Fire brigade 'Super HQ' will put lives at risk

The Government plans to close all 46 fire service and 999 call centres in England and replace them with nine large regional ones - scrapping the North Yorkshire control centre based at Northallerton, which currently covers North Yorkshire, including York. The North Yorkshire Fire Brigades Union (FBU) control centre rep, Claire Brewster, said this would be replaced by one super-centre covering North, South and West Yorkshire and Humberside.

Miss Brewster said this could put lives at risk, with operators at one of the new centres required to have a local knowledge of a huge geographical area, increasing the risk of crews being sent to the wrong address.

"Local knowledge is not everything in our job, but it does play a big part.

"At present there are seven different towns and villages with a variation of Carlton in North Yorkshire - imagine if that were times by four and a crew was sent to the wrong address by mistake," she said.

Miss Brewster said that the current plans would also mean significant job losses, as 130 centre staff were employed at Northallerton and the number employed at a larger centre could be as low as 40.

Her comments come after a leaked report leaked to national newspapers from the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister showed 300 jobs are expected to go nationally.

It put the cost of the new centres at £754 million, leading to fears that council tax may be pushed up.

Geoff Rennie, North Yorkshire Fire Authority chairman, said staff needed to be reassured about how exactly a new large centre would be staffed and where it would be located.

He said: "This is really a major hurdle, because at the end of the day we want to provide as good a service at the public as we do at present and the public need to have confidence and that remains to be seen as things stand." The first Regional Control Centres are planned to be operational by the end of 2006, with the rest coming online by 2008.

Updated: 10:17 Wednesday, January 05, 2005