UNCORRECTED TRANSCRIPT OF ORAL EVIDENCE To be published as HC 352House of COMMONSMINUTES OF EVIDENCETAKEN BEFORECOMMUNITIES AND LOCAL GOVERNMENT COMMITTEE
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Transcribed by the Official Shorthand Writers to the Houses of Parliament: W B Gurney & Sons LLP, Hope House, Telephone Number: 020 7233 1935
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Oral Evidence
Taken before the Communities and Local Government Committee
on
Members present
Dr Phyllis Starkey, in the Chair
Sir Paul Beresford
Mr Clive Betts
John Cummings
Andrew George
Alison Seabeck
________________
Memoranda submitted by Fire Brigades
Examination of Witnesses
Witnesses: Mr Matt Wrack, Fire Brigades Union (FBU); Mr John Bonney, President, Chief Fire Officers Association (CFOA); Cllr Brian Coleman and Cllr James Pearson, Local Government Association (LGA), gave evidence.
Q1 Chair: Can I welcome the witnesses and particularly thank Councillor Pearson for stepping in at short notice for your colleague who I think is snowed up somewhere. The Committee has of course previously done a report on FiReControl and other aspects and therefore the stated positions of each of your organisations at that time in regard to FiReControl are on the record and I do not really want us to go over all that again since we are more concerned as to where we are now and where we go next. However, in the first question I would like each of you on behalf of your organisations to say briefly what your position was in relation to FiReControl at its inception, what your position is now, and, if there has been a change, why your position has changed.
Mr Wrack: On behalf of the Fire Brigades Union we have opposed the FiReControl project from the start on grounds of its operational usefulness to the Fire and Rescue Service, on the basis of its threat to the efficiency of the Fire and Rescue Service, on the basis of local accountability and on the basis of cost. I have to say that the previous seven years have just confirmed our position more so than when we started out.
Mr Bonney: The professional Association's view very much remains as it did at the inception - that we are very committed to the principles and aspirations of the project. We are concerned as it has developed at how badly parts of it have been managed and in recent times we have been clear that there needs to be an alternative plan worked up because of our concern about some of the risks with the project at the moment, but in terms of aspirations and the objective of the FiReControl project, we are still very much committed to that.
Cllr Coleman: The LGA's position has in fact changed. Having been broadly supportive although quite ambivalent, especially among member fire authorities, we have now moved to a position of hostility and against the project in principle. We have ask officers of the LGA to work up alternatives, rather in line with CFOA, because member fire authorities have come to the view that the project has just been delayed for far too long and they have serious doubts whether it is ever going to work.
Cllr Pearson: In 2005 when I became a fire authority member in Greater Manchester we took the view, in line with the Liberal Democrats of our group, that we would oppose the project in principle. We did not have a majority at the time in Greater Manchester and since then developments have happened. I became a member of the Fire Service Management Committee in the summer of last year and I fully support the current position of the LGA.
Chair: Can we move into slightly more detailed questions about project management. Clive?
Q2 Mr Betts: When we had our previous inquiry I think there were two fundamental problems that we identified. One was whether the technical issues could be overcome satisfactorily. I suppose we have had a number of fairly high-profile problems with technical systems in government computer systems that have not worked or certainly have not worked at first instance. Is your view that we were justified at that time in having concerns and is it possible to remove those concerns going forward? Secondly, I think we expressed our view that the business case simply was not robust at that time. Does it look any stronger today than it did then?
Mr Bonney: There are a couple of things there. In terms of the technical problems I think that some of those continue to exist. The Association is very much of the belief that the technical problems can be overcome but the fundamental problem is the way the project has been managed and the involvement of professionals, those people who deliver on the ground, chief fire officers, and it is a lack of understanding within the government department of that which causes a lot of the technical problems. That is where you end up having a problem. They can be overcome. There has been an attempt in recent times for CLG and their contractor to apply more attention to the users, but I think there is still a shortfall there.
Q3 Mr Betts: Could I pick up one point before I ask other people to respond as well. If you had been told back then when we did our previous inquiry that this scheme was going to cost £240 million more than it was going to yield in benefits, would you still have supported it then or would you have found a better use for the money within the Fire Service?
Mr Bonney: I would still support the investment in the Fire Service and I would still support the principle. If you asked me five years ago if it should have been run like this, I would have told you then that it should not have been run like that.
Mr Wrack: I think in terms of the initiation of the project, one of the difficulties is that this idea did not come from within the Fire and Rescue Service; it came externally from government. That has been one of the fundamental problems of it from the start, in that the views of professionals within the service have not been taken into account when developing the project from start to finish. I would echo Mr Bonney's comments. The other professional users are the control staff themselves who are experts in delivering emergency fire and rescue control rooms currently, whose views have largely been ignored so we have a project foisted on us from the outside, run by a department where we have very great scepticism about their understanding of the issues they are dealing with, with teams who come and go and seem to never take on board the criticisms which are levelled at them by the professionals, whether at chief officer level or at fire fighter and control level. On the point Mr Betts raised about the costs, in terms of what this project has delivered, as far as we can see, we have a number of empty buildings which are of no current use to the Fire and Rescue Service costing the taxpayer £40,000 a day. That is more than it costs to employ a fire fighter for a year and that is a gross waste of public money.
Cllr Coleman: Indeed, probably for the first time in my life, I would not dissent
from the Fire Brigades Union! Last week I
went to visit the new suggested
Q4 John Cummings: Do you think perhaps that has gone a stage further? I had a look around the new centre in Durham and, quite frankly, it put first of all into my mind the question of a regional seat of government. I am wondering now whether somebody has the idea of incorporating all of the emergency services into one building and then to move towards national forces - a national fire service, a national police service and a national ambulance service. Is this what is behind this immense amount of investment that is taking place at the present time?
Mr Bonney: In one sense you could look at a conspiracy theory here but I think it is something slightly more prosaic than that. Those regional control centres were completely over-specified in the first instance and created a level of capacity that was not necessary. That was simply because of the way the project was managed, there was not enough attention paid, as Matt has said, to what the professional users were saying to them about what they needed. If you look at those centres, the level of over-specification in them is quite staggering.
Q5 Chair: Can you clarify, Mr Bonney, when you say over-specification do you mean too much detail or to do things that were not necessary?
Mr Bonney: Too big. The level of resilience, ie the level of protection in terms of terrorist threat or environmental threat, is much, much higher than ambulance and police controls, even though they are still part of the critical national infrastructure. It really was as prosaic as that. I do not think there was any belief that they were going to be used for other things. I think they will be ultimately because people will want to use the space.
Cllr Coleman: The
Cllr Pearson: The point being raised by Mr Bonney is absolutely right. At the time when the original question was
around the business case, this was sold to us as it would save us money and it
would be a more efficient way of delivering this particular thing to us. Steadily as the project has moved on it has
become more and more expensive and, luckily for us as individual fire and
rescue authorities, we are not being asked to pick up the tab; it is coming
under new burdens. Mr Bonney's point is
absolutely correct. There was a rush to procurement
at the beginning of the project and that is why we have these over-specified
buildings. When we tell you about over-specified
buildings we are talking about security levels that just are not necessary for
the Fire and Rescue Service. The CLG's
initial idea was to go and consult with the regional management boards. I chair the regional management board in the
Q6 Sir Paul Beresford: Who set the business case and who set the specifications, the Government?
Mr Bonney: The CLG.
Cllr Coleman: The CLG.
Mr Wrack: If I might develop a point from Mr Cummings' question. First of all, on the buildings - and this relates to project management - we have a number of buildings which for example, and alarmingly, do not take account of them and they are now having to be retrofitted to take account of DDA requirements, which is quite staggering. On the issue of regional fire services and national fire services and so on, that does touch on the key contradiction between this project and Government policy on the Fire and Rescue Service more generally because the Fire and Rescue Services Act and Government policy is all about the delivery of local, integrated risk-management plans by local fire and rescue services, and yet on top of that they have attempted to bolt a regional structure which bears no relation to the policy setting and operational planning within fire and rescue services. That is the fundamental contradiction with FiReControl.
Q7 Mr Betts: All of you seem to be saying, correct me if I have got it wrong, that one of the fundamental flaws has been that the system has been designed by people in the hierarchy of CLG and the contractors with very little attempt to make reference or seek the views of the people who actually do the job, whether it be chief fire officers or the people in the control rooms who on a day-to-day basis deal with the calls coming in?
Cllr Pearson: That is absolutely correct. I
visited the new control centre in
Mr Bonney: From a professional point of view, as you said, we would argue that
the rush to procurement meant that less time was invested in talking to those
people on the ground who knew how to deliver these systems. I would not necessarily agree with Mr Wrack
on the point that it was bolted on. One
of the reasons why we were looking at this solution was because of new threats
that we had not seen in the
Q8 Chair: Are we talking about the initial procurement in 2004?
