Examination of Witnesses (Questions 80-100)
21 OCTOBER 2003
MICK HOWELL,
JEREMY HILTON
AND BARRY
MERRITT
Q80 Chris Mole: So within local government
you have become very familiar with the Comprehensive Performance
Assessment approach. Do you have any reservations about the introduction
of CPAs for authorities that operate within a county council structure?
Mr Hilton: Not at all, but it
would be nice if the Fire and Rescue Service gets an excellent
result, that the county council also gets acknowledgement that
that is the service they are providing as well, which it would
not do at the moment.
Q81 Chris Mole: Do Cornwall take
the same view?
Mr Howell: I do and professionally
I take the view that it is long overdue that we have actually
got an independent body looking at the Fire Service rather than
the Inspectorate. I think the Inspectorate has an important role,
but. . .
Q82 Chairman: Would you abolish the
Inspectorate?
Mr Howell: No, I would not abolish
them. I did say they have a clear role and that role, so far as
I am concerned, is very clearly directed in policy and standards
for Fire Services to work to, but not an audit and inspection
role.
Q83 Chairman: We have the Health
and Safety Executive making some suggestions as to policy. You
have the Inspectorate and then you have the Audit Commission.
There is a danger with the Audit Commission that they actually
stretch into policy rather than in the ways in which they make
policy. Are you happy with that?
Mr Howell: I can only speak from
the brief experience I had with the CPA inspection which was carried
out for Cornwall County Council and I was involved in it because
I had corporate responsibilities as well as the Fire Service.
My understanding and experience of that CPA process was that it
was a very realistic and structured approach to looking at the
efficiency and the aspirations of that particular authority. If
they use the same principles when inspecting the Fire Service
I think they will gain a very good understanding about the mood
and the developments that are taking place and whether we are
striving, struggling or whatever other definition they choose
to use. I am picking up a Charter Mark award tomorrow whilst I
am in London, and I think that says something about the Fire Service.
That is another independent review, if you like, of the way we
deliver services. If we are doing our job—what we are paid
to do—I do not think we should fear inspection or audit
from anybody. I just think it is better if it is independent.
Q84 Chairman: Can we go on to this
question of retained fire fighters. Mr Merritt, you actually employ
a lot of people who you then release as retained fire fighters.
Mr Merritt: We have done for 30
years. At one stage we had five retained fire fighters out of
45 employees. The worse problem you have is summer time when there
are moorland fires, or winter when there are floods and you actually
lose them for a complete day. You cannot make that up, but what
we do is that we structure their jobs around what they do. We
decided at the beginning that we wanted to give something back
to the community. There were 10 employers 30 years ago, now there
are three of us; all the rest are self-employed people.
Q85 Chairman: So it is quite difficult
for you to release people actually to do the retained fire officers
job. What about if you wanted to go on to give those people a
lot of training? It would be almost impossible for you to release
them to have that training.
Mr Merritt: They take it as holiday
and do the training in their holiday time. That is their choice.
Releasing them for fires is bad enough, but to release them for
two weeks" training would be impossible.
Q86 Chairman: You are saying that
there are only three people in your area who are now releasing
people. Is that right?
Mr Merritt: That is right. Even
the local council will not release staff to go to fires. Most
of them are self-employed. There is nothing for them; there is
no reward for employers to do that.
Q87 Chairman: Should there be a reward?
Would you be able to manage your work if there was some reward
for releasing them?
Mr Merritt: I do not think so
much a reward financially, but some sort of recognition for the
employers would do it. Financially greed comes into it, so I would
say that you have to accept that you are going to put something
back into the community or not. That is what we decided to do.
Q88 Chairman: How many people in
your area actually know that you provide part of the fire cover?
Mr Merritt: Probably none at all.
We do not make a song and dance of it. A lot of people do not
even know that we have retained firemen locally. If they are trying
to get to a fire they have a sign that they hold up saying "Fire"
and they put their headlights on. They have horrendous problems.
People will not let them through.
Q89 Chairman: From your point of
view as an employer, you think it is going to be quite difficult
into the future.
Mr Merritt: I think that the employers
have to be recognised. Someone from the Fire Service actually
has to go and see those employers to see if they can persuade
them. I am sure if you work around someone's work schedule, for
instance someone working in Tesco's stacking shelves, why could
he not be released? But nobody actually goes to see them. Nobody
goes to Tesco's, for example, to see the manager. There is nobody
from the Fire Service actually involved. It is all done from the
local station office.
Q90 Chairman: So you think that if
there was much more publicity and much more effort from the top,
it might be possible to get rather more retained officers in an
area like yours.
Mr Merritt: Yes.
Q91 Chairman: But you are also telling
me that really if they are going to be trained then that would
become impossible for yourself and a lot of other employers.
Mr Merritt: It would. We accept
in the beginning when someone first joins the Fire Service that
they go for their Monday night training and then they go away
for their two weeks. We allow that; they go unpaid from us and
the Fire Service pay their time. The training thereafter is taken
as part of their holiday.
Mr Howell: Could I just add a
point on the retainership. I think here lies probably one of the
biggest problems for the future of the Fire Service in terms of
having a sustainable retained service. I do not think this Select
Committee or central Government should underestimate that.
Q92 Chairman: That is one of the
reasons why we are asking for you evidence.
Mr Howell: Indeed. The point I
would make—particularly about training and particularly
in relation to IPDS and the broadening role in the community that
the Fire Service is probably going to undertake—is that
the current arrangements not only whereby an employee is giving
up their holiday (which is when they are supposed to rest) to
actually work (because that is what the training entails) is just
not sustainable. This particular employer has been fairly charitable
in that area, but there are a lot of employers, certainly in my
area, who are now saying that they just cannot afford to allow
people to be lost from the workforce for however long it is. I
do think that we need to recognise—and hopefully you are
already beginning to do this—that the cheap alternative
service that the retained fire cover has provided in the past
and accounts for the difference in terms of spend, is going to
change significantly, otherwise we are going to lose the Service.
