County Councillors again fail West Sussex residents

Committee Chairman Cllr. Kevin Boram and Chief Fire Officer Sabrina Cohen-Hatton

At the recent meeting of the Fire & Rescue Service Scrutiny Committee, Councillors failed to insist that Surrey County Council honour their agreement to meet specified performance standards in their fire control. Instead of answering all '999' calls within 7 seconds, they have dropped the standard to let them take longer than 10 seconds to answer one in twenty emergency calls. The standard for the time taken to notify fire crews of emergencies was also cut.

No justification was given for this performance cut, just a misleading link to a target figure in a working agreement between all the emergency services and British Telecom. It was claimed that now the fire control is handling emergency calls for three authorities, they need to align West Sussex with East Sussex and Surrey Fire & Rescue Services. Sadly, that is simply an excuse to drop adequate West Sussex standards to suit the inadequate standards of others. This is not about fire control personnel not performing well, they do, it is a senior management and Cabinet Member failure.

West Sussex residents deserve high standards, not Surrey's low standards.

Consultation results withheld from Scrutiny Committee

The committee was told that the results of the public consultation on the Community Risk Management Plan had been discussed by the Chairman, the Cabinet Member, and the Chief Fire Officer. Yet no explanation was given for not publishing the results, or for not providing them to the Scrutiny Committee. Keeping the committee in the dark stops them doing their job properly. 

Consultation results should be published now.

Rural areas are not low risk

There was a worrying contradiction with the Chief Fire Officer talking about rural areas being 'low risk', but also referring to the problem of fire deaths in rural areas. She claimed the trend was for victims to be deceased before the alarm is raised, yet no evidence has been produced to substantiate that. Of course, sometimes, that is the case but there are also instances where it is not, which makes a quick response from fire crews vital if lives are to be saved.

She is quite right that it is better to stop fires starting with the use of prevention activities, but the reality is they cannot stop every life-threatening fire. Research has shown that the optimum response time, to save lives and to confine the fire to the room of origin, is between 5 and 10 minutes. Opportunities to do that diminish rapidly over 10 minutes, yet County Councillors have only made provision to arrive within 10 minutes for just 2% of the County. For 37% of West Sussex, it is 12 minutes, and for 61% it is a staggering 14 minutes. 

Yet, in the last quarter, they failed to arrive within these lengthy times at over 13% of critical fires.

Examples of risks found in rural West Sussex

Just a few examples of the many risks in rural areas - historic buildings, nursing homes, boarding schools, business and industrial parks, food production centres, hotels, and million pound plus homes. There are also many more modest family homes, caravans, both holiday and residential, properties occupied by those who are vulnerable, including those who cannot escape a fire without assistance, areas of deprivation, fuel depots, chemical storage, firework manufacturing, farms, heathland, woodland, areas of outstanding natural beauty, and sites of special scientific interest. All are in danger when fire breaks out. 

West Midlands

West Sussex

A 14 minute target is far too long, failing that target is unacceptable.

Why rural lives, business, property, and environment don't get a quick and effective response

West Sussex Fire & Rescue Service's ability to provide a quick and effective response continues to diminish, and that is fundamentally the fault of County Council cuts to frontline resources. In addition to the removal of eleven frontline fire engines and crews, they fail to ensure the remaining 35 fire engines, at 24 fire stations, can be crewed all the time. This map overlay shows the only 10 fire engines, at 8 fire stations, that have had crews available for more than 95% of the time. The other 25 fire engines only had crews available  for between 15% and 91% of the time. 

It really should be no surprise that rural response has become so poor.

Based on four year average to 2019/20

When the Chief Fire Officer talks about 'low risk', she is really referring to areas that have fewer fires. However, they pose no less of a risk to those who live and work there than fires in urban areas. The actual risk to lives and property may depend on a building's construction, occupancy, and fire safety measures, but it does not depend on geographic location. However, once a fire does break out, in any part of West Sussex, the speed of response can significantly alter the risk to lives and property.

The danger increases for every extra minute it takes firefighters to arrive. 

A little good news

It appears that with the budget now set, additional wholetime personnel will be recruited to extend cover from 5 days to 7 days a week at Day Crewed fire stations and on the Crewing Optimisation Group (they help fill crewing deficiencies on Retained fire stations). This will obviously bring some improvement to response times, particularly in the Adur and Mid Sussex district areas, but it will not reverse all the damage caused by County Council cuts.

More firefighters are needed to properly protect West Sussex residents

Chief Fire Officer unaware of pandemic severity

I really don't understand why the Chief Fire Officer said that nobody could have predicted the scale of the impact of the pandemic. Whilst the public were unaware, those in senior positions in the emergency services should all have been fully aware. Government has known this for over fifteen years, which is why pandemic continued to be shown as the potentially most damaging threat on the National Risk Register. 

As for the scale of the impact, as far back as 2010, pandemic planning assumptions had identified that a pandemic could result in between 50,000 and 750,000 additional deaths, and cause significant disruption to us all:

National Risk Register 2010 version

Government has kept Responder Organisations (NHS, emergency services, utilities etc.) fully informed on these threats and the likely consequences. Despite the terrible harm that the Covid pandemic has caused, the reality is that the scale was far from the worst that should have been planned for. It thankfully appears that WSFRS reacted and coped well with the impact of the pandemic, but it is unclear how much of that was the result of effective pre-planning and how much was improvised response to a crisis, something the service is traditionally very good at. 

To those who have had experience of Government pandemic planning, it is painfully obvious that this Government's preparation and response was inadequate. So, it is no surprise that they would like the public to believe it could not be predicted. It was predicted, the harm was predicted, and all Responder Organisations should have been prepared. It would be unwise for the Chief Fire Officer to support the fiction being promoted by the Government ahead of the public inquiry. It certainly won't help when the Government attempt to pass the buck to Responder Organisations, and others, for the failures to prepare and to respond effectively.

Pandemic consequences were predicted 

All Chief Officers should have been aware