Mr Bonney: Yes, the period before the contract was let which then led to a situation where the discussions between the contractor and CLG ended up in some very long conversations about, "Now we have set the procurement what is it that you actually want?" So in one sense a lot of the work subsequently has been around that failure to be very clear in both output and outcome terms about what was going to be delivered by the project. When we talk about CLG having a lot of resources still committed to this project that is because they are having to work so closely with the contractor to fill in those gaps that should have been filled before the procurement.
Q9 Sir Paul Beresford: Six years later have conversations reached a conclusion?
Mr Bonney: In one sense I think they are still on-going. I think there is a reality now that this project ---
Q10 Sir Paul Beresford: Is dead?
Mr Bonney: --- Hangs in the balance a bit and for that reason there is a real focus, certainly from CLG and EADS, to up their game.
Cllr Coleman: The CLG's view is that an incoming Government of whichever party will have to look seriously at whether to pull the plug on this in June.
Q11 Chair: Can we reserve the question about pulling the plug until the end because we have some other detailed questions. We will get to it but I would rather not do it now.
Mr Wrack: There has been an attempt by CLG over the past year to improve communications. Where stakeholders have an issue with CLG is that we are told constantly that all the problems have been addressed, only to find out some months later that a new batch of problems have been identified. That is where people are losing patience with the whole thing.
Q12 Mr Betts: Two additional points. Certainly when we had the first inquiry it was not clear there was unanimous agreement and understanding about how precisely the command and control issues would be dealt with under the new FiReControl centres given they were going to be providing services for a number of different fire authorities and services each with their own command structure and then you were going to lay on top this regional control centre. Mr Bonney, has that been sorted out yet?
Mr Bonney: Has it been sorted out? It is still being worked on. The thing that I would say, though, is that the current fire control systems do not deliver command and control. It is for the officers and professional people who work with fire controls to deliver command and control. We do have to be a little careful here. When we talk about the regional control not having command and control, ie decision-making around an incident, we do not have that at the moment, and the difficulty is of course with a region you would expect that regional fire control to interact with the officers and personnel who make decisions on the ground. That is complicated, but to say that the current fire controls have command and control facilities would not be correct.
Q13 Mr Betts: This is even more complicated?
Mr Bonney: It is more complicated because, for instance, in my region Hampshire where I am chief, there are nine fire and rescue services now working with that single fire control and each one will have a command and control structure and of course each one will have to interface with the new regional control.
Mr Wrack: If I may develop some of these points. One of the difficulties - and it goes back to the earlier point - is that the project did not start by finding out in great detail what controls currently do. They simply identified a solution to what they saw as the problem rather than speaking to the Fire and Rescue Service and identifying what improvements and developments there could be. Some of that might have been about greater regional inter-operability and so on. I do not think we accept John's point that regional controls are necessary to deal with major floodings - far from it - but just to emphasise the importance of command and control; it is absolutely essential for the operational management of an emergency incident. One of the difficulties we have is people thinking that they are developing a project which is something like running an automobile assistance service. I called the AA a week ago. An AA mechanic turned out and he or she can do the job themselves. It is completely different from running an emergency incident where you have large numbers of members of staff, large numbers of decisions, risks to members of the public, to fire fighters, to the environment, all of these decisions; that is the importance of command and control. A key to regional control is the attendance of fire service officers. The mobilisation of fire service officers is again an afterthought in the regional control project. It is staggering to people who work within the service that some of these issues have been neglected right at the start.
Q14 Alison Seabeck: We have listened in your responses to a number of comments regarding your lack of involvement as stakeholders with CLG. Can each of you give me a specific example - I am sure there is more than one - where you feel at different stages you have been completely missed out in the process? Are there certain incidents that stick in your minds where you think, "We found out about this after the fact." Mr Wrack has given one. Has anybody else got any?
Mr Bonney: CFOA has a team of officers that work with CLG on the project. It can look like we are very involved and, in truth, we do see very good work, but there are occasions where we seem to have very little visibility on some of the things they are doing. For instance, we have been asking for some considerable time for a decision log, a very clear list of decisions that are the key decisions in this project. That has never been forthcoming.
Q15 Alison Seabeck: Have they offered any reason why?
Mr Bonney: No, to be honest. They would wave a piece of paper, it is true to say, that has "decision log" on the top of it, but if you look at the way the project has developed over recent times, it does not catalogue those decisions in proper detail.
Q16 Alison Seabeck: So it does not give you much confidence really, does it?
Mr Bonney: It is immensely frustrating.
That said, as professional people we continue to work in this project. What I would say is that it is very easy to
be completely dismissive of this whole project.
This whole project is very, very important to the public in
Cllr Coleman: CFOA do not have a choice because it is the only game in town. The Government has made it plain that it is the only game in town.
Q17 Alison Seabeck: On that issue you talked about looking at alternatives in your first answer. Do the LGA and do local authorities have the capacity, given the history of this particular project, to offer an alternative without it costing the taxpayer a significant amount of money?
Cllr Coleman: That is a key question. I would say as Chairman of the London Authority, which has been a regional authority for the last 40 years, that we do have that capacity and we have worked as a region for 40 years successfully protecting Londoners.
Q18 Alison Seabeck: What is the option?
Cllr Coleman: What it will force politicians on fire authorities to do is to come
to some sensible decisions about joint working, whether that means merging with
neighbouring fire authorities, or they may take a decision such as
Gloucestershire to work much closer with the other emergency services, or they
may take other decisions. I know I am
not supposed to discuss this at this stage but if the project falls in
Q19 Alison Seabeck: Would you not accept that London is a slightly different case to, say, Devon and Somerset?
Cllr Coleman: I would entirely but I think it could be the model. In
Q20 Alison Seabeck: I am not sure the FBU would want to see that.
Mr Bonney: What Brian says about the "only game in town" is that what you have to realise is that fire and rescue authorities have committed to this project. After a period of great caution at the beginning, they have committed to it, and have invested energy and effort on the ground to work on this project. To now say blithely, "Okay, we will scrap that and we will just commission it from somebody else," is dangerous in the extreme. One of the points that CFOA has been saying is that there are now fire and rescue services that are bordering on having completely obsolete systems in the belief that they are waiting for FiReControl, and why should they not? They have seen government money invested in this. Why should they be developing alternatives.
Q21 Alison Seabeck: I think Devon and Somerset is one of those that is getting worried about the gap between one ending and one starting?
Mr Bonney: Exactly. So to blithely say "Scrap the project" will leave a number of fire rescue services high and dry, irrespective of the fact that a quick and easy solution might be offered. There are no quick and easy solutions to this. That is why the project is complex.
Cllr Pearson: I think the point is about confidence here. Collectively and as Chairman of Greater
Manchester I have a responsibility to satisfy ourselves that we can
mobilise. Bearing in mind the length of
time - and we had initial proposals of when this was going to be ready - the
thing has been delayed and delayed and it has posed the question for us locally
as to what we can do, what does our plan B look like. We work collaboratively with our neighbours,
Chair: We will adjourn for 10 minutes if it is one vote and 20 if it is two.
The Committee suspended from 4.54 pm to 5.04 pm for a division in the House
Chair: If we could restart. Just before we do, one of the questions that we tried to get an answer to but did not, and which I would therefore like you give us in writing afterwards, is specific examples of where you think the end user requirements have not been met. If you could let us have that in writing subsequently that would be very helpful. Alison?
Q22 Alison Seabeck: If I can follow on a little from the relationship between different organisations. Mr Wrack, in your statement you were quite critical of how the relationship between EADS and CLG has operated. Would you like to elaborate, please?
Mr Wrack: I think the question needs to be put to both ADAS and CLG, but I think it touches on the lack of information that comes back to other stakeholders and the fact that there seem to be poor relationships. We have just recently had a change of sub-contractors and I have to say what surprised us in a recent report from CLG is that this was presented as a great step forward that CLG had to change its sub-contractors, to which the obvious questions is: if that is the case why was it not done some considerable time before? There are difficulties in the relationships and it clearly touches on all the issues that we have been discussing earlier.
Q23 Alison Seabeck: In your evidence you also talked about the fact that CLG made a point of ensuring there was little contact between stakeholders and EADS. Can you give me some evidence for that because the way it is written it is very anecdotal?
Mr Wrack: In terms of stakeholder engagement there has been very little direct opportunity for stakeholders to question and discuss with EADS the technical issues. For example, there are various stakeholder meetings - and this does touch on the general communication issue - for example a sounding board that we send people to where the briefings which we are given are very general briefings from CLG whereas we have people who are very technically expert in this area and they want the opportunity to put the detailed technical questions to the people who will be providing the technical solution and that opportunity does not arise.
Q24 Alison Seabeck: I understand that criticism but in your evidence you say that CLG made a point of ensuring that stakeholders were not involved in the EADS. What is the evidence for that, please?
Mr Wrack: That is our experience.
Mr Bonney: I mentioned before the relationship between EADS and CLG. One of the problems stems from this lack of clear specification at the beginning. What happened subsequently was the contract was let and there was a lot of infilling required to be done. If a partnership-type relationship had been developed, I think that would have been a lot easier.
Q25 Alison Seabeck: And you could have drawn on the expertise that was available?