We have to ease the demands on those fire fighters so they do
not spend all their spare time training and that will be a challenge.
That may also be about putting full-time bobbies on the beat,
as it were, to do some of the community fire safety work in those
areas so that the retained fire fighters continue to provide an
emergency response. It is not going to be cheap in the future
for a variety of reasons, not least of all IPDS.
Q93 Christine Russell: Can I ask
you about a couple of reservations that have not actually been
raised by other authorities. One is, the redeployment of unfit
fire fighters; can you comment on why that is going to be more
difficult for an authority like yours? Secondly, you have reservations
about the change of name.
Mr Howell: Firstly, the re-location
of unfit fire fighters, the number we talk about in a Brigade
such as mine are few in number so are the support service functions
that they could actually take up. Quite frankly I have nowhere
to put them. This is like a redeployment register in a sense.
Once they cannot be operational fire fighters if I put them in
another job it could be a community fire safety role, they are
taking the job of somebody else; that job may not be vacant. In
any event, the salary for that job would normally be considerably
less so it is going to cost me more to employ them. I do not work
in a metropolitan or a larger brigade, but my experience in Hertfordshire
was that you can absorb a small number of out of contract, unfit
fire fighters for some support work.
Q94 Christine Russell: So what is
the answer? Finding them jobs outside the Fire Service? Have you
thought it through as to where they could go?
Mr Howell: I think you have go
further back down the value chain line and actually make sure
they do not become unfit in the first place. That means more investment
in occupational health. The Fire Service Benevolent Fund provides
a therapy centre and that is free of charge; fire authorities
do not pay for that, it is provided through fund raising from
fire fighters and communities. We do not have that sort of facility;
some occupational health systems in brigades do. I think this
preventative work has got to be done before you actually get to
that position.
Q95 Chairman: There are going to
be certain things that are going to happen to some fire fighters
which, however good your prevention services are, you are not
going to prevent them getting problems.
Mr Howell: It is not an ideal
world so you will always get them coming through. All I am saying
is that where you can absorb them into the system, fine; but that
should not be seen as a panacea because small brigades like mine
just cannot absorb that extra resource becomes an extra. I have
to replace a fire fighter on the run, that person becomes supernumerary,
I do not have anywhere to put them.
Q96 Christine Russell: What about
in the local authority? Have you had these discussions?
Mr Howell: There are those possibilities
but I think there is a bit of a culture change needed on the part
of fire fighters, particularly in terms of the IPDS skills and
assessment they will be doing. Just because they cannot ride a
fire engine does not mean to say that they are no loner of use
to the wider authority. At the moment we are part of a wider authority;
we may not be in the future.
Q97 Christine Russell: What about
the name change?
Mr Howell: I do not have a major
problem with it. We are modernising the Fire Service and we are
using the name that has been around for thirty-plus years. I think
it was Cambridgeshire Fire and Rescue Service in the late 1960s
first dubbed it the Fire and Rescue Service. Here we are talking
about a preventative role and we are actually calling ourselves
something that only reflects the emergency response. I think a
Fire Department or Community Fire Service is a more appropriate
name.
Q98 Chairman: Is that your favourite?
Mr Howell: I do not have a brilliant
snappy name because I do not work for Saatchi and Saatchi, but
I suppose Community Fire Service would do. So long as it has an
identity to go with it; that is the important thing.
Q99 Christine Russell: Is there any
difference between the rural areas and more built up urban areas
in the cause of fires?
Mr Howell: Generally speaking,
no. The trends that you have had heard from colleagues—and
particularly some of the more recent trends in terms of car fires—match
across the country. One of the issues about attendance times in
rural areas and the impact that a fire has is clearly different
in our area. You have heard a lot about IRMP but you may not have
seen one of these so I will leave this with the administrator.
It answers a question that you have raised about sprinklers and
gives a risk rating for various measures. If I may just finish
on this point, you have asked about what single measures could
be taken and a couple of my colleagues have alluded to this. You
have to work from the basis that fires can be preventable but
not all will be and then deal with the residual consequences of
that. You cannot put a car on the road without an MOT unless you
break the law, but you can actually do what you like in your own
home, including kill your own children without apparent penalty
unless somebody is callous enough to prosecute a parent who has
just lost their child in a fire even though they may have caused
the fire through their own negligence. I think a sort of domestic
MOT system—which the Fire Service could run and is not about
fire risk assessment, it is about a total safety check which is
about giving advice on all aspects of domestic safety and then
dealing with the residual risk through sprinklers and smoke detectors—is
the way forward. We have PFI funding to support a one-stop safety
shop in Cornwall—we are working on that project now—which
will co-ordinate all the activities of all the safety agencies
to provide a call-handling and a drop-in centre to receive advice
on any aspect of personal or business safety. That is where the
Fire Service should be positioned in the future.
Q100 Chris Mole: On the causes of
fire, one of the things that I heard was that as we moved into
the age of electricity fires started by candles disappeared. With
the popularity of aromatherapy these things are actually becoming
quite a nuisance. Is that something you can comment on?
Mr Howell: We have had experience
of fatal fires in Cornwall and many of my colleagues up and down
the country have also had fatal fires caused by candles being
used for aromatherapy. Also with the decorations round the base
for Christmas purposes and so on. A candle is a naked flame; it
does not have a place in the home so far as I am concerned. There
are not any in my home. I think they should be banned.
Chairman: Well that is fairly blunt advice.
On that note, can I thank you very much indeed for you evidence.
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