Sussex Fire & Rescue Service finally responded, three days late, but failed to provide any information.

They refused the request and claim the information is “commercially sensitive”

Now the last time I looked both Surrey and West Sussex County Councils, including their fire & rescue services were not commercial organisations, but public bodies that are accountable to the public. The Fire & Rescue Services Act does permit a fire & rescue authority to arrange for another fire & rescue authority to discharge functions on its behalf, but it does not say that details of how they discharge that function can be kept secret. 

With a new County Council Leader, new Chief Executive and new Chief Fire Officer I had hoped the days of secrecy and cover up were behind us, but it appears my hopes were misplaced.

Council Leader Paul Marshall’s claims that his vision is “to lead an authority that is open with the public about how it works” and that he “welcomes scrutiny” seem rather hollow now. Council Chief Executive Becky Shaw’s claims about communication being important seem similarly hollow. Chief Fire Officer Sabrina Cohen-Hatton speaks about the importance of staff being able to trust in the organisation, but it seems that public trust is not important when secrecy is the priority.

Incredibly, there is no agreement!

The West Sussex reply goes on to say: "The project has only recently commenced, with the section 16 agreement yet to be drawn up." So West Sussex County Council has spent a large amount of public money, and Surrey have been handling West Sussex emergencies for nearly three months, without a signed agreement - unbelievable.

Any responsible fire & rescue authority would have had the Fire & Rescue Services Act section 16 agreement drawn up and signed before handing responsibility over. Once again, West Sussex County Council fails to do things responsibly.

Having already handed their legal responsibility for call handling and mobilising over to Surrey, West Sussex has left itself with no bargaining power when they eventually draw up the agreement. Concerns that this arrangement lacks proper safeguards for West Sussex residents now look very real. It was completely reckless to commence operation without a signed agreement, especially on staffing levels.

Without a signed section 16 agreement, it begs the question, 

"Has West Sussex County Council acted lawfully?"

Commercially Sensitive Claim is bogus

When they even refuse to provide information on West Sussex only activity, it is very clear that the commercially sensitive claim is bogus. 

The question about control room training and experience of the West Sussex staff who are responsible for assessing and signing off the adequacy of staffing levels for the agreement only relates to West Sussex. Similarly, how on earth can details of the standards, good practice guides, studies and research material, used by West Sussex to inform the assessment process, be commercially sensitive? 

Details of problems that resulted, or could have resulted, in a delay to the attendance at West Sussex incidents since Surrey took over, and what has been done about those problems, are matters of serious public concern, but apparently that too is “commercially sensitive”.

The public also has a right to know what performance standards West Sussex Fire & Rescue Service has specified in this yet to be concluded agreement with Surrey, but again they claim that is “commercially sensitive”.

With increasing concerns nationally about IT failures and inadequate staffing levels in fire controls, secrecy and cover up cannot be tolerated.

Chief Executive Becky Shaw was right when she said that there are "fundamental issues that need to be addressed" in West Sussex County Council. One of them is the Council's historic resistance to scrutiny and accountability, including trying to frustrate legitimate Freedom of Information requests.

So I would ask Paul Marshall, Becky Shaw and Sabrina Cohen-Hatton, "are you continuing to resist scrutiny and accountability, or is this the result of poor advice from those in the Council who have always preferred secrecy and cover up?"

If it is poor advice, then it is time your advisers were reminded that they are supposed to protect the public, not cover up County Council mistakes.

Why adequate staffing is vital

There is no pattern to instances of high demand in fire service control rooms, it can happen at any time of day, on any day of the week, and at any time of the year. The recent bad weather is a reminder of how demand can suddenly increase. A summer storm in July 2007 illustrates this very well. At the time, each fire & rescue service had their own dedicated control room and in the case of West Sussex it was well staffed. 

At the peak, West Sussex's fire control was receiving two emergency calls a minute and within 15 hours they had managed just under 300 emergency calls. Of those, 150 were about incidents in West Sussex, but 146 were for other fire service control rooms that were unable to answer their calls in a reasonable time. Most were for emergencies in London, but Surrey provided the second most and East Sussex the third most calls. Not all the calls that day were flooding related, there were also fires, rescues and road traffic collisions. 

With significantly less control staff today, 

a similar event would result in serious and even life threatening delays.  

Computer Business Review

During the recent storm 'Dennis', London Fire Brigade suffered a major IT failure and "Control room staff were forced to resort to taking pen and paper notes, and patching calls through to local fire stations manually." Clear evidence that claims about technology enabling you to have less staff are reckless. 

Staffing levels must always be sufficient to handle both 
sudden increases in demand and technology failures. 
  
Performance information secretly moved

At the last County Council meeting there were two interesting questions about fire & rescue from Councillors Chris Oxlade and Michael Jones. 

Chris Oxlade pointed out that details of response times for the second fire engine attending fires, and for the first fire engine at road traffic collisions were among items removed from the council’s Performance Dashboard. He asked when they would be restored.

The answer revealed that the data had been moved and could now be found on the fire & rescue service reports page of the website. Reassuring that the information can be found, but disappointing that it is less user friendly than it was on the Performance Dashboard.

It remains unclear why it was secretly moved with, apparently, neither the public or councillors being informed. Perhaps they did not want people to scrutinise it?

More dubious advice

In a question about councils selling data to third parties, Michael Jones also asked about sensitive and personal data now being shared with Surrey County Council, following the fire control change. The answers were rather alarming. 

It appears that no consent was sought from individuals, businesses or partners to share personal, commercial or security sensitive information. The excuse offered was that the Fire & Rescue Services Act provided a lawful basis, but that Act does not cover data sharing. That is dealt with by the Data Protection Act, which they seem happy to ignore.

Now it is true that the Information Commissioner has accepted there may be a need to share data during an emergency, but blanket sharing ahead of an emergency is not accepted. In their haste to enter in to this arrangement it seems that the the Data Protection Act and the rights of individuals were not properly considered. 

The Commissioner's guidance is clear, before sharing they must consider if the objective can be achieved by passing less personal data and that sometimes consent should be sought before sharing data.

This is even more alarming when you realise that the data is now much more vulnerable to unlawful access because it is stored in more locations, including those of commercial organisations:

Data held by West Sussex County Council is stored on servers in Chichester and Horsham. Data held by Surrey County Council is stored at their premises in Salfords and Guildford.

Data is stored on commercial premises for the following reasons:

• Hosted – where the Council’s bespoke system is hosted at the software vendor’s own premises or third-party premises (e.g. Cloud provider – Microsoft, Amazon, etc.).

• IaaS – Infrastructure as a Service – where the Council buys compute and storage capacity from a mainstream Cloud provider and manages these applications directly.

• SaaS – Software as a Service – where the Council buys an end user solution – with operation, maintenance, storage and support of a software solution handled directly by the vendor – the Council consumes resources provided as a service (SmartCore Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) replacement project is proposing to procure through this model).

When you realise that stolen, leaked or corrupted data often results from the actions of disgruntled employees and companies who lose contracts, having so many opportunities to gain access to the data, lawfully or unlawfully, is alarming. 

Now of course they mention agreements and contractual obligations covering data protection, but they can fail and the more there are the greater the risk. Not forgetting of course that the section 16 agreement with Surrey has not yet been drawn up!

The Council's continuing cavalier attitude to data protection
and freedom of information legislation is disturbing.