Mr Bonney: Also, I think it would not have resorted so quickly into what we saw, which was a contractual relationship, which starts to make things much more difficult. What we found, certainly from the professional Association's point of view, was not only was there not the organised contact with EADS, we were kept at arm's length, it was through CLG, but the relationship between CLG and EADS was adversarial because it was already in a contractual relationship rather than a partnership approach. That would have been all right if we had got a very clear detailed specification but when you do not have that you end up, if you are not careful, only sorting the problems out by means of resorting to the legal arrangements. I think that is fundamentally where the difficulties existed. Things have improved slightly.
Q26 Alison Seabeck: In the last six months.
Mr Bonney: We have a number of solution establishment workshops, as they are called, which bring stakeholders together, but they are not particularly well organised.
Mr Wrack: And they do not involve all stakeholders.
Mr Bonney: They do not involve all stakeholders, that is true.
Q27 Chair: Which stakeholders are not included?
Mr Bonney: It tends to involve professional people involved in the project at the moment from fire and rescue services. It does not necessarily involve, as Matt quite rightly says, all stakeholders. It does not include the representative bodies.
Q28 Chair: Which bodies, just to be clear?
Mr Bonney: The FBU.
Cllr Coleman: Deliberately.
Cllr Pearson: Just to pick up on the point about SEWs. I went down to
Q29 Chair: Can I just make a point. There is a court case going on and certain matters are sub judice. Any sort of remarks about why EADS switched from one contractor to another are off limits so could we not go down that route. Councillor Coleman?
Cllr Coleman: I do worry that this was a new way of working for fire authorities and many fire authorities simply did not get it. Many fire authorities diverged from the FBU's view because the FBU are interested in their members' jobs, which is entirely reasonable, and there are considerable reductions in jobs because of this regional control and indeed it is quite probable that employees of these new controls will not be members of the Fire Brigades Union, as in London where the control room staff are not members of the Fire Brigades Union at all. There has always been that agenda and you can see why the DCLG wanted to keep the FBU, for example, well away from the process.
Q30 Chair: Can we try also not to go down the line of imputing what other people's views are, particularly when we have the various organisations here and we can get their views straight from the horse's mouth, otherwise it is going to degenerate between the various members of the panel.
Mr Wrack: Just to take up that one point. In terms of the loss of jobs, of course as a trade union we are concerned about the loss of jobs. The real issue however is the service that is provided to the public because no matter how good your computer system is you need somebody to be able to answer the phone to an emergency call, so the loss of jobs impacts on the service that is provided to the public. That is the very real issue.
Chair: The Committee is well able to make its own mind up about people's motivation. We do not need other people to do it for us.
Q31 John Cummings: Would you like to tell the Committee what is happening to the existing control centres? Are they being adequately maintained and, if so, at what cost? Are those costs coming from a central budget? Are they coming from your ordinary resources?
Mr Bonney: The existing controls continue to be run by local fire and rescue authorities. They are being funded, and any replacement or upgrading is being provided by local fire and rescue authorities.
Q32 John Cummings: Are they being adequately maintained?
Mr Bonney: I can speak for my professional colleagues that we will adequately maintain them because that is the only way that we can continue to deliver our service and clearly we would take that very seriously. The difficulty is that many of them, although not all, are becoming increasingly obsolete, and maintaining them and keeping them in a state that is effective becomes increasingly difficult. There comes a point where they cannot be maintained any longer and they have to be replaced. A number of fire and rescue services have done that in recent years simply because they could not wait for the FiReControl project. That is why CFOA is very, very clear there needs to be a second option, because if the project - and I know you want to come on to that - becomes delayed or is scrapped we cannot leave fire and rescue services high and dry.
Q33 Chair: The second question of who pays for it?
Mr Bonney: The upgrade is fire and rescue authorities. They continue to pay themselves individually.
Cllr Coleman: We have a key deadline coming which is the Olympics and it is not
just a
Q34 John Cummings: Are you saying that various projects have been delayed because of the inadequacies of the new system?
Cllr Coleman: I understand that
Mr Bonney:
Cllr Coleman: In
Q35 Sir Paul Beresford: A few minutes ago, Mr Bonney, you actually said that this was the only show in town. Now you are saying you are looking for an alternative.
Mr Bonney: No, what we have said is that fire and rescue authorities have not been investing in their fire controls in the expectation that the regional control centres would be brought in. We are now saying there is a point we have now reached with the confidence on the project, although we are still committed to the project, where we do believe there needs to be an alternative provided if, for whatever reason, the project is scrapped. We cannot leave fire and rescue services high and dry.
Q36 Chair: Sorry, Mr Bonney, I do not want to misinterpret what you were saying before but in answer to the previous question I think what you were saying was that some fire and rescue authorities are unable, with confidence, to continue to provide the service they should be providing in the interim before a new scheme comes in and that is why some of them may be upgrading their existing schemes.
Mr Bonney: Some of them have upgraded already.
For instance,
Cllr Pearson: There are two elements to your question. One is the technical side and one is the staffing
side. On the technical element, it is
right that there are a number of fire and rescue authorities who expected this
project to be in by now who have not invested in renewing their control
systems, and their control systems have fallen over. There is an example in
Q37 Sir Paul Beresford: Mr Pearson, you have just said that some of the organisations that have gone ahead as Surrey had are being paid centrally and yet Surrey and perhaps others have not. Why?
Cllr Pearson: Sorry, the question is?
Q38 Sir Paul Beresford: You were talking about those who were feeling obsolete or were in a situation of becoming obsolete and had moved ahead.
Cllr Pearson: As part of the overall project because the delivery of regional control centres has been delayed, the legacy systems in some of the authorities that have not been able to survive up to the revised schedule date have had to be supported. Some have meant a complete renewal.
Q39 Sir Paul Beresford: Who has funded it?
Cllr Pearson: CLG to some part.
Mr Bonney: I think I can help there.
Where there has been sufficient and very hard lobbying, CLG have
relented and paid a degree of the project replacement costs. They have not paid for the hardware. They have usually paid for some of the
project management costs, which was the case in
Chair: Afterwards could you give us the specific data on what proportion was paid for by CLG and what was not? That would be very helpful.
Q40 John Cummings: Do you think that the new FiReControl centres will provide better technology for use by all existing fire control centres?
Mr Wrack: One of the selling points from CLG has been the point that Mr Bonney
made earlier, that some local fire controls do not have the most advanced
technology. I think part of the answer
to that is that a number already do have extremely modern technology and others
have, as has just been discussed, delayed the introduction of technology
because of the promised introduction of regional controls which is now
considerably delayed. In terms of the
technology itself, again this goes back to the whole design of the project. They did not sit down and discuss what
current fire controls do and therefore what any system of modernisation would
be required to do. I will give another
example of this. A large number of fire
fighters in the
Q41 Chair: Are these from commercial organisations?
Mr Wrack: Commercial organisations who are identifying the gap between fire controls and what fire services actually need and are thinking, "We can make some money out of filling this gap." To me that demonstrates very clearly there is a huge gap at the heart of this project in how it was conceived in the very first place.
Q42 Chair: Can we try again with the question Mr Cummings actually asked which was whether FiReControl provides better technology to all existing FRS control centres?
Mr Bonney: Simply put, yes it does. There are some fire rescues services which have extremely modern delivery systems in their controls. The difference with FiReControl that is very clear is that any of those fire controls anywhere in the country could mobilise any fire engine, which cannot happen at the moment. If a fire and rescue service control is knocked out, the only thing that usually happens is that the 999 calls can be passed to another control. They cannot mobilise those fire engines. With the networked system that is the fundamental difference and that is something that is actually worth having. Whether it is worth all the pain we have had is for others to judge, but that is a fundamental issue that we do not have at the moment.
Cllr Coleman: Let us not be under any pretence that we have some Nirvana at the moment where everything is wonderful. In many small brigades during the night you have two men sitting there answering the telephone. If that goes down then that brigade is in trouble and therefore the inter-operability, the fact that the North West is supposed to be able to handle London's calls if London went down or the South West could take the East of England's, or whatever, is a key selling point, and if the technology works it will be a vast improvement, particularly on mobilising nationally if it is a flooding threat to the east coast, or whatever the issue is. Let us not think that somehow we have a wonderful situation at the moment.
Q43 Mr Betts: If the key issue is about being able to mobilise other brigades' fire engines and for various people to speak to each other, would it not have been possible simply to have upgraded all the existing control centres with the same technology so they could all speak to each other and speak to each other's fire engines?
Cllr Coleman: 46 control centres was never going to be viable.
Cllr Pearson: The point is they are not interlinked and this is the fundamental point. No control at the moment can mobilise other assets.
Q44 Mr Betts: But could you not have upgraded them all so that they were interlinked?
Mr Wrack: Certainly ---
Q45 Chair: Wait a minute, Mr Wrack, we are actually asking Councillor Pearson. I will come to you.
