Positive news for a change, hopefully!

Your chance to help improve your fire & rescue service.

Proposals 2 and 3

The County Council is currently consulting the public on plans for the next four years. At long last there are two proposals that should help improve the protection offered to residents by speeding up some response times. Some will be unaware that at Burgess Hill, East Grinstead, Haywards Heath and Shoreham fire stations, there are only firefighters on duty there from 7am-7pm Monday to Friday. For the rest of the time those stations are dependent on retained (On Call) firefighters who have to get to the fire station, from wherever they may be, before fire engines can leave the fire station.

Similarly, the Crewing Optimisation Group, wholetime firefighters who are used to help crew fire engines at retained (On Call) fire stations when they are short of firefighters, also only operate from 7am-7pm Monday to Friday. Sadly, the Council has known for a long time that there are similar crewing problems between 7am and 7pm on Saturdays and Sundays, but until now has ignored the problem.

Chief Fire Officer Sabrina Cohen-Hatton now wants to address that failure by extending that day cover to include Saturdays and Sundays. This is long overdue and deserves support from the public and Councillors. However, it has emerged that proposals 2 and 3, which will require an additional 20 wholetime firefighters, is dependent on the County Council agreeing to allocate the additional budget, so it is not a foregone conclusion.

If anyone doubts the need for this, the latest quarterly figures show that even though most of West Sussex is only considered worthy of a 14 minute response time, the service failed to meet response targets on 17.5% of occasions. 

A continuing result of the Council's cuts to the number of wholetime and retained firefighter posts and their failure to fill all the remaining retained posts. 

Proposals 2 and 3 deserve support

A loss of 310, mostly frontline, firefighters since 2004.

Source - Home Office fire & rescue service data

Cabinet Member refuses to provide Councillors with supporting documents

It is very disappointing that no supporting documents have been made available. It is usual in such consultations to have more detailed modelling and business case information available on the website, and this is essential for those who want to fully understand the implications of proposed changes. 

Astonishingly, such important documents have not even been provided to the Council's Fire & Rescue Service Scrutiny Committee. 

At their recent meeting, Councillor John Milne asked why they had not been provided. Instead of offering to make them available, Cabinet Member Duncan Crow said there will be opportunities to delve further into the proposals at a behind closed doors meeting for Councillors only. That is of no help to the public and also denies Councillors the opportunity of studying the documents ahead of the meeting. 

No doubt Councillor Crow would not have endorsed these proposals without seeing a detailed business case, so it is improper to hide these from the Scrutiny Committee and the public. 

The other proposals

This lack of detail makes it impossible to fully understand how the proposals will be achieved and the risks and benefits associated with them.

Proposal 1 - some fine words in this section, but no real information on what an 'operational response model' is, or how it would operate. There is only one way to have the right people, with the right skills, equipment and training in the right locations, at the right time, and that is to ensure they are always available. 

There is no way of knowing where the next incident will be, or how many of the 'right people' you will need at that incident. More detail is needed.

Proposal 4 - sadly this proposal carries risk for both the public and for firefighters. Despite the emphasis in the document on false alarms, automatic fire alarm systems do detect fires many times every year. They play a vital part in saving lives and property, provided the fire service attends quickly. 

Not attending, or discouraging premise owners from having their alarms automatically call the service, will lead to small fires developing into much larger ones. That will inevitably put lives at risk, result in more damage, and require more resources to deal with the fire. 

There are occasions that such buildings might only have one person on site, for security, maintenance etc. If that person is incapacitated by the fire or the event that started the fire, and for policy reasons the service does not respond to the automatic alarm, that policy could be a death sentence. By the time the fire is visible outside the building, and someone makes a '999' call, it may well be too late to save the victim and the building. Deaths have already occurred in other areas when the fire service did not attend an alarm operating call.

It is unfair to expect people to comment without seeing the risk assessments and the differences in expected outcomes for the different options.  

Proposal 5 - it really is time this low, medium etc. risk nonsense, with response times that are far too long, was replaced. This assessment has nothing to do with the risk to individuals, the risk to property, or the risk to the environment, it is just an attempt to justify inadequate response times. 

Fires don't burn slower in Wisborough Green, than they do in Worthing, or slower in Bosham, than they do in Bognor Regis. Lives are just as important in Balcombe, as they are in Burgess Hill, and just as important in Loxwood, as they are in Littlehampton. There are also nationally important and irreplaceable historic buildings and sensitive ecological sites scattered across the County.   

Response times should properly reflect the real threat to lives, property and the environment.

Response times for the first fire engine

1 = West Midlands (whole area) - 5 minutes

2 = Hampshire (whole area) - 8 minutes

3 = Surrey (whole area) and 2% of West Sussex - 10 minutes

4 = 37% of West Sussex - 12 minutes

5 = 61% of West Sussex - 14 minutes

Proposal 6 - whist reviews are needed from time to time, history tells us that they usually result in cuts to resources, not improvements. It is concerning that the Council don't intend to consult on all proposed changes, just those the Council considers 'significant'. That means there could be a further deterioration in specialist capability, despite the need for that capability remaining and even increasing. 

Last year there were 45 incidents involving hazardous materials, which is more than double the average of ten years ago. Assisting other agencies has risen dramatically, from less than a 100 per year, ten years ago, to 637 last year. Despite a drop last year, connected to less vehicles on the road during Covid restrictions, around 500 road traffic collisions were attended every year of the previous ten years. 

Many of these non fire incidents require specialist resources, such as the heavy rescue tenders, breathing apparatus support units and aerial ladder platforms. Previous Council cuts has seen the number of each of those specialist vehicles reduced. That, and inadequate crewing, too often sees just one of each type having to cover the whole County, and consequently taking a long time to reach some emergencies. 

Any proposed changes should be put out for further public consultation.

Despite my reservations about the lack of information, I would urge residents to respond to the consultation.

The closing date is 21 January 2022.

Postscript

Those who read my previous post will know that, after the October committee meeting, I wrote to Committee Chairman, Councillor Kevin Boram, to voice my concern that the committee would be unable to do their job effectively if they are denied information and given inaccurate answers. 

Sadly, I have had no reply. No reassurance, no rebuttal, not even an acknowledgment. At this latest meeting, Councillor Boram failed to support Councillor Milne's request for more detailed documentation on the Community Risk Management Plan proposals. I had hoped the new Chairman would be more probing than his predecessors, but it appears that the committee is still little more than a rubber stamp for the Cabinet Member's decisions.

You cannot have proper scrutiny without transparency.