Some Fire & Rescue Authorities properly protect the public and their firefighters

With Devon & Somerset Fire & Rescue Service providing less effective resources, and now planning to cut resources, it is worth looking at how other Fire & Rescue Services do more to protect their residents and firefighters.

Lincolnshire Fire & Rescue Service are providing 33 new and improved fire engines to better protect their communities. The comments in their video provide a stark contrast to the attitude of the Devon & Somerset Fire & Rescue Authority and the Chief Fire Officer towards firefighter and public safety.

Shame the Councillor called it a 'force', instead of a service, but you can't complain about 'best level of emergency response', 'important to provide the very best equipment', 'greater water supplies', and 'much more effective service'.

Then there is the Devon & Somerset Fire &
Rescue Authority's approach to 'duty to provide'.

Rapid Intervention Vehicles providing a poorer level of emergency response, 
less equipment, less water and a less effective service.

Now this is a Hampshire Fire & Rescue Service vehicle that is very similar to the Rapid Intervention Vehicles Devon & Somerset Fire & Rescue Service decided to buy. Unlike D&SF&RS, who decided to buy 45 with no idea where they were going to use them, Hampshire decided to extensively trial them first. 

Hampshire Fire & Rescue Service has now sensibly decided they 
are unreliable and inadequate. They have cancelled plans to buy 33. 

As well as buying these Really Inadequate Vehicles, Devon & Somerset Fire & Rescue Service now plans to close 8 fire stations, cut 16 fire engines and not crew another 14 fire engines during the day!

Residents and firefighters in Devon & Somerset deserve better!

Deceit continues as the public protest

Two weeks on and sadly no response from Sara Randall-Johnson, the Chair of Devon & Somerset Fire & Rescue Authority. My thought that she might be concerned about the misleading consultation document she had put her name to seems to have been misplaced. I hope it doesn’t mean she knew it was deliberately misleading.

The public give their views loud and clear

Devious & Secretive Fire & Rescue Service continue to try and persuade people that these are not cuts, but it is quite clear that people aren't falling for it.

It seems that some fire & rescue service staff have felt uncomfortable at some public consultation meetings. They really should not be surprised that people who have been told their lives will be put at greater risk are angry and appear hostile. It may be unfair to criticise those sent to persuade the public that they should accept cuts to their service, after all, some of them may not realise they have been sent out with distorted data and misleading claims. If that is why they are uncomfortable then they need to take it up with their employers.

Uncomfortable will be waiting longer to be rescued from a 
burning building or a wrecked car when help has to travel further

Apparently, having received a petition at Porlock containing over 3,500 signatures opposing the station's closure, someone left it behind. Now I agree that full consultation responses are better, but if the Fire & Rescue Authority is sincere they must accept the petition. Petitions to official bodies have been recognised as a valid way for the public to express their view for many hundreds of years. It is wrong of D&SF&RS to now imply that petitions are not worthwhile.

Make your views known to the Fire & Rescue Authority

and your MP

I strongly recommend that people complete the consultation questionnaire and lobby Fire Authority Members. Despite what some D&SF&RS officers would have you believe, this is a result of Government cutting funds for Fire & Rescue Authorities, so please also write to your MP. The new Prime Minister has pledged to repair the damage austerity has caused to the Police, so it is wrong that austerity is still being allowed to destroy our fire & rescue service.

Who can you believe?

"Resources in the wrong place"

This is the inept D&SF&RS plan to get them in the 'right place'

This is their worst case proposal, which could be adopted. Roving fire engines may appear to improve things, but we don't know if they will be full sized fire engines with a full crew, or vans with a couple of firefighters, so there is no way to know. The odds of them being in the right place at the right time are also very poor.

Preparing for extra fatalities?

My attention has been drawn to one of the images used by the D&SF&RS propaganda unit. The question raised was, “is the firefighter depicted carrying a body bag with one of the extra bodies that will result from these cuts?”