Cllr Pearson: Yes, you could put it on a national scale and with the three data centres that are being delivered on part of this it negates the need to have these nine huge control centres delivered regionally which, let us be honest, have not really done us any favours at all. If CLG looked through this and you had a system where individual fire and rescue authorities could tap into a national network and see what assets were available from other areas, that would actually solve the problem. The fact is here that we have built these regional control centres as part of the Government's regionalisation agenda that has fallen by the wayside. You are absolutely right; we could have done it locally.
Mr Wrack: First of all, in terms of your point about the technology, I was making a point about technology that the current controls do take account, for example, of a very key issue, the mobilisation of retained staff who cover the bulk geographically of the United Kingdom, so that is an important technical point which is not addressed within the FiReControl project. That is the first point I would like to make. In terms of the current system compared with what is on offer, no-one has ever provided any case where current fire control systems have failed. We have asked parliamentary questions and we have had recent examples of mobilisation of resources in Greater Manchester by Lancashire Fire and Rescue Service, for example, so co-operation between emergency fire controls already happens. In terms of the issue about major incidents and floods, I suspect that most fire and rescue services would not want a regional control centre 200 miles away mobilising resources when they are already implementing special policies to deal with the huge number of calls they have for example in mass flooding incidents.
Chair: We can make up our own minds when we get contradictory evidence. Mr George, do you want to do the safety questions.
Q46 Andrew George: Mr Bonney, earlier you said that it would be dangerous to drop the scheme but are there not also public risks and dangers in carrying on with the existing project, particularly public risk during this period of uncertainty?
Mr Bonney: There is always risk in these projects. I will not be an apologist for the project. What I would say is that my professional concern would be that if people just blithely say, "Scrap the project and let's begin again," let us look at where we would be, not just in terms of public money and how much has already been spent and how much would be spent in disentangling people from the project, but also what we would then have left for fire and rescue services. You would have a number of fire and rescue services with obsolete systems who would immediately have to start replacing them. My own service, for instance, Hampshire, would have begun to replace their system two years ago. On any scale it would take approximately two to three years to change your system, even if you are going to do that collaboratively. My concern and the concern of the Association is if we just say, "Scrap the project, we will just cut our losses," the danger is that you have a number of fire and rescue services that are left completely high and dry at a time when public finances are going to be desperately short. They will be looking to central government and presumably to local taxpayers to fund the replacement systems. Certainly the Association's view is not just to plough on regardless, because that would be a wrong and very unprofessional thing to do, but be very careful about not accepting some of the implications of just walking away from this project at the moment.
Q47 Andrew George: Even if we were persuaded that the new FiReControl project would provide a safer service in future? Is there not a question about the current situation? In other words, during this period of uncertainty, are the public more or less safe than, say, they were three or four years ago?
Mr Bonney: I would be assured that they are as safe as they were two or three years ago. There is no question about that because fire and rescue authorities themselves are not willing to allow a core piece of their activity to reduce, but that cannot go on forever.
Cllr Coleman: Any chairman of any fire authority who allowed his control system to become unsafe should be absolutely ashamed of themselves. I am sure that every chief officer would advise the fire authority when their system was becoming unsafe and members of that authority would make appropriate arrangements. I cannot imagine there is a fire authority that has not got a safe and effective control system at the moment or is likely to have.
Q48 Andrew George: I am sure they would not admit to it.
Cllr Coleman: Sorry, you are not telling me that any fire authority chairman or member, of any political party, would sit at a meeting, would listen to professional advice from their chief fire officer that the current control system was not adequate and that people in Bristol or Exeter or wherever it might be were at risk and would not do something about it, because I am sure they would.
Andrew George: It would certainly raise the wider question about the need for the FiReControl project at all.
Chair: We have just gone back to that point.
Q49 Andrew George: I know but I would be interested in Mr Wrack's response.
Mr Wrack: I would not argue that there is an increased risk currently to members of the public as a result of what has happened so far. I think that there are risks in embarking further down the road of regionalisation without addressing the fundamental problems around which I think there is a fair amount of consensus. I think the risk that has emerged as a result of the delays relates to issues around staffing. Because of the uncertainty around what is going to happen to staff, there are large numbers of staff who have, for example, retired and not been replaced and there are short-term contract staff and there is a huge amount of uncertainty among the staff. These are areas where there are problems, and in terms of how the service delivers to the public, clearly at the heart of that is the staff. People have mentioned floods. What made the fire service work during the floods is the staff working in those fire controls and when you constantly undermine their morale that does ultimately put the public at risk.
Q50 Chair: Can we finally get to the question which you have all been attempting to answer up until now, which is, fairly briefly since you have all gone over it tangentially already: should the Government now abandon the FiRiControl programme? If so, what alternative should they consider?
Mr Wrack: Yes, I think our position is fairly well-known. We are not into the Government making some cavalier decision about scrapping FiReControl and not addressing the issue it attempted to discuss. I think the project itself needs to be fundamentally reassessed. We think regionalisation of fire controls is a mistake. We think that there are alternatives around the idea of upgrading and networking existing fire and rescue controls which would be a preferable solution to the regionalisation project.
Mr Bonney: It is clear from our point of view that we believe the principles and aspirations of the project still remain sound. We have made it clear that it is the way the project has been managed. As I said, the worst thing that could happen now for fire and rescue authorities, and therefore the public, would be to say scrap it and start again because we would be five years behind and we think the investment and enormous effort, not just from central government but also from fire and rescue services to make this project work, would mean not only that money would be lost but effort would be lost and we would be starting again from scratch which we think is the wrong thing.
Cllr Coleman: Sadly, there is no guarantee the technology will work and I think successive ministers have been less than straightforward with fire authorities. We had the Minister allegedly come clean in July on the timetable. Fire authorities are reaching a point where they have no confidence in the CLG on this project but basically if the technology does not work there is no choice but to scrap it and start again.
Cllr Pearson: I think it is the point Councillor Coleman raised about confidence. At the moment confidence in this project from the service is at rock bottom. If it is going to continue in the way that it is being pushed at the moment to make live these nine regional control centres, I think many, many more millions are going to have to be spent on the project. Some elements of it can be rescued. Some elements of it were a good idea. To have a National Resilience Network is a sensible plan. Unfortunately, the way it has been devised and the naivety as to the requirements where CLG has not really understood what the Fire and Rescue Service needed and what would be of benefit to it will ultimately lead to the downfall of the project.
Q51 Mr Betts: Local government would be content, would it, if the project was scrapped and if we went back to upgrading existing control centres, maybe more effectively linking them, but that would not be treated as a new burden, would it?
Cllr Coleman: If you believe in localism, as I am sure we all do, it is up to individual fire authorities to work out what are the best arrangements.
Q52 Mr Betts: And to fund them?
Cllr Coleman: Indeed, possibly to fund them
and to find the efficiencies to do that funding. It can be done. We have 46 fire authorities in
Cllr Pearson: To have a one-size-fits-all solution that is mandated on everybody is not the way forward. To have something that would do what we were told it would do at the beginning - ie, save us money, be more efficient and be safer - then yes, by all means bring it on. We would be very happy to subscribe to a project that did that but at the moment this project does not do that for us.
Chair: Thank you all very much indeed for your evidence.
Memoranda submitted by EADS and CLG
Examination of Witnesses
Witnesses: Mr Roger Diggle, FiReControl Project
Director, and Mr Robin Southwell,
Q53 Chair: Minister, you will know that the Committee asked for access to documents from the Office of Government Commerce health checks relating to FiReControl and the two independent reviews carried out in 2009 and that the Secretary of State declined to give us those documents. We have the letters here which we will be publishing, I think. Can I just ask how you expect us to verify your written evidence and what you say about the reviews when we as a Committee have not had sight of them, and whether you considered following the precedent of the EFRA Committee and their ministers who allowed them to see OGC documents on a confidential basis?
Mr Malik: It is absolutely our intention to be as helpful and as open as possible. Certainly we would not be in the business of obstructing the very important work that this select committee has to do. We have been open with the NAO who have seen all the advice. You have a copy of their Report. I hope that is testament to the fact that we are not secretive about this. There are some reasons that you have seen. I am happy to just very briefly repeat. One is that ----
Q54 Chair: All the Committee Members have had the letter, so they know the reasons given in the letter. I do not think you need to repeat them. I think the additional question is why you did not follow the example of the Defra ministers and give it to the Committee Members confidentially.
Mr Malik: Each department makes its decisions based on the individual cases that come before it. We made a judgment with respect to your request. It might well be that it is a judgment that does not find favour with you. I think that goes without saying and is pretty obvious from what I am picking up. I do not know if you have considered our reasons and whether you think those reasons are inadequate in any way. It is essential just to ensure, as is set out in the papers - there are commercially sensitive issues there - that issues about ensuring that people who give advice can do so in a candid manner. The NAO has obviously had access to the relevant documentation. In a nutshell, that is where we are.
Q55 Chair: We are probably not going to get satisfaction but clearly we are not satisfied. Speaking as Chair, I think it unsatisfactory that we have not been given the opportunity to see it on a confidential basis, since I would have thought that members of this Committee could be trusted with commercial information and it would have helped our deliberations. I think we will probably leave it there.
