Memorandum by Colin Ive MBA (FRS 64)
As a Retained firefighter for the past 25 years,
23 of them as Officer in Charge of a busy single pump Retained
fire station in Hampshire I'm totally dismayed by the continual
discrimination poured upon us and it is this discrimination which
has finally worn me down to the point were I plan to leave the
service in the next few months. Despite the commitment and regular
sacrifices I have seen Retained firefighters give, in particular
during the time when so many tried to keep their local communities
safe during the FBU dispute in 2003, all the promises of modernisation,
the proposals from the Bain report and the much promised, but
it seems soon forgotten, Retained Review have hardly made any
impact down at the grass roots level.
As I write all the Retained Sub Officers in
charge of Retained fire stations in Hampshire are to be demoted
as part of the Rank to Role process, a process which seems to
have been hijacked at county level with additional local "conventions"
which have encouraged this demotion. This at a time when the opportunities
should be being pursued to use such people more effectively in
the safety of their communities by using them and their staff
widely in prevention duties.
Community Fire Safety save lives reduces fires
and reduces the financial losses from fires. I know, my station
has been practicing this for the past six years; entirely voluntarily
we have raised funds locally, over £33,000, to purchase smoke
detectors, 13,272 in total, and freely distributed these as personal
issue to our local school children for fitting into their bedrooms.
We know this has been worthwhile, we have met the family of four
one who awoke in the middle of the night to one of these sounding
and alerting them to what would without doubt have been a serious
and very probably fatal house fire. Yet we are now told to cease
this work as it is not "service policy" and recently
described by a senior officer as "amateurish". It wasn't
thought amateurish when we started this program in 1999, its wasn't
"amateurish" last year when we were judged as finalists
in the National Fire Safety Awards, and not of course by the family
one saved or by the many others who would have suffered fires
had not an early warning from an alarm have altered them before
any need to call 999 was required. This program was of zero cost
to the service, saved lives and contributed directly to the safety
of our community, yet we have been ordered to stop. True a Home
Fire Safety Check for each household is being promoted by the
service but this will take many years, if ever to complete. Our
program would have provided free added value to the service CFS
policy but has been simply thrown away.
The government identified that the Retained
Fire Service is "Firefighting on the cheap" and that
much needs to be done by Fire Services to improve both recruitment
and retention within Retained Fire Fighting. But perhaps most
poignant is the requirement that "Retained Fire fighters
need to be properly valued as part of the Integrated Risk Management
Process". Hampshire's response to this by continually discriminating
against this one specific group of employees is a management failure.
Such failure seems common within the British fire service served
by many senior officers who clearly appear incapable of transferring
their abilities to manage a fire or rescue incident into that
of managing an organisation or teams of people in ways which produces
a motivated, effective and efficient workforce. Retained firefighters
are the most efficient firefighting workforce one could have but
they are daily becoming less effective by being continually demotivated
in so many ways.
Despite the rhetoric one may hear I can tell
you from the coal, or fire, face that we are not valued nor is
our potential recognised, we could do so much more but in so many
ways we are, apart from a few notable exceptions, being motivated
into doing less and less.
Our communities deserve better than this.
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