I can see why someone thought it looked like a body bag, but I am sure the propaganda unit would not be that foolish. However, I have been informed it depicts a firefighter carrying a ‘Cleveland Load’ bag, which contains hose packed in a way that is easier to use in high rise buildings. A good idea you might think, except that all the bags they bought have never been used. In another example of inept planning, they can’t fit them on their fire engines without removing other vital equipment, so they are sitting in storage!

Money wasted on TWO Chief Fire Officers

A look at last year's accounts shows that D&SF&RS spent £353,855 on TWO Chief Fire Officers! Lee Howell, who now tells us they have to save money, was paid even though he was away for the whole of 2018/19. They also paid his Deputy at the full Chief Fire Officer rate to do Lee Howell's job. Lee Howell seems to have little interest in Devon & Somerset Fire & Rescue Service or local residents. After a round of damaging cuts six years ago he went part time, so he could act as Chief Fire and Rescue Adviser and Inspector for Wales. 

In November 2017 he left to take charge of a Home Office funded data analytics initiative. It was only supposed to be for one year, but he failed to complete it in the time and stayed on, only returning in April this year. Now the Home Office was supposed to pay £140,000 towards the cost of his employment for 2018/19, but that does not appear in the accounts. 

It beggars belief that the Fire & Rescue Authority effectively subsidised the Home Office, who were only offering to cover two thirds of the CFO's cost. You also have to wonder if the Data Analytics initiative will see data analysed properly, or manipulated in the way it has been for this consultation!

Chief Fire Officer wants you to do his job for him

It now seems that Mr Howell doesn't want people to tell him his proposals are wrong, he wants them to do his job and come up with alternatives.

The reason the service is in this mess Mr Howell is because you have failed to impress on the Home Office how damaging their funding cuts are. Now some suggest that you haven't done this as you have been working for them. I hope that is not the case, so if you have campaigned on behalf of Devon & Somerset's residents and firefighters, please publish your correspondence to the Fire Minister and to local Members of Parliament, together with their replies.

Residents in Devon & Somerset deserve honest answers

Now junior staff are used for propaganda

Devious & Secretive Fire & Rescue Service is always redacting the names of junior staff in documents requested under freedom of information legislation. They say this is to protect their personal data. Yet it now seems they are quite happy to use their images and voices, which are pretty personal to most people, to spin dangerous cuts in their latest video on social media.

I suppose it is the uproar, as the public begin to realise that D&SF&RS management is misleading them with this consultation, that has prompted this latest shabby attempt to spin the cuts as improvements. They must think the public will be misled by a few faces from further down the service's career structure in to thinking that staff support these cuts. 

The reality is that the vast majority of Devon & Somerset Fire & Rescue Service staff oppose these cuts. 

What induced them to take part in a propaganda video, which is effectively stabbing some of their colleagues in the back, I don't know. Especially as the proposals will also see hundreds of thousands of residents in Devon & Somerset face an increased risk to their lives. It does not matter if they were pressurised or did so voluntarily, it was very unfair of the service to put them in that position. 

So let us look at the claims in the video: 

Consultation document misleading, over 600,000 people face increased life risk

My email to Sara Randall Johnson, Chair of Devon & Somerset Fire & Rescue Authority, sent yesterday:

Dear Fire Authority Chair,

 

Whilst I am sure you were unaware, the consultation document you have put your name to is deliberately misleading. Sadly, it appears this has been done to deceive the residents of Devon & Somerset and I would urge you to withdraw the document.

 

My experience of FSEC modelling made me doubt the claims made by ACFO Pete Bond in his BBC interview on 2nd July, so I submitted questions to the Safer Together Programme Team. Their answers, and another D&SF&RS document (attached), confirm my suspicions that the presentation of the risk modelling outcomes are deliberately misleading.