Mr Malik: I do not want us to end this session where you feel as if you have been denied access to something which you think is valuable absolutely outright. Would you allow me to go away and think about how we might be able to accommodate something that would give you a bit more than you currently have? I promise to do so before Wednesday, pretty obviously.
Chair: That would be very helpful.
Q56 Mr Betts: When you heard that the Committee was going to do this inquiry, did a smile come across your face or did you think: "Why the hell am I the one that is holding the parcel when the music stops?"
Mr Malik: As the eighth Minister in as many years, it is a very popular job. Of course a smile came to my face. I was not surprised that you wanted to have an inquiry on this issue. The truth is that it is contentious for a whole host of reasons. Fundamentally, the Government is absolutely committed to the concept behind FiReControl. We can see the national resilience that it will bring and deliver. We know that will benefit both fire fighters and indeed the wider community as well. Yes, there was a little smile but I knew it was coming at some time or other and we are here now.
Q57 Mr Betts: The reasons you have just outlined for having the project are the same ones that we were given at our previous inquiry and the same ones the Government started off with. When the project stopped, do you think that people in CLG, ministers, officials and EADS, your contractual partner, actually understood the degree of risk involved and the extent to which this could go so badly wrong?
Mr Malik: To be absolutely candid, I think it is really important that select committees and anyway as a parliamentarian you are candid. The truth is that this did not start off too well. That is on the table. It is a fact.
Q58 Sir Paul Beresford: It is not continuing very well either.
Mr Malik: I beg to differ but I will await your questions shortly, Sir Paul. There is no doubt that it did not start off too well. I would like to think that we, with our partners EADS, are in an infinitely better position than we were. When this journey set off, it was not a back of a fag packet job. It was really on the basis of a concept paper and some figures that went alongside of that, which were about £120 million at the time. The truth is that insufficient work had been done, detailed work with the fire and rescue community and with others to quite understand where we were going with this and indeed the concept and the vision were all fine, but I do not think the detail was there. Equally true - EADS can speak for themselves - I think they did not anticipate just how much work was involved in this as well. It was a very complex, problematic start but we did eventually, in March 2007, sign a contract. Since then, things have improved. Certainly in the last 12 months I think I can point realistically to some significant improvements. I am not going to come here and defend something which is not quite indefensible, but which would not be accurate or true. The fact is it was a very inauspicious start but I think we are in a very healthy position now.
Q59 Mr Betts: We do not have anything working, do we?
Mr Malik: That is not actually correct. There are a lot of things working. All the technology is there. It is a question of bringing it together to make it work. This is tried and tested technology. The partners that EADS have - and they will speak for themselves shortly ---
Q60 Mr Betts: There is not a single fire engine out there linked up to it, is there, operating on a day-to-day basis?
Mr Malik: There is not. The go live dates are not until mid 2011.
Q61 Mr Betts: What was the initial date when the project started?
Mr Malik: We signed our contracts with EADS in March 2007. Since then I think the Committee will be aware that there have been two delays. In November 2008, there was a nine month delay and in July 2009 there was a ten month delay that I myself announced.
Q62 Mr Betts: Is the 2011 date now guaranteed?
Mr Malik: For any minister, after two delays, to give a 100 per cent guarantee would be rather foolish. We are confident based on all the information that we have that mid-2011 still is the date.
Q63 Mr Betts: Are the contractors absolutely confident it is going to be up, running and working without any more hitches?
Mr Southwell: We are committed to delivering in accordance with what the Minister has just mentioned. There is no reason, sitting here, that we do not believe we will meet that commitment.
Q64 John Cummings: Are you saying there have been no commitments to that in the past?
Mr Southwell: No, I am not saying that.
Q65 John Cummings: What are you saying?
Mr Southwell: I am saying, in answer to the question, my response which is we are committed to delivering in accordance with what the Minister has just said is the schedule.
Q66 Mr Betts: What is the contractual commitment, because I understand the current contract that you have does not go beyond March 2010. Is that right?
Mr Southwell: No. Our contractual commitment is as the Minister has just mentioned, to be delivered in accordance with the schedule mid-2011.
Q67 Mr Betts: Is it actually set down in a new contract that has been signed by both parties though?
Mr Malik: Let me just make the
situation very clear. We have a draft
schedule which indicates to us that mid-2011 is the date by which FiReControl
will go live. We are currently looking
at that schedule. We are going to
finalise it very shortly. All the
indications are that 2011 will be achieved and there are some very considerable
reasons for having confidence in that because there have been some drastic
changes within EADS and some significant changes within the CLG and CLG's
capacity which give us much more confidence.
I will probably allow Shona, with your permission Dr Starkey, to respond
to that but we have had some significant changes with new project directors,
new commercial directors, new heads of communication etc. That gives us confidence on the capacity side
of the CLG. There have been significant
changes on the side of EADS, including a new chief executive for the project in
the
Q68 Chair: Were any of you in post at the start of this debacle? No?
Mr Southwell: I probably was in the job at the start of this project.
Andrew George: 2007?
Q69 Chair: No; 2004.
Mr Southwell: I was probably just starting the job around then.
Q70 Mr Betts: Is there a contract in place at present which states that this project will finish by mid-2011?
Ms Dunn: There are a number of documents that were signed by EADS and by ourselves either in the run up to or just after the July 2009 rescheduling. There is a heads of terms agreement setting out the revised expectations and there are two contract change notes which set out a number of additional milestones and revised expectations, both in terms of what is to be delivered and how the relationship between the two organisations will work. That has not been fully taken through to detailed changes in the underpinning contract as yet and that will happen once the ongoing process of reviewing the revised draft schedule that EADS have provided to us is complete.
Mr Malik: In a nutshell, the answer is no, but we have a draft schedule which we are looking at. It indicates a mid-2011 date which is the time period that we have already announced. We are confident that we are going to bottom that out and come to a conclusion over the next few days and perhaps weeks.
Q71 Mr Betts: Presumably officials have been negotiating this. If it was July when this revised schedule and other revised documents were put to you and discussions began between the contractors and yourselves, why in February - I make that seven months later - has no revised contract been signed? That is an awfully long time. We are talking about two years from July 2009 to mid-2011. More than a quarter of that time has gone by and no contract has yet been signed. Is this another example of the problems that have beset the contract from the beginning at official level?
Ms Dunn: The negotiation that led up to the July 2009 delay was set down in the heads of terms agreement and subsequently in the two contract change notes. The reason that has then not flowed through to the contract is because of the uncertainty that started to build post the July announcement around whether EADS wished to stick with their original, main subcontractor or whether they wanted to shift their main subcontractor. We are now looking at a draft, revised schedule which takes account of the implications of the shift of main subcontractor. Once we have completed that process with EADS, we will be able to flow those expectations through to the contract. The decision was taken there was no point in flowing them through to the contract until that issue was resolved.
Q72 Sir Paul Beresford: Was there a contract first with the original subcontractor and, if so, what was the deadline on that?
Ms Dunn: There is a contract that does exist. I would have to go back and check. I do not want to give you an inaccurate answer on that.
Mr Malik: We can write to you on that.
Q73 Mr Betts: If there is not a contract then and EADS fail to hit this new target of mid-2011, are there any penalties that they have to pay?
Mr Malik: One of the improvements that we have made is on the commercial contracts side. We have carrots and sticks built into that now in a way that patently did not exist in the past. We have key milestones and many more milestones that EADS have to meet. Payment is on the basis of meeting milestones. Where key milestones are missed, there are penalties by way of liquidated damages. We are in a very different position than we were in a year or so ago or perhaps even less.
Q74 Mr Betts: If you have not signed the contract, surely none of those penalty payments or rewards is ----?
Mr Malik: We have agreements.
Q75 Mr Betts: Are they legally binding agreements that actually mean something if they fail to hit the deadlines?
Mr Malik: That is my understanding. I am trying to paint a picture where ----
Q76 Mr Betts: What do EADS think about this? Do they agree that they are going to face penalties if they do not hit the targets?
Mr Southwell: If it helps, we are very comfortable with the situation, notwithstanding what you are hearing. We are comfortable because firstly we are in the process of delivering against the schedule which the Minister mentioned, notwithstanding that we are in the final stages of securing the documentation. There is no delay and there is no confusion on our side as we move forward to seek to secure that delivery. The second thing we mentioned, as the Minister alluded to, is we have offered and agreed to put in place a regime whereby if we are delayed beyond that we will take a commercial hit to ensure that everyone is aware that we are serious that this will happen. In the context of where we are now, nothing that we are talking about is delaying us getting on with the job. We will deliver this. We are committed to delivering this by mid-2011 and we will subsequently be prepared to pay damages associated with any further delay.
Q77 Chair: If EADS are so terribly satisfied with this, where is the delay in signing the thing that was first negotiated in July 2009? Is it with the department?
Mr Malik: No. This is obviously quite a complex matter. Do you want me to deal with the schedule issue or do you want me to just explain?
Q78 Chair: We need to know why, if everybody agrees with it, it was not signed.
