INDUSTRY NEWS
THE TRADE’S LOOK AT SIR KEN’S REVIEW ‘FACING THE FUTURE’ I
wake every day at around 05:20, just as the World Service hands over to Radio 4 which starts with the Shipping Forecast and so I hear the delights of North Utsire and FitzRoy – For the latter I preferred the previous name Finisterre, derived from the Latin for ‘end of the earth’ which is somehow more appropriate in the early morning rather than the name of the founder of the Met Offi ce! Following on is News Briefi ng which usually sends me back to sleep but not on the morning of the 17th May as fi re was the fi rst news item! In particular there was a long piece on Sir Ken Knight’s Review ‘Facing the Future ‘ – In the past I don’t recall fi re related matters in this ‘Government’ context ever featuring as the fi rst item on the news! Many in the fi re trade will have views of the Fire and Rescue
Services (FRS) and these will be coloured in many cases by local experience be it good or bad; this article does not seek to offer opinion on matters that are internal to the FRS but it does comment on those matters arising from Sir Ken’s Review that affect the wider fi re world. In Chapter 2 of the Review statistics reveal that an English fi re
fi ghter attends 110 incidents per year and that false alarms now marginally outnumber the fi re calls. The number of fi res in general has dropped drastically during the course of my working life due to
smoke alarms, furniture regulations, reductions in smoking etc. and it should be noted that the number of false alarms has also reduced. While the false alarms statistics are interesting there are no estimates as to how many automatic fi re detection systems are installed and how this number has increased over the year and thus the scale of the drop in false alarms (30% reduction in Total False Alarms in the last ten years) is diffi cult to estimate. However ambiguous, the statistics attendance at false alarms is a big waste of tax payers monies and because of this, work is underway under the auspices of the Fire Sector Federation with the FIA, CFOA, BRE and the FPA combining to gather more meaningful data on the true causes of false alarms, to provide technology based fi xes to problematical systems and to provide education to all stakeholders as to how best to drive down the incidence of false alarms to zero. In Chapter 4 Sir Ken points out the issues with regard to charging
and trading by Fire and Rescue Authorities and comments on charging: “The diffi culty seems to be around setting a price for activities that properly refl ects the costs involved to ensure that total cost recovery is achieved, without overstating these costs and slipping into trading.” Certainly the FIA’s experience has been that the charges from FRS’s for services such as training are comparable with those in the private sector and of course the latter, in the main, are in business to make a profi t. Moving on to trading, Sir Ken describes it as a useful way to generate income and goes on to ask: “As more Fire and Rescue Authorities move to having a trading arm, one intriguing question arises – won’t this bring authorities into direct competition with the private sector and each other as they try to secure contracts and might this competition act as a new barrier to fuller sharing and collaboration between services?” From the trade’s point of view the question of Fire and Rescue
Authorities trading seems fraught with State Aid ‘questions’ concerning the use of the FRS brand and the availability of Government grants. In the opinion of many, including the FIA, these issues tilt the playing fi eld unfairly. In order to release greater effi ciencies in the FRS’s, in Chapter 5
Sir Ken says that this could be achieved by “Moving towards a more national model, through enforced mergers to reduce the number of fi re and rescue authorities or potentially a full merger in the style of Scotland”. If one assumes that fewer FRS’s would mean greater consistency between those that are left standing, be it ten or one, then the trade would welcome this as having 46 different attendance policies for automatic fi re alarms is diffi cult for the commercial user to understand plus greater consistency in enforcement would remove many of the urban legends that surround this issue, particularly from those stakeholders that have had more attention under the Fire Safety Order than they have had under previous fi re legislation. Sir Ken Knight’s Review has evoked much comment in the fi re world and it coupled with the reductions in funding to the English FRS’s mean that the remainder of the term of the current Government could see much change in the English FRS’s. Who knows, in the next couple of years I could be nodding off after Lundy and Fastnet have ‘had their say’ only to be jolted awake again by the news for only the second time in 30 years or more!
Graham Ellicott, FIA CEO
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