Shropshire fire authority backs shared control room move
Friday 18th February 2011, 6:00PM GMT.
Shropshire’s fire authority has backed a move which will see the formation of a shared control room with Hereford and Worcester fire service.
Plans to create a regional control centre in Wolverhampton were scrapped in December after the Government decided the project could not be delivered on time.
Now the two fire services have agreed to operate one control centre from two locations – one in Shropshire and one in Worcestershire.
Both Shropshire and Wrekin Fire Authority and Hereford & Worcester Fire and Rescue Authority agreed to the move at meetings this week. Further details will be discussed over the next few months.
Officials have claimed the move will maintain the level of service currently provided.
Councillor Stuart West, chairman of Shropshire and Wrekin Fire Authority, said: “It will mean that the communities across the area will continue to have a resilient and cost effective fire and rescue service.”
Brigadier Peter Jones CBE, chairman of Hereford & Worcester Fire and Rescue Authority, said: “The planned collaboration with Shropshire Fire and Rescue Service will deliver a state-of-the-art control room.”
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Regardless of the different thoughts on the merits or otherwise of regional control centres, one has to say that all this reorganisation has cost a bundle of money so far.
I went over to the business park in Wolverhampton to look at the building that was planned to be the control centre. It’s a HUGE building, cameras everywhere, tall security fences, discreet basement parking, automated gates, rapid access to motorway network (that will be upgraded soon) – I would imagine very expensive to have had built (under PFI?) and very expensive to continue leasing.
To offset the financial cost a bit, I suggest that whoever is in charge of it now contacts the BBC and proposes it as a filming base for the next series of Spooks. It would suit a programme about spying, it looks just like one would imagine a secret service control centre to look like.
All that time, money and effort and then all put into mothballs – spooky, isn’t it?
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The Government might as well have agreed to spend whatever money was still required to get these places up and running. I’m no fan of centralised services – it hasn’t made Ambulance Services notably better – but it’s ultimately where technology and increased costs are taking us.
Because of the high cost of providing Control and Communications (both for the technology and for staffing), fire authorities are now faced with finding other affordable solutions for their future needs, hence this co-operation between Shropshire and Hereford and Worcester. While the Government doesn’t claim itself to favour regionalised fire services, I suspect it will turn a blind eye if the Fire Services themselves are the driver behind individual link-ups. They may *have* to do that with funding getting ever-tighter.
I’m intrigued as to how you can operate “one Control Centre from two locations though”. Eh?!
Presumably one becomes a call centre and the other a dispatching centre, with one able to take over the functions of the other whenever required, providing the required ‘resilience’? I just can’t see how they can ultimately continue to operate from two locations though; I wouldn’t have thought the workload for either Service would justify it. Sooner or later it’ll be one location, and how long after that before we get a ‘West Mercia Fire and Rescue Service’?
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