The Future of Fire Service Control Rooms in Scotland

The UNISON Scotland Submission

To the Scottish Executive consultation on
"The Future of Fire Service Control Rooms in Scotland"

August 2004

Executive Summary

• UNISON is Scotland's largest trade union representing over 145,000 members working in the public sector in Scotland. UNISON members are employed within the Scottish Fire Service as support staff, and as Scottish citizens our members have an interest in the functions and service provision of the Scottish Fire Service.
  
  
• UNISON Scotland is concerned that the chosen consultants are not entirely objective in their analysis of the situation since they have already proposed a rationalisation of fire service control rooms in England and Wales.
  
  
• UNISON Scotland is concerned by the selective use of statistics within the report which appears biased towards the case for reducing the number of fire service control rooms.
  
  
• UNISON Scotland is concerned that the consultants do not fully appreciate the role of fire service control room staff.
  
  
• There is a concern that consultant's report downplays the importance of local knowledge as a key element that local fire service control room staff bring to their area.
  
  
• UNISON Scotland is concerned that the consultants compare their projections with the current situation while making no allowances for the fact that the current situation includes control room staff carrying out their full range of duties. In other words there is no like with like comparison.
  
  
• This flawed analysis fails to mention how the remaining duties of control room staff will be carried out or the costs involved in this.
  
  
• In going for a more centralised approach and reducing the number of fire service control rooms, the consultants have rejected the Scottish Executive's aims of a more locally focussed fire service.

Introduction

This paper constitutes UNISON Scotland's response to the Scottish Executive's consultation, ‘The Future of Fire Service Control Rooms in Scotland".

UNISON is Scotland's largest trade union representing over 145,000 members working in the public sector in Scotland. UNISON members are employed within the Scottish Fire Service as support staff, and as Scottish citizens our members have an interest in the functions and service provision of the Scottish Fire Service.

UNISON Scotland welcomes the opportunity to respond to this consultation exercise.

However UNISON Scotland has a number of concerns relating to this consultation and the report prepared by the consultants Mott MacDonald. These include the objectivity of the consultants as well as their analysis of the current and future provision of fire service control rooms.

Objectivity

There is a concern that the chosen consultants, Mott McDonald, are not entirely objective in their analysis of the situation. They are the consultants who proposed a rationalisation of fire service control rooms in England and Wales and there is a concern that they have included that experience within their approach and subsequent response. If this report was to recommend no change to the present structure it would have to disagree with the report they compiled previously.

As will be highlighted later UNISON Scotland is also concerned that the consultant's report uses selective figures and information to produce a biased report with the aim of promoting the case for rationalisation.

There are further concerns about the use of statistics and figures within the report, where any figure that promotes a rationalisation of control rooms is referred to as ‘reliable' while figures that do not support such a view are often described as ‘not robust enough'. For instance the consultant's accept any evidence to allow them to state that larger control rooms are more efficient but question the reliability of evidence that indicates that larger control rooms are less effective in responding to calls.

It also seems as if the whole rationale of this report is to produce an argument for reducing the costs of fire service control rooms. This is seen in their implication that larger control rooms may have easier access to New Dimension resources than smaller control rooms. The New Directions programme is a UK response to the 9/11 attacks in the USA and look to how emergency services can respond to a large scale terrorist attack. If the Scottish Executive accept the need for larger control rooms then there will be a benefit for them in attracting external funding for control room upgrades rather than this having an impact on their own resources.

There is also a concern over the examples used by the consultants to highlight the benefits of rationalisation. There is no mention of amalgamations that have not worked, such as the pilot scheme in Cleveland to amalgamate the control rooms of police, ambulance and the fire service. This pilot scheme ran into so many problems that the scheme had to be abandoned. Similarly there is no mention of the rationalisation of rescue co-ordination centres by the Maritime and Coastguard Agency during which time there has been an increase in deaths of over 28%.

