Examination of Witnesses (Questions 20-39)
MR PETER
HOUSDEN, MR
CHRIS WORMALD,
MS HUNADA
NOUSS, MS
CHRISTINA BIENKOWSKA
AND MR
RICHARD MCCARTHY
22 OCTOBER 2007
Q20 John Cummings: What does?
Mr Wormald: What would equate
to a worse service?
Q21 John Cummings: Yes.
Mr Wormald: Fire deaths going
up.
Q22 John Cummings: Just deaths?
Mr Wormald: I think that is a
very good measure of the services' delivery and I think what fire
services have rightly done is shifted resource out of response
into prevention and that has led to a large number of people not
dying.
Q23 Martin Horwood: Do you actually
have any data to back up that assertion? It is not an illogical
assertion to say that because you have shifted resource into prevention
that response times have got worse but it is not necessarily true.
Mr Wormald: I was going to say
that is not the only factor that affects response times. Of course
traffic affects response times quite heavily as well and that
is factored in that. I can send you the research that we have
on the relationship between prevention and response.
Martin Horwood: It would be useful to
have that.
Q24 Sir Paul Beresford: What about
the stations? Many of the fire stations have had to make financial
reductions and in many cases they have actually reduced the numbers
of stations or the manning of the stations, has that made any
difference?
Mr Wormald: I cannot answer you
definitively on whether that has affected response times. I do
not think it is correct that there have been actual cuts in the
amount of money put into fire and resilience services. There have
been a lot of local decisions about how that resource has been
deployed, some of which have led to reductions in numbers of stations
but those are local operational decisions of the type you would
expect chief fire officers to make.
Mr Housden: I think the 2004 Act
did two really powerful things to change the effectiveness of
fire and rescue services. Firstly as Chris has mentioned there
was the shift to prevention; we are not just being about response
but preventative work in the community and secondly your point,
Sir Paul, actually giving flexibility at local level. Bear in
mind that the 1947 Act set down all these national standards that
must be followed in every fire and rescue authority and those
actually made them less efficient and less effective. Allowing
local fire and rescue services and authorities to make their decisions
about what mattered for them, what was the best pattern of stations
and so forth must have contributed to these broadly positive trends.
Q25 Martin Horwood: Again this sounds
like an assertion, but do you actually have data which shows that
where a different strategy has been adopted locally that has led
to a reduction in response times or an increase in response times?
Mr Housden: I could not comment
on the specifics of response times.
Q26 Martin Horwood: Would you also
have any data on Sir Paul's point about reconfiguration of local
stations or about reconfiguration of response centres, FiReControl
centres? Do you have any data that links those in specific areas
to changes in response times?
Mr Wormald: I do not think we
have any specifically but, as I say, those are in the ambit of
the local decision making in this. What we have here is a series
of reforms that we made at national level to give considerably
greater flexibility to local decision making at the same time
as a really quite sharp decline in the number of fire deaths.
That suggests to us nationally that we are getting the balance
in the right place. I can certainly go away and look out what
research is available on those specific points, but in terms of
the national framework that we have drawn up and the effect of
it, we have reasonable confidence that the changes we have made
and the flexibilities that we introduced have allowed a better
local level of response.
Q27 Anne Main: Can I just take you
back, Mr Wormald, to one of the reasons you gave for the possible
deterioration in response times which was traffic. I find that
quite interesting that if we are blue lighting it we are not getting
through traffic. Do you have some statistics to show where the
deterioration in response time is overlaid where the most congested
areas are?
Mr Wormald: I do not have any
data to hand.
Anne Main: It is just so easy for us
to assume you are right on traffic but I would actually like to
know. There are major implications of course for that. People
living in heavily congested areas do not wish to think, I hope,
that they are going to get a worse fire service. I would really
like to see some data to back up part of your assertion that the
deterioration in times is traffic.
Chair: I think, Mr Wormald, we are asking
for the data on that and also to back up the assertions that you
made to Mr Horwood as well.
Q28 Sir Paul Beresford: There is
a complaint by local government, by police and fire that government
imposed bureaucracy-targets and so on and so forth-is costing
money, therefore that would be reflected in the service. What
are you doing to reduce the bureaucracy?
Mr Wormald: I would say that the
reforms that Peter Housden mentioned earlier are actually a big
deregulation of fire and rescue response time and have introduced
a considerable amount of new local flexibility and we have really
seen the benefit of that. In that case I would say a number of
the changes in the wider local government in terms of deregulation
we actually did in the Fire and Rescue Service first.