 

The reduced risk claim is frankly fraudulent, as it is based on a comparison for the future, which assumes all the service's fire engines are available, with the current situation, which assumes several fire engines are not available. The excuse given is that crewing and contract changes will ensure all appliances will be available in future. That is outrageous speculation and it is highly unlikely that will ever be achieved. 

So, the only honest and responsible method is to compare current theoretical full availability with future theoretical full availability. That comparison shows, although not very clearly in the public consultation document, an extra death every other year on option 5 (25 extra in dwellings and 22 extra in RTCs in 100 years). A figure that will be higher, as not all deaths have been included in the results. Fire deaths not in dwellings, which in some years have exceeded those in dwellings, and deaths at non-fire incidents, other than road traffic collisions, have not been included. The figure shown for RTCs is also highly suspicious, as the service saves many more lives at RTCs than it does at dwelling fires. Delayed responses will therefore impact more on RTC fatalities than on dwelling fire fatalities. FSEC modelling in other fire & rescue services show that for every extra death in a dwelling fire there can be 15 extra deaths in non-fire incidents, as a direct result of longer response times. 

Although the reply I received states that the modelling for RTCs was based on attendance times for the first two fire engines, the figures in the consultation document suggest that is not the case. In option 5, fourteen second fire engines are taken out of use during the day, yet it is claimed that will make no difference to RTC fatalities (same result as for option 4). This suggests that the figures used in the consultation document are for first fire engine only, so once again deliberately misleading. It is also concerning that modelling figures have not been provided for property damage, which is also certain to increase if the proposals go ahead. 

 

The figures for option 6 are also dubious and wholly unreliable. I am told that the roving fire engines were “in certain locations for the purpose of the modelling”. Whilst there may be odd occasions when a roving fire engine happens to be near enough to an incident to provide an improved response time, the random nature of emergencies means there is a much higher probability that it will not. Evidence of this unreliability can be found in the Analytical Comparison of Community Impacts from Service Delivery Operating Model document, dated June 2019. This is stated to be “the evidence base to assess the impact of changes to our Service Delivery Operating Model”. This shows the outcomes for options 5 and 6 as the same, which means there is no improvement on response times for roving fire engines.

 

Whilst the Analytical Comparison document seems generally more accurate than the consultation document, there are still some concerning conclusions in it. For example, on page 45, the increased response time shown for Porlock and Woolacombe, if they are closed, is just two to five minutes. Yet the nearest fire engines are Minehead and Ilfracombe respectively, both six miles away. Even Lewis Hamilton could not achieve that on those roads in even light traffic. Similarly, the map on page 46 shows day crewing at Barnstaple only increasing first pump response time by one to two minutes. The reality is that at night, with On Call Firefighters responding from home, it would be an increase of around four minutes. These outputs suggest the results have been manipulated to appear less severe. 

However, what the Analytical Comparison document does reveal is that over 600,000 residents will face an increased risk to their lives if the full proposals are carried out (262,486 households x 2.3 average occupancy = 603,718 people). That detail should not be kept secret, the public deserve to know before responding to the consultation. It is also very disturbing that the station risk profiles for every fire station have suddenly been removed from the D&SF&RS website. Removing recent (2018/19) performance information during a consultation is not being responsible and accountable.

 

I would add that I requested copies of the actual modelling data used, but this has not been supplied.

 

I can't believe that you would be happy about the public and Fire Authority Members being misled in this way. Please have the document withdrawn and postpone the consultation until a revised document can be published showing full, accurate and honest details of the impact of these cuts. Given the seriousness of this matter I have copied this email to Fire Authority Members and other concerned parties. 

Yours sincerely

Residents should be concerned about Fire & Rescue Service cuts consultation

Consultation launched by Devon & Somerset Fire & Rescue Service

The consultation is now open on their website, but beware of their claims and statements.

The Dark Art of Spin

Some examples of how Devious & Secretive Fire & Rescue Service is trying to spin cuts as improvements, with some added responses.