UNISON Scotland has a concern that the issue of a terrorist attack may be exaggerated in order to drive through a reduction in control rooms. For instance, the Lockerbie bombing did not result in calls for a change in control rooms. Even the evidence given by the consultants regarding emergency control rooms in the USA, covering areas involved in the 9/11 attacks, show that there has been no demand for a change in control room sizes.

There is also a concern that whereas under the current situation each brigade has one main control room and a fallback facility this would not be the case under the proposals advocated by the consultants. Having one or two larger control rooms would make for an easier target for any terrorist attack aimed at disrupting emergency services.

Analysis of Fire Service Control Rooms

UNISON Scotland has a number of concerns relating to the consultant's analysis of fire service control rooms. These include the consultant's interpretation of the role of control room staff, the future governance of such staff and the measurement of the efficiency used in the report.

The Role of Control Room Staff

UNISON Scotland is concerned that the consultants do not fully appreciate the role of fire service control room staff. As well as call taking and dispatch duties there is a wide range of other duties undertaken by control room staff such as:

• Dealing with staffing issues for Operational personnel
• Checking and maintaining Service staffing levels, ensuring that fire appliances do not go off the run due to staffing deficiencies
• Monitoring and receiving notification of equipment and vehicle faults and notify the appropriate authority
• Providing daily, weekly, monthly and annual statistical reports
• Maintaining the mobilising (FIRES III) database, updating it with changes to premises or hazards contained, new premises, new streets, of "persons at risk in the community" etc.
• Assisting Community Fire Safety Department in combating Malicious Calls and assisting Community Fire Safety Department with initiatives such as "Juvenile Fire Setters"
• Ensuring Health and Safety legislation is adhered to
• Assisting Service Admin staff when they are busy or short staffed.
• Dealing with Admin calls outwith office hours
• Receiving and relaying information to operational personnel e.g. local weather conditions/ road closures, burst mains etc.
• Receiving test calls from premises testing alarms

The above list is only an indicator of the many other duties undertaken by control room staff. There is also likely to be a major role for these staff in the introduction of both Integrated Risk Management Plans (IRMP) and the Integrated Personnel Development System which the Scottish Executive plan to introduce into all fire authorities in Scotland.

Fire control room staff are part of the Community Fire Safety process and assist in identifying areas of concern. They are and will be vitally important to each of their areas when IRMP's are being created locally as it is going to matter greatly whether an area has a local fire service control room or not.

These staff will also be affected greatly by the introduction of Integrated Personal Development System (IPDS), which will offer them greater and more in depth training and also identify & quantify the level of expertise and knowledge required by ‘the Emergency Fire Control Operator' to allow them to serve the community. Surely the Executive should at least wait until this process is fully completed before any judgements are made on what is at present inaccurate and incomplete information.

The consultant's report also downplays the importance of local knowledge as a key element that local fire service control room staff bring to their area. While insisting that databases and software can take the place of local knowledge, the consultants do concede that it would be a large task keeping databases etc up to date. However the consultants do not appear to have taken into account any problems such as computer viruses etc which could make an over-reliance on such software potentially dangerous. There are some other advantages of retaining a local fire service control room such as:

• An emergency 999 call can be received and processed quicker in the localised areas because local knowledge assists the Emergency Fire Control Operator to identify in a much quicker way addresses & locations within their area.
• Local Fire Authorities are better able to judge local needs and respond to local changes but would not have autonomy if the Emergency Fire Control is out with their boundary area.
• Local knowledge is absolutely vital with the increase in mobile phone use - many people either do not know or are unsure of where they are when phoning in a 999 call. Previously a telephone kiosk number could be used to identify an area or trace call.
• Spate conditions i.e.: Bonfire night, Flooding, Grass & Forestry Fires, The Big Freeze etc, etc. Smaller Emergency Fire Control Rooms saves the Fire Service thousands of pounds using local knowledge & skills to identify single incidents or duplicate calls to single incidents.
• Saturation point of incidents is reached quicker in larger Emergency Fire Controls Rooms causing a greater degree of worry & stress to Emergency Fire Control Staff.
• Distance can breed contempt. There is still pride in serving your local community.
• It is impossible for larger Emergency Fire Controls Rooms to serve different Brigades - having separate local procedures for each Brigade within their areas, is incompatible, confusing and increases the risk of error.