Ms Dunn: There are a number of issues in relation to the shift to Intergraph. There are potential implications for various aspects of the schedule. We are working with EADS to really get into the nitty-gritty of what those implications are, to understand where additional risks are arising and where those risks are falling. We are working together with EADS to get a lot of very detailed information. This is an incredibly complex schedule and complex plan. There are over 200 individual lines within this and within each of those there are many, many more. We need to understand in great detail the exact implications before we can advise the Minister on whether or not he should sign off on that. To answer the point about the penalties and liquidated damages though, the penalties and liquidated damages in the original contract and the penalties and liquidated damages that we have agreed as part of the change control notes are absolutely still extant. They are legally binding and we can call upon them.
Q79 Mr Betts: Have there been any penalties and liquidated damages so far on the original contract?
Ms Dunn: Both around the November 2008 and July 2009 rescheduling there have been negotiated agreements with EADS.
Q80 Mr Betts: How much for?
Ms Dunn: Some of that information I believe is commercially sensitive. Some of that information is included within the NAO Report which you have received. There is a figure around the November 2008 date of a package worth around £10 million in extra services and reduced service charges. There was another package put together around the July 2009 delay.
Q81 Sir Paul Beresford: What in broad terms was wrong with the original contract that you had to redesign it and start again?
Mr Malik: I have alluded to it at the beginning. The problem was that there was a concept and a vision but the detail was not there. In the spirit of continuing in candid mode, we had not engaged the Fire and Rescue Service in the development of the concept and that was one of the gaps. It is a gap that we have since filled. We have a lot of stakeholders now engaged in the project moving forward in a way that was not true when this project was first initiated. There was a gap between the vision and the reality on the ground. The truth is that once we started to engage with fire and rescue services it then became apparent that their needs had not been catered for in a 100 per cent fashion. That means that there were a number of changes to the specifications that were required. At the offset, it was an unhealthy start, mainly because it was a concept and vision and because people who were crucial to the success of the project, the Fire and Rescue Service, had not been included and incorporated in a way that perhaps would have been ideal.
Q82 Sir Paul Beresford: Did these organisations explain this to you at the very beginning?
Mr Malik: We always had some element of stakeholder involvement.
Q83 Sir Paul Beresford: It is just yes or no. Did they? You said at the very beginning they were not spoken to. They were not involved.
Mr Malik: It could be a difficult one to answer given that I am the eighth Minister in eight years and nobody else has been here at the beginning of the project either, but I am happy to write to you on that.
Q84 Sir Paul Beresford: There is an Australian phrase. You do not know whether you are Arthur or Martha, do you, Minister?
Mr Malik: It is well known in
Q85 Chair: Do you accept it should have been CLG who should have done the detailed end user requirement analysis?
Mr Malik: I am very clear that for this to succeed the Fire and Rescue Service ought to have been much more involved at the beginning.
Q86 Chair: That is not the question I asked. Was it the responsibility of CLG to do that detailed end user analysis requirement obviously in conjunction with the fire and rescue services?
Mr Malik: I think it was absolutely. I take responsibility. We ought to have done that. We ought to have engaged key stakeholders in a way that was adequate. It was inadequate.
Q87 Andrew George: You said you were being candid. I just want to be clearer on the point of fact that, when you said earlier that the project commenced in 2007, in fact of course the project commenced in January 2004. Certainly a letter from the then Local Government Minister, the Rt Hon Member for Greenwich, to me on 4 April 2005 says that the estimated total net cost of delivering the regional control centre network is approximately 72 million. This covers the cost of setting up the new fire control centres from the start of the project in January 2004 until the last regional control centre goes live during 2008. It is very clear that that is when the project commenced. That cannot be air brushed out of the history of this.
Mr Malik: It is not my desire or intention to air brush anything. In fact, quite the opposite. I think what I said is actually that the contract was awarded to EADS in March 2007. The concept and the outline business case, this vision thing that I have been speaking about, started in November 2004. At that time the estimate was £120 million. That is what I have here. Because of our engagement with the Fire and Rescue Service and others, there were some significant changes to the specification both on the IT side and on the needs of the Fire and Rescue Service as well as to an extent on the buildings.
Q88 Chair: Mr Southwell, we have been pressing the Minister about the details of the contract. To what extent do you accept that your company and/or your various subcontractors are at fault in not complying with the contract and not fully understanding the technical complexity of FiReControl?
Mr Southwell: On reflection, I agree and understand exactly where the Minister is coming from in terms of when we initially established and started to gain some momentum in this. In hindsight it is easy but it is not unusual for projects of this complexity that you learn some of the lessons and there is an iterative process going along. I do not know of many, if any, projects where you have really locked in what the requirement is at day one, particularly a project where you are involving a number of stakeholders across the whole of England and you are asking people to put their minds to it, actually to think about how behaviours need to change, how people need to transform their processes and organisational structures. There are many factors. To expect at the very beginning every single one of those factors to be readily understood completely and then put into an end user requirement to be delivered without change over a period of time is a tall order and one that probably is nigh on impossible to undertake.
Q89 John Cummings: That is a rather slack sort of answer when you consider the hundreds of millions of pounds involved. Have you no regrets at all?
Mr Southwell: No. I am simply explaining that, if you have a project of this scale and complexity involving a number of parties who need to become involved and buy into it, there is an element of looking down the final requirement as you go through the early, iterative stage. That is the only point I am making.
Q90 Chair: Do you think the early, iterative stage of this one went on for rather too long?
Mr Southwell: Yes. I have to agree with the Minister that in hindsight we should have done a little bit more work earlier and we should have done a little bit more work after we had been selected in terms of bringing in the various stakeholders, defining their requirements, understanding the behavioural issues as to how it actually works on the ground, to allow us to gain the traction and momentum which we all wanted. I agree fully with the Minister.
Q91 Chair: What about the situation now? We were hearing in earlier evidence from the first set of witnesses that they find it unhelpful that communication at the moment seems to go on through a train of yourself to CLG to the stakeholder. Would it be better for you to communicate directly with stakeholders?
Mr Southwell: I am pleased to say that, having learned the lessons reasonably quickly from where things were not going right - that is a healthy phase in a project that you are not in denial; you are picking up what is going wrong and reacting to it - we instigated a number of changes quite quickly. Two of those which were quite fundamental and which are showing some very improvements are, firstly, that we have co-location of ourselves as EADS, the Fire and Rescue Service and of CLG at one location in Newport, South Wales. That is proving to be really, really advantageous. The parties are working in a team, in a partnership arrangement. The second thing is we are having end user workshops, solution workshops, on a regular basis. In fact, I believe a few of them are working today, involving the end user on an operational basis so that we are real time ensuring that we have that dialogue which was missing at the beginning and which is now taking place. The combination of those two factors as well as a very, very impressive relationship and a very robust but healthy relationship with us and CLG at a project management level, the combination of those three factors - and at all three levels it is working - gives us increases assurance cautiously that we are now on track in that area.
Q92 Chair: Two quick questions. Since when and who exactly is involved in that, apart from CLG?
Mr Southwell: Since when?
Q93 Chair: Since when have you been doing this close working in Newport?
Mr Southwell: We co-located last August in
Mr Diggle: We have run workshops almost every day since last August.
Q94 Chair: Involving who apart from CLG?
Mr Diggle: Involving ourselves, CLG, the fire and rescue services and whichever supplier has been appropriate to that workshop.
Q95 Mr Betts: Sir Ken Knight has sat there as an interested observer so far. Can I ask whether, if he had been appointed to the post at the beginning of this project, he might think now he would have a happier story to tell about how it might have developed?
Sir Ken Knight: It would be arrogant of me to believe that the fact that the Government did not have a chief fire and rescue adviser in 2004 and indeed 2007 meant things might have been different. This of course is a high profile and a complex project. You know my background because I have been here before. This is a real opportunity of step change for the Fire and Rescue Service. It is an opportunity where disparate fire controls have appeared at different rates with different technology since the Second World War. It is part of a £1.1 billion programme that the Government is spending on the Fire and Rescue Service. I recognise and welcome that alongside new dimensions and Firelink. What it does for me, Mr Betts, is offer real opportunities at two levels: opportunities for increased fire fighter safety by information directly to the cab about incidents that fire fighters need to go to and at an interoperable level allowing fire engines and fire fighters to cross boundaries. Those have been very largely significant as we have seen over the last five or ten years. I think when I have been in charge of three fire brigades, from some of the smallest to the very largest, and seen how FiReControl is operating and the opportunity, this is a prize that the public will recognise is worth having.
Q96 Mr Betts: I know you probably will not want to get drawn there but when this project began you were still in a position where you could see what was coming and how it was going to affect you and the brigade which you were in charge of. Did you have reservations at that time about how the whole project was being developed and were you sat there thinking: "It could be done better if only someone bothered to ask"?
Sir Ken Knight: It would be pretty complacent at that time of course because I was in charge of the London Fire Brigade which already had FiReControl. 20 years ago it merged four separate fire controls into a single region control. All of the doubts about people not knowing the addresses, people not knowing where they were coming from and technology as it were, were dispelled to what I think is one of the most effective FiReControls that is operating today with some 220,000 calls a year. I have no doubt at all that the concept of regional FiReControls would not work without the right technology and the right effort.
