Cross party support for campaign to keep fire control in Cornwall

There was overwhelming cross party support among Cornwall councillors at yesterday's meeting for a motion opposing plans from the Home Secretary to hand control of the fire and rescue service to the Devon and Cornwall Police Commissioner.

The principle reason for this opposition was the loss of local control. Cornwall's fire service is unique. It is built around our towns and villages and in response to the needs of each town. There was a significant fear that moving control to Exeter would lose this tailored approach and also result in cuts to our brigade in order to support the less efficient Devon service.

Cornwall's fire and rescue service has not always been so good - but huge strides have been made in recent years by the staff, the excellent leadership and by the council itself. Why would we want to go backwards?

I'm delighted that there was also massive opposition from the Conservative group to the idea that the inefficient Tory Police and Crime Commissioner should take control of Cornwall's fire service.

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Why handing control of the Fire and Rescue Service to the Police Commissioner would be bad for Cornwall

It seems that free-spending Conservative Police Commissioner Tony Hogg is keen to expand his empire. He has welcomed a proposal by the Home Secretary to explore the idea of police commissioners taking over the running of fire and ambulance services. Chancellor George Osborne also gave a hint of such a move in his spending review announcement yesterday.

I don’t know that much about the ambulance services, but Cornwall Fire and Rescue Service is a hugely specialised team which has developed brilliantly under Cornwall Council. It has new leadership and was taken off a list of those services seen to be failing after a lot of hard work by the authority and staff. The idea of centralising it to an Exeter HQ (and merging with Devon) would mean the loss of local accountability and, I fear, a less responsive service.

Whilst most of local government has made significant savings in administration in recent years, Mr Hogg has overseen further bloating of his own administration team. He has, rightly, made the point that local police services will be affected by the latest round of cuts. But his arguments are holed below the waterline given his own profligacy. I can't help but wonder whether taking over fire or ambulance services would be simply an excuse for another round of consultants and more 'chums on seats'.

At the moment, Cornwall Fire and Rescue Service is run by the council and accountable to the public through local elected members. The debate about local fire stations and service levels is one which the public can see and take part in. My fear is that, if the Police Commissioner’s empire is allowed to expand, we will lose that accountability and decisions will be taken in a private office in Exeter.

Led by my colleague Sue James, a cross party group of Cornwall councillors has proposed a motion for the next council meeting opposing the centralisation of fire services.

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Flashpoint Lifeskills Centre

This afternoon, the Cornwall councillors overseeing the fire service visited the Flashpoint Lifeskills centre in Bodmin. This is a centre that was established about 10 years ago by North Cornwall Council and teaches a variety of people about safety both inside and outside the home.

Now the centre is run by Cornwall Fire and Rescue Service and the majority of their visitors are primary school teachers. In addition, they have other school pupils in and they do first aid courses for adults.

Predominantly led by volunteers, the sessions look at 11 different scenarios from the kitchen to a farm yard and a railway track.

The centre is certainly well put together and very visual. There is lots of effort put into each scenario and masses to learn.

The battle for the centre is twofold

- how to get more volunteers in so that they can cope with as many schools as wish to visit

- how to boost the number of schools who want to visit so that every young person in Cornwall gets to learn vital information about safety at home and outside.

Fire Working Group - a peer review

Have I lost you already? No really, some reviews of council services can be very helpful and interesting.

A team of experts is helping Cornwall's Fire and Rescue Service to assess what improvements have been made since the scathing report into the service last year. This team is made up of four uniformed fire officers from around the country including the chief officer of Kent Fire Service - acknowledged to be one of the best in the UK. Also with them is the lead councillor for Hampshire's fire service and an expert from IDeA - the body which organises these expert peer reviews.

Today's meeting was for the seven councillors on the Fire Working Group with the two 'civilian' members of the team. They wanted to ask us how we approached our scrutiny role and what we thought the challenges were for Cornwall's Fire and Rescue Service.

I can't really go into all the details of what we discussed, but the outcome was that we got a lot of ideas for further work as well as (hopefully) convincing the review team that Cornwall's fire brigade is on the right track to become an even better service - which I believe that it is, and setting out the challenges we think still need to be overcome.

But the main point of this post is that certain types of inspection and review can be incredibly helpful to a council's service. But the old Labour regime of endless inspections has the opposite effect - particularly when they are tick box exercises or where the inspectors simply watch and listen rather than use their experience to make suggestions for delivering a better service in the future.

An evening with Falmouth Fire Brigade

I've just got back after an evening spent with the retained firefighters at Falmouth Fire Station together with fellow councillors Judith Haycock and John Fitter.

I sit on the small scrutiny group which is helping to make sure our fire and rescue service is the best it can be. As part of our work, we went to Falmouth which is one of two whole timed crewed stations in Cornwall (the other is Camborne). But we weren't there to see the whole time firefighters. Instead, we were meeting the retained section. These are fully trained crews who work 120 hours a week on call and who support the whole time crews as well as having their own specialist duties.

One of the unique aspects of Falmouth is that they operate the Marine Incident Response Group system, delightfully known as MIRG. Whilst many fire brigades operate a marine system for fires close to shore, only a few participate in the MIRG system which enables fire and rescue expertise to be delivered offshore - sometimes up to 200 miles away. The nearest MIRG partners are in Hampshire and South West Wales.

MIRG operates both alongside and offshore. Alongside includes those ships within Falmouth Harbour and within the Carrick Roads up as far as the King Harry Reach where boats are laid up. Offshore, not surprisingly, means those boats which are out to sea.

In order to fight these fires, the MIRG team has a mixture of specialist equipment and their regular gear which is tasked to marine operations. They can reach boats at sea by three means - using the helicopters based at Culdrose for ships furthest away from shore, by using the Coastguard ship permanently based around the Cornish coast or by using their own RIB, the Phoenix, which is moored in Falmouth marina.

One of the recent marine trips was to deal with a serious fire on board to Irish ferry the Oscar Wilde.

We went out in the RIB for a trip around Falmouth Harbour and the lower stretch of Carrick Roads. The boat can carry up to eight firefighters and can travel at up to 40 knots - which means that it can help to support to station at St Mawes - reaching the town in less than ten minutes. The RIB itself costs little to maintain and I believe is a great addition to our firefighting capabilities.

As well as seeing the work of the marine team, we picked up on a number of other issues which we will be able to explore further during our more 'normal' meetings.

Many thanks to all at Falmouth Fire Station for all the help and information they were able to give us during a great visit.

What's going on with the proposed fire control centre?

One of the great projects proposed by the Government is to create a single fire control centre for the whole of the South West. The new centre - in Taunton - is already costing taxpayers £155,000 a month even though it is standing empty.

Over-runs are said to be almost £4.5 million and local taxpayers may have to pick up that tab and apparently fire chiefs are concerned that the new centre may be using obsolete technology.

You can read more about the concerns on This is Cornwall.

I have asked that councillors receive an update on this issue at the next meeting of the Fire Working Group, a scrutiny sub-committee on which I sit and which is monitoring the efforts to make sure that the Fire Service is up to scratch following the poor audit assessment.