Standards cut to hide Fire Control failures & worst WSFRS performance for 18 months

Joint Fire Control failure cover up

Papers before today's Fire & Rescue Service Scrutiny Committee meeting reveal West Sussex County Council's shabby plan to drop their agreed standard for the Joint Fire Control to answer 98% of '999' calls within 7 seconds. This is something that any well staffed and efficient fire & rescue service control room should be able to achieve.

Yet since the joint Surrey/West Sussex Fire Control began dealing with West Sussex emergencies, they have consistently failed to meet this standard.

False claim

To make matters worse, they are dishonestly claiming that answering 95% of '999' calls in 10 seconds is a national performance standard. It is nothing of the sort. They have hijacked this from the Code of Practice for Public Emergency Call Service document, which is merely a working agreement between communications providers and the emergency services.

Unlike a proper performance standard, which focuses on keeping the public safe, this is simply an agreement by the emergency services to help communications providers reduce the time they spend on transferring calls. It is not about public safety, but about freeing up '999' call handler time, so communications providers, like BT, won't need to employ more staff.

This agreement was mostly about what police and ambulance services could achieve with their significantly higher call volumes. It is not an acceptable standard for fire & rescue services. Surrey County Council, who manage the Joint Fire Control, must be required to deliver their promised level of service. 

There is no legitimate excuse for Joint Fire Control failing to answer 98% of '999' calls within 7 seconds. That standard must remain in place and be met.

Failing to alert fire stations on time

Not only is the Joint Fire Control missing their target for answering '999' calls, they are also failing to ensure that fire stations are alerted within 2 minutes of the emergency call being received on 98% of calls.

The excuses offered in the report for consistently being over 10% below standard do not stack up. The previous joint East/West Sussex Fire Control faced exactly the same challenges and performed much better.

The 'deep dive' review promised in the report is to be welcomed, but these failings suggest there are fundamental weaknesses in this Joint Fire Control. Concerns have already been raised about a failure to ensure there are enough staff available, and there may be other problems contributing to these failures. 

Questions have to be asked about whether this so called 'state of the art' mobilising system is part of the problem (there have been reports from others using the same system of slow running at times), is it the loss of local knowledge, is it unnecessarily time consuming procedures, is it inadequate training etc? 

Whatever lies behind this unsatisfactory performance, which delays help reaching West Sussex residents, it must be fixed urgently. 

Poor performance

The performance report for the second quarter of 2021-22 shows the worst decline of the last six quarterly reports. Fourteen of the thirty core performance measures are worse, with some being the worst for 18 months.

Those affecting how quickly help reaches people in trouble are the most troubling. In addition to the fire control failures, overall response times for the first fire engine to arrive at critical fires and at critical special services, such as road traffic collisions with people trapped, are the worst of the last six quarters. 

The latest figures show that they failed to achieve the generous response target times (12 minutes for 37% and 14 minutes for 61% of the County) at a shocking 17.5% critical fires. 

The target for those needing rescue from crashed road vehicles and from other hazardous situations is 13 minutes, yet in the latest quarter shown the failure occurred on nearly one in four emergencies.

You will also notice the worrying downward trendline on these graphs. Sadly, the underlying reasons for these performance failures is West Sussex County Council's funding and staffing cuts.

Despite these being core measures in the West Sussex County Council Plan, they have not been selected for examination by the Scrutiny Committee.

We keep getting excuses about the failure to properly crew Retained (On Call) fire engines, but little effective action. Things continue to get worse.

Proposals 2 and 3 in the Community Risk Management Plan consultation, which will see extra wholetime firefighters employed, is the first measure likely to improve this poor performance. Those proposals should be supported. 

However, I am concerned they may be too little, and they are certainly too late to help the many West Sussex residents who have had to wait an unacceptably long time for help to arrive.

Between them, Government and West Sussex County Council have inflicted serious damage on the Fire & Rescue Service's effectiveness to help those in trouble. 

They both need to do more.