Q97 Mr Betts: We are not in that concept, are we? We are talking about actual delivery and the design of a system that would work and deliver that concept. Surely from the beginning you would have been talking to colleagues in other brigades at the time. Did you not instinctively have a feeling that things potentially could go badly wrong with the way they had been constructed and developed?
Sir Ken Knight:
Q98 Mr Betts: There is no reason therefore why it has not so far. What has gone wrong?
Sir Ken Knight: I share, I suspect, both the first session you had and I am sure my Minister's disappointment that it has not been delivered so far. I suspect I share much of the fire service's disappointment. I cannot account for the beginning part of the project. I would like to see its successful conclusion, frankly, in the interests of fire fighter safety and resilience.
Q99 Mr Betts: Why has it gone wrong?
Mr Malik: I think it is more
straightforward than we think in many ways.
If anything starts off really badly planned in terms of the detail, you
are storing up trouble for the future.
The important thing is that today, sitting before you, we are in an
infinitely better position than we have ever been before. The technology, as Sir Ken has said, is
technology that the NYPD uses. It is
technology that the fire service in
Q100 Alison Seabeck: This is directed really at the EADS to start with. Do you have an agreed project plan for FiReControl?
Mr Southwell: Yes, we do.
Q101 Alison Seabeck: That is good news. That is nice and positive. When was that project plan completed and signed off?
Mr Southwell: It is iterative because obviously we are reviewing it on a regular basis.
Mr Diggle: We have a project plan that we are operating to at the moment. I am glad to say that we had a milestone last month, 22 January, and that milestone was hit. We have another milestone, 14 February, and that is on target.
Q102 Alison Seabeck: As you say, it is iterative so it is changing and moving.
Mr Southwell: The framework is there and we are very comfortable with that framework, which is why, as I said earlier in support of the Minister, we are committed to and confident that we are going to hit the go live date because it is against those milestones which we are now hitting.
Q103 Alison Seabeck: Mr Diggle, you have come from a background of working with people like BT, a very large company with lots of big projects. Have you ever come across a project that has been managed in this way when you came into the job?
Mr Diggle: Yes, I have.
Q104 Alison Seabeck: Can you give some examples?
Mr Diggle: I worked on the National Programme for IT for the NHS. This is a complex initiative dealing with a federated user.
Q105 Alison Seabeck: Are you confident though that we are now in a place, as others of your colleagues have suggested, where this is now moving forward?
Mr Diggle: Yes, I am. One of the reasons I am confident is that we have a very strong technology platform in the Intergraph offering.
Q106 Alison Seabeck: If I can very briefly touch on the 2011 timetable, we heard from earlier witnesses that if mid-2011 did not happen they would be looking for a plan B and someone would look for a plan B in any case. Could I ask the Minister whether or not his local government colleagues in the department have looked at potentially what a plan B might cost local government, because clearly it would fall under a new burden if they opted to go to an upgrade of the existing system?
Mr Malik: If we are speaking about contingencies and whether we have looked and are looking at contingencies, I think the truth is where you have a business change project of this magnitude it would be extremely foolish not to be looking at contingencies. The answer is yes, we are looking and have been looking for some time at contingencies, but we are very confident that we will not need any contingencies. I think it is prudent for any organisation that is dealing with a project on this scale to try to develop contingency projects and contingency measures. The important thing about those - and I think it is really important that I say this here - is that if we ever did go down that route - and I hope to God we are not in a position where we have to go down that route; the impression I have thus far tells me that we are not in that position - we would only do so with the support of the Fire and Rescue Service. We would only do so after very serious consultation, not tokenistic consultation. I am not especially keen on opening up dialogue on contingencies. I think it might give it some reassurance in some ways, but it might give it a bit of a negative mindset. At this moment in time we are perhaps more positive about FiReControl than we have ever been. We are looking at it but if we got to the point where we had to do something we certainly would not do it in isolation. In many ways we have learned from the past but we are very focused on delivering FiReControl mid-2011.
Q107 Alison Seabeck: You would not have concerns that you would have a local fire authority unilaterally decide it wanted to opt for an entirely different system?
Mr Malik: Everybody is broadly on board. It would not make sense unless everybody was on board. That is the whole point of having this integrated system with the operability. You have to have buy-in. I have to say with CFOA - I know John Bonney who was here earlier - we have been very honest in our relationship. They have been honest with us and we have been honest with them. I think they recognise that a lot of good will come from this but of course they want to see it happen and we want to see it happen. At this point in time I think we are in a better position than we have ever been before.
Q108 Chair: Do you recognise that local authorities would have more confidence if they knew they were going to be fully reimbursed by CLG for any additional costs in the meantime? As you know, for many of them, they are having to upgrade their existing systems when they previously thought they did not have to.
Mr Malik: I have given a firm commitment on two fronts. Firstly, that if there are expenses and costs which are incurred as a direct result of the delays on FiReControl, my department will seek to meet those costs. What I have also given a commitment to is, once FiReControl goes live, if there are extra costs incurred by fire and rescue authorities, then because of FiReControl going live, we will meet those as well. I have also given a commitment that where fire and rescue makes savings because of FiReControl - and there are some 21 who will - that money will not come back into the central coffers. That money will be reinvested locally by the fire and rescue authorities on their own priorities.
Q109 Chair: Is this a change in policy, because the previous witnesses said that they had examples where fire and rescue services had only been partially funded and only then after, as they put it, extensive lobbying?
Mr Malik: I just go back to the very specific point that I was making. If it can be demonstrated that costs have to be incurred because of the delay, we will meet those costs. I do not know about the specific examples that you have been given but I would be very happy to look at them and I would be delighted to respond to you on each and every example that has been given. As the Fire Minister, I am absolutely categorical that if there is a cost that has been incurred because of delays then it is or responsibility to meet that cost. I have said that to fire and rescue authorities, to CFOA and to others.
Q110 Chair: If FiReControl is fully implemented, is the IT support and maintenance transferable or will it have to be EADS who does it? Is EADS the only firm that can run and maintain the system?
Mr Diggle: No. In theory, it could be transferred to any maintainer.
Q111 Chair: What does the contract say?
Mr Diggle: The contract says it is our maintenance contract until 2015, I think.
Q112 John Cummings: Could you tell the Committee how much the regional control centre buildings are currently costing to build and what would have been the previous costs?
Ms Dunn: At the moment there are eight
regional control centre buildings that have reached practical completion. The ninth regional control centre, which is
Q113 John Cummings: Can you tell the Committee are staff being at present employed in the centres and, if so, what are they doing?
Ms Dunn: There are a number of staff that are operating in the centres. There are regional project teams and regional control centre operations teams which are operating out of those buildings. There are a number of activities taking place in those regional control centres. Some of them are being fitted out with equipment. Some of them are being used for training purposes, familiarisation purposes and so on.
Q114 John Cummings: I would imagine that the costs of these staff are paid for out of the £800,000 you are talking about?
Ms Dunn: No. The £850,000 is simply the lease cost of the building. The costs of the regional project team and the regional control centre teams are paid for as part of the project implementation costs by CLG until the point of cut over, at which point they will become part of the stated costs of the system.
Q115 Chair: Why was the procurement of the buildings done separately from the delivery of the IT system? If they had been together you would not have been left with buildings that are costing £1 million a month.
Mr Malik: I will be corrected by
somebody hopefully but I think that it is quite unusual to get one company that
can do both these very different jobs.
One is a kind of technology based business change project and the other
one is a building project. Of course the
objective was to try to ensure that they met at one point in time but, because
of the delays that we have had on the technology side, clearly the buildings
although being well utilised in all honesty will be better utilised once we get
the go live dates in those regional control centres. I visited one myself in the
Q116 Andrew George: Minister, as you are in candid mode ----
Mr Malik: I am always in candid mode.
Q117 Andrew George: Of course you are. If you were Minister seven years ago and you knew then what you know now about how the project would develop over time, would you not have gone for an improvement and modernisation of the existing structure rather than the project that the Government has gone with?
Mr Malik: Absolutely not. Without a shadow of a doubt, I would have gone with this concept but the difference is obviously with hindsight all the errors that we spoke about, the inadequate nature of the beginning of this project, would not have been repeated. We would have firstly got a really good feel for what we wanted. We would have ensured that there was adequate stakeholder involvement in shaping that concept. It would have been much more detailed and so on and so forth. Those are the changes that I would have made but in terms of the concept, the vision and the national resilience that this project will bring, as Sir Ken said, it is one project of three projects which are part of a national resilience programme which will ensure that this country is at the cutting edge of fire and rescue service provision anywhere in the world. I think it is something that in years to come we will rightly be proud of.
Q118 Andrew George: While there is the present environment of tremendous uncertainty, in spite of the positive way in which you have painted the project, how are you dealing with issues of public safety, because clearly the project is not in place? You have the interim, current situation. Are you satisfied that risks to the public arising from this period are being adequately catered for?