Staff Governance

The report suggests that in the event of having larger but fewer control rooms, the staff in these control rooms would have to be employed by a central agency such as the proposed Common Fire Service Agency. UNISON Scotland is concerned that this could lead to problems of governance and accountability as each fire brigade could have different protocols and procedures especially with the onset of IRMP's, leading to a poor understanding of their implementation.

There will also be problems in maintaining links between the brigades and the centralised control room(s). The consultant's also raised the issue that not all staff would want to transfer to new centralised control rooms and extra training and recruitment would be needed to replace the loss of valuable, experienced staff.

Efficiency

The consultants propose using the cost per incidence as a measure of efficiency for fire service control rooms. UNISON Scotland is concerned that this methodology has some serious flaws.

First of all it concentrates only on call taking and dispatch and ignores the other duties of control room staff. This therefore ignores added costs to the Fire Authorities for employing extra staff to take over these duties. Nowhere in the consultant's projections are these costs included, therefore the report provides an inaccurate picture of all the costs associated with a rationalisation of fire service control rooms.

There is also a concern that cost per incident is not a true reflection of efficiency. If the Scottish Executive is seriously concerned about reducing the number of deaths through fire incidents then maybe a more effective measure would be based on the time taken between accepting a call and the dispatch of fire-fighters to an incident. Reducing this time will obviously have an impact on how quickly fire-fighters can attend an incident and on the number of casualties at each incident.

Within the report the consultants highlighted the time taken from the acceptance of call to dispatch. Although the percentage of calls handled within 2 minutes varied between 91.1% to 98.5%, there was a wider difference in the percentage of calls handled within 1 minute. This ranged from 49.4% to 78%. The consultant's stated that in their view this was not related to the size of control rooms but more due to staffing levels. This seems a strange comment since their analysis suggests reducing staff numbers.

If an alternative approach was taken whereby the authority with the best percentage response (for calls handled within 1 minute) was extrapolated against the number of incidents and applied to other authorities such as the one with the poorest percentage response, this would show that extra staff would be required.

Future Projections

UNISON Scotland is concerned that the projections used by the consultants for the future provision of control rooms is based on the staff only carrying out call-taking and dispatch duties and not the full range of their duties. The consultants compare their projections with the current situation while making no allowances for the fact that the current situation includes control room staff carrying out their full range of duties. In other words there is no like with like comparison. It is therefore unsurprising that the consultants can predict savings in staff costs over the current situation. This flawed analysis also fails to mention how the remaining duties of control room staff will be carried out or the costs involved in this. Such an omission renders the consultants comparisons as invalid and certainly not a true reflection of the situation.

Scottish Executive Policy

The recommendations made by the consultant's contradict the general thrust of the Scottish Executive's proposals to modernise the fire service in Scotland. In general the Scottish Executive aims to hand over more power to local decision making as evidenced in the abolition of Section19 of the Fire Services Act of 1947 (the Ministerial role in the decision making process affecting issues such as the closure of fire stations). This accent on local decision making can also be seen in the plans to allow each fire authority to introduce their own IRMP. However in going for a more centralised approach and reducing the number of fire service control rooms, the consultants have rejected the Scottish Executive's aims of a more locally focussed fire service.

For Further Information Please Contact:

Matt Smith, Scottish Secretary
UNISONScotland
UNISON House
14, West Campbell Street,
Glasgow G2 6RX

Tel 0845 355 0845 Fax 0141 342 2835

e-mail matt.smith@unison.co.uk