Q29 Sir Paul Beresford: Could you
drop a note to the Committee?
Mr Wormald: Yes.
Q30 Chair: Just for clarity's sake
on this response time thing, are you saying that there is not
going to be a target about response times but on a wider set of
outcomes or that you are actually intending to allow response
times to get even longer?
Mr Wormald: I do not think it
is a question of us allowing response times to get longer. The
targets that will be in the DSO will be about outcomes so they
will be about fires and fatalities and numbers of accidents. I
think we would expect chief fire officers and fire and rescue
authorities to continue to be concerned about response times but
in terms of what you do about it, that seems to me to fall in
exactly the category that Sir Paul mentioned, of the kinds of
decisions that are actually better taken locally than as part
of some form of national framework.
Q31 Martin Horwood: Can I ask some
questions about Firelink and FiReControl which are obviously major
projects with big implications probably for response times and
for the safety of the public generally. Firelink is now going
to be running probably at least six months late but broadly to
budget according to a response to a Parliamentary Question. FiReControl
is going to be two years late and 50 per cent over budget, from
£120 million original planned cost up to £190 million.
What is going wrong?
Mr Wormald: The project is now,
I think we would say, making good progress. It is true it did
not come in at the speed we originally envisaged. It has been
a complicated scheme to implement both with technical innovations
and the large number of stakeholders and players and I think it
has just been more complicated than we originally envisaged.
Q32 Martin Horwood: You would always
expect it to have been complicated but good progress is not two
years late.
Mr Wormald: I meant that good
progress is now being made towards its introduction.
Q33 Martin Horwood: Can you put your
hand on your heart and say that there will not be further extensions
of the time scale or further overspend expected?
Mr Wormald: As with any major
project, and particularly major projects involving both human
resources and ICT, I cannot promise.
Q34 Martin Horwood: I will take that
as a "no". I just want to ask one more question about
FiReControl. It is quite a controversial process; it is the regionalisation
of FiReControl centres. In Gloucestershire during the flooding
which affected my constituency along with others the local tri-service
model that we had in Gloucestershire that had previously been
highly praised by ministers and others which is being abandoned
as part of the FiReControl process was proved to be very effective
and was widely praised by all the three services involved in it.
Do you think it is time to maybe sit back and think about whether
FiReControl is really going to deliver value for money and an
effective service overall?
Mr Wormald: In response to some
of the publicity around that the Chief Fire Officers' Association
came out unequivocally in favour of FiReControl. In terms of the
tri-centre there will still be fire and resilience service staff
at that centre; it will only be the mechanics of the actual control
which I believe in the tri-centre was still separate from the
other two emergency services that would be in the regional centre.
Q35 Martin Horwood: In the light
of overall targets that are showing worsening response times,
is it really wise to introduce more links in the chain?
Mr Wormald: It does not introduce
more links; it replaces one link with another link. I think it
ought to be clear that the way we are doing FiReControl, the main
argument for going down that route was national resilience. The
big advantages you get from the regional centres are that each
centre can cover for all the other centres so if one centre goes
out of action one of the others can pick it up. It is also an
essential prerequisite to have Firelink in place which builds
inter-operability between fire services so that people can cross
borders easily and inter-operability with the other emergency
services. That is the biggest argument for the reform programme
we have made which is not to refute anything you said about the
tri-centre which did indeed do excellent work. What we now need
to do is build on that.
Q36 Martin Horwood: It did excellent
work on the old model.
Mr Wormald: Yes, but that is not
necessarily a reason not to create a new model.
Q37 Martin Horwood: Even though in
the project there have been overspends and delays.
Mr Wormald: I am not going to
try to pretend that there have not been some problems with the
history of this. I will point you back to the views of the Chief
Fire Officers' Association who are now convinced that this is
the right way forward.
Q38 Anne Main: The budget is obviously
not the budget that was originally anticipated, neither is the
timeframe. What is the new budget and what is the new timeframe?
Mr Wormald: Can I write to you
with the exact details?
Anne Main: Thank you.
Q39 Mr Betts: It has not been a very
happy experience, has it? It is probably not surprising that you
are quoting that the Chief Fire Officers' Association has finally
signed up to it. Would it not have been an awful lot better if
you had got support from the chief fire officers who are actually
going to operate this system right at the beginning rather than
waiting for several years? Is that not one the reasons why we
have had so many delays?
Mr Wormald: As I say, I am not
going to dispute that this is a controversial project and has
not gone exactly as planned. Clearly it would have been better
if everything had gone right from day one. What I am saying to
you is that the project is now making good progress.
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