Mr Malik: That is obviously a very reasonable question to ask and I am pleased that you have. Every fire and rescue service has an individual responsibility to ensure that its operations are adequate in terms of dealing with the safety and the risks that exist in its area. In that sense, I am confident that every fire and rescue authority is taking its responsibility seriously. I think what I have said is that we are going to have some legacy systems for example which could potentially cause some concerns in the very near future. My department is working very closely with every fire and rescue authority to understand if there are needs and to ensure that we are there to give adequate support. Of course it is not the case that we need regional control centres there tomorrow to ensure safety in this country. The reality is that what we have is adequate for today. The whole point about regional control centres is that they deal with both today and tomorrow. You probably will have heard about the threat of terrorism, the threat of climate change, the threat of disease and critical infrastructure failures as well. That is why RCCs are not just about today; they are about the future as well. In that sense they are future proof and that is why they are the kind of buildings that they are.
Q119 Andrew George: Surely there must be risks going on at the moment given the fact that you do not have all the things you say must be in place such as the interoperability. Some of the fire control centres you have said years ago are not really fit for purpose in this modern day. They are not able to perform some of the functions which your new service will be able to perform. Are you not satisfied that the public are very much at risk while this period of uncertainty is going on?
Mr Malik: I think any Fire Minister who was satisfied would not be doing his or her job properly. We are always looking to improve what we have. This will be a significant step change. It is one project of three in a national fire and rescue resilience programme that will ensure that we are at the cutting edge and that we have the best service anywhere in the world. I am confident that what we currently have is adequate for where we are now, but if you are asking me could it not be improved it could be substantially improved and that is exactly what this £1.1 billion of investment seeks to do.
Q120 Mr Betts: In terms of costs, we are told that until the end of last year about £200 million had been spent and another £220 million is going to be spent to complete the project up to 2017. If the plug was pulled today or in the next couple of weeks as some people have advocated, how much money would have been spent on it by the time that decision would be made? I presume there are some costs which are contractually committed now, which would run on even if the project was stopped. If you do not have an answer now, it would be helpful if you could write to us about it.
Mr Malik: Sure. It is an area that I am not particularly keen to speculate on. It is my belief from everything I know that we are not going to be in that position but you are right to ask. I am very happy to write in more reflective mood and give you some detail on what that actually might mean. Quite a lot of the costs that have been incurred have been spent on things that will be useful moving forward. It is not the case that this would be a deadweight loss to the Exchequer, but clearly that is not where we currently are. That is not where we want to be. If the Committee wants to have a bit more of a spotlight on that, I am happy to write and give you some more detail.
Q121 Andrew George: In the letter which I quoted earlier from April 2005, the then Minister told me that we expect there will be net annual savings of 30 per cent in the running costs of the control services from then, the financial year 2009/10. They were anticipating then, after the project should have been fully live by 2008, so within two years there would be 30 per cent savings in the annual running costs. What is the current estimate of that?
Mr Malik: As far as I am concerned, this project was never about cost. It was always about the national resilience that FiReControl would provide. On cost, the current situation is that we expect some £6 million - i.e., nine per cent - annual efficiency savings. The net present value of FiReControl is £240 million. That is the difference between what the existing systems would cost and what this new system would cost. A quick bit of maths - I am happy to be corrected at this stage - tells me that this is one pence per person per week for the best fire and rescue service anywhere in the world. I think that is pretty good value.
Q122 Andrew George: Could you write to us to give the figures for that because I would like to see what your baseline is against which you are saying that these savings are going to be achieved?
Mr Malik: Of course. I would be delighted to do that.
Q123 Chair: Can I just probe about the senior management team on both sides of this project? Firstly, in relation to CLG, how do you justify spending over a quarter of the total budget of FiReControl on project management staff? Why is there such a horrendously fast turnover and why are you so reliant upon consultants?
Ms Dunn: Presumably you are referring to the figure in the NAO Report in relation to the cost of the national project team as part of the overall project implementation costs. The national project team is of a very significant size, simply because of the complexity of the project and the numerous different work streams. It is not just a business change programme. It is not just a buildings programme. It is not just an IT programme. It is a very extensive and complex project which, as colleagues were mentioning earlier, necessitates deep involvement from a large number of FRS experts. Amongst that national project team, about a third of that national project team are fire and rescue service secondees, people who are expert in control rooms, the operation of control rooms and so on. It is an extensive team. I think it is important that we have those secondees in place and it is important also for example that we have those 30 people down in Newport co-located with our colleagues in EADS, making sure that the systems integration work is going exactly as it is intended to and that we are keeping on track.
Q124 Chair: Do you believe now that the project team you have is doing its job effectively?
Ms Dunn: Over the last 12 to 18 months we have a very much strengthened senior project team and we have a significant number of new individuals on the team. We have also been able to start making that shift that you rightly referred to away, where possible, from the use of consultants and towards the greater use of the Civil Service and secondees. There were quite a number of occasions over the last year where we have looked really closely at individual job specifications and determined that, with the right sort of skills transfer, we can move that role to a civil servant or to a secondee and we have done that.
Q125 Chair: Why was that not done at the outset?
Ms Dunn: There are a lot of very specialist skills that are required in the running of a project like this. Although PPM skills are becoming increasingly common in the Civil Service and increasingly CLG in particular is going well in terms of skilling its staff up in that respect, there is a level of specialism required in some of the project management activities, some of the risk management activities and particularly some of the systems integration, testing and assurance activities that we just could not have found off the shelf, at the beginning of the project. The reason I imagine that took place right at the beginning of the project was we needed the project team there, up and running, operational and effective from the start. The quickest way of doing that was to bring people in with the requisite skills. There is an opportunity now to shift which we are starting to take and there will be an opportunity over the coming years, as we get closer towards cut over and completing the cut over cycle, for the numbers in the project team to come down as well. We did provide numbers to the NAO for how we expect the numbers in the project team to come down over the coming years. There will be challenges in that but we need to try and do that certainly.
Q126 Chair: To turn to EADS, Mr Southwell, you have been very confident that you are happy with the delivery date of mid-2011. You do not feel it is too challenging to deliver by 2011?
Mr Southwell: No. As I said before, we are committed to that date.
Q127 Chair: Why do you think everybody should be as confident as you are that you will be able to deliver now when you have not up until now?
Mr Southwell: As we mentioned earlier, we
are hitting our milestones which is obviously a very good comment. Secondly, we have a great team in place. We have Roger, who has been with us one whole
year, so his feet are under the table and he is making a measurable difference. He reports to this gentleman here, Paul
Watson, who was appointed three months ago as the CEO of the business in
Q128 Chair: I think the same question applies. Why was that not in place from the start?
Mr Southwell: From the start we did not have those people in place. As we have all said right from the start here in terms of how we ramped this up, there were lessons that could have been learned. We have given you one. Another one is we wanted experienced, dedicated people from industry brought in to work with our embedded teams. We have learned that lesson as well. The third one is in terms of our strategic partner. We now have in Intergraph an immensely capable organisation that is already bearing fruit. In the spirit of candour and to underpin my confidence as to why things are different and why I am not just brandishing the same old statements, I have material evidence of actual things which have changed for the better which now gives me the confidence which you ask me to express in that committed date.
Q129 Chair: Do you not both think that the taxpayer might have expected that this level of expertise would have been there in both organisations at the start when this enormous public project was begun?
Mr Malik: I talked about £240 million
net present value and described it as net present cost. It is actually net present cost. That is the cost. I think the taxpayer would rightly have
expected us to have had a much better start than we did all those years
ago. I am happy to sit before you and
apologise for the inadequate start that there was for this project. I am also
here just to say that I think we are in an infinitely better position than we
have ever been. I am not here to blame
EADS. I think they were at fault quite a
lot. We have been at fault as well. They are very trusted in government circles,
with the multimillion pound projects that they have with government etc. They have a very good pedigree but the truth
is that this was not the perfect start.
The taxpayer is right to expect better.
All I can say to you is that we are in a much better position. I just hope that lessons are learned here,
not just in terms of CLG but right across the board, across
Q130 Chair: The final question: all the witnesses we had in the first panel essentially said that they did not have confidence in the project being implemented on time as it was currently. They recognised you could not just scrap it and go with what there is at present. Essentially, if I am not putting words in their mouths, they were mostly saying that it needs to be modified and something different thought of which builds more on cooperation between existing regional centres and a national resilience network. Is the department considering that at all? If not, at which point if you fail to deliver on the current timetable, will you decide to rethink the project?
Mr Malik: You said the current regional centres?
Q131 Chair: I mean the existing ones, the ones that are working at the moment.
Mr Malik: Our position is that at this moment in time we are pushing ahead with what we have because we have more confidence in it than we have ever had before. Again, I cannot sit here and say to you 100 per cent that it will happen on time, but all the information I have at hand tells me that it ought to happen. I have mentioned the contingency plans that we are looking at. I know that they are looking at all different possible configurations, so in that sense for us our focus must remain on delivering FiReControl as it was envisaged in a much better environment than it has ever been in before, while at the same time, pretty obviously, being prudent and looking at contingencies which may well include the contingency that you have outlined.
Chair: Thank you very much.