Kenilworth MP hits out at fire closure consultation

Kevin Unitt

09 October 2009

KENILWORTH MP Jeremy Wright has slammed the consultation documents given to residents over plans to close the town's fire station.
Mr Wright, speaking from the Conservative party conference in Manchester, told the Observer this week: “The consultation document is not very well worded and does not give people the opportunity to say what they want to say.
“I would urge residents to respond by all means and not to be inhibited by the document.
“They can always write in, explaining exactly what they think
“The document asks questions in a way that can only deliver very positive responses, which will not give an accurate reflection of people's views.
“It doesn't give a a very good view of the consultation process at all.”
Warwickshire Fire and Rescue Service is conducting a 12-week consultation process on the plans, with final proposals expected to go before Warwickshire County Council's cabinet in January.
On the closure plan itself Mr Wright added: “The evidence is not convincing for closing our station.
“Kenilworth is a town of sufficient size to merit its own fire station and the reasons for keeping it are psychological as well as operational.
“People in the town feel safer with their own fire station."
Kenilworth station, which costs £95,000 to run annually, dealt with 231 incidents last year, of which 79 were false alarms and seven were small fires.

LETTER TO THE CHIEF FIRE OFFICER FROM JEREMY WRIGHT MP

30 September 2009

Please take this letter to be my initial response to the Consultation process you have initiated on the document entitled ‘A Fitter Stronger Fire and Rescue Service’. I reserve the right of course to comment further as I hear more from my constituents. I will concentrate most of my remarks on the case you make for the removal of operational response, or to put it another way, the removal of firefighters and fire appliances, from Kenilworth Fire Station.

The introduction to the Consultation document urges respondents to “please consider carefully and suggest better ways of doing things”. I have certainly considered carefully the information the Warwickshire Fire and Rescue Service has made available as part of the Consultation process and wish to comment in detail upon it, but I have to say that it is somewhat unrealistic to expect members of the public without expertise to propose “better ways of doing things”. I do however think that the public are entitled to clear and detailed explanations as to why radical changes to fire cover currently provided are necessary and I hope that this consultation process will be used to do just that.

I am afraid that the Consultation Document is not a good start. The eight steps of the improvement plan you set out each have their benefits listed but no disadvantages are mentioned. It is very clear that additional services and activities are advocated within a static funding envelope. They will be paid for by the effective closure of six fire stations across the County. No doubt it would be your argument that the balance your proposals achieve is, overall, the right one, but that argument needs to be made with greater clarity and straightforwardness. It must be the case that there are losers as well as winners. The real question to be asked is whether the additional benefit to the winners is worth the additional risk to the losers. Instead the public are invited to indicate their enthusiasm for a series of statements with which nobody, on the face of it, could sensibly disagree. This is a document designed to elicit a positive response, not a meaningful one. I hope you will forgive me therefore if I structure my response in a different way.

The report produced on the activity of Kenilworth Fire Station, during the period between April 2004 and March 2009, in the geographical area normally covered by it (Station Ground Information) makes the case for removing operational response from the station under a number of headings – incidents responded to; response times; availability of firefighters and appliances and cost. I will take each in turn.

Incidents Responded To

The first point to make is that the number of incidents responded to reflects the size of Kenilworth in the last 5 years, not in the next 5, 10 or 20 years. This is significant given current plans for substantial development in the town over the next 20 years and the expectation of considerable expansion at the University of Warwick over a similar period. Have these proposals been drafted with a view to Kenilworth’s future as well as its past?

Secondly, we need to know more about the evidence we are given. The suggestion is made that because a large proportion of the calls responded to are described as automatic false alarms, in other words they are the attendance of a fire appliance at premises where a fire alarm has been triggered otherwise than by the presence of a fire, reducing the numbers of such attendances would lessen the demand on fire appliances and contribute to obviating the need for a response from Kenilworth altogether. The argument is perfectly logical but requires an explanation as to how it can be reliably ascertained whether a call is a false alarm before a fire engine is dispatched to check. My understanding is that very few false alarms are known to be so before the fire engine leaves the station and surely far fewer would be responded to if it were otherwise? Any new methods to resolve this problem need to be properly explained and confidence in them justified.

Thirdly, the statistics given concerning incidents responded to from Kenilworth Fire Station in the last 5 years need to be properly
understood. The Station Ground Information covers only incidents within Kenilworth station’s normal operational area, but incidents are
regularly responded to beyond it. This is apparent from the fact that although only 117 incidents are listed for 2008/2009 in the Station
Ground Information, we are told elsewhere in the Consultation papers, under the heading ‘Why Kenilworth Fire Station?’, that Kenilworth attended 231 incidents during that period. If approximately half of call-outs are made to assist nearby stations, those call-outs have to be included consistently in assessments of Kenilworth’s viability. They also highlight the context of mutuality in which the number of Kenilworth fires attended by appliances from other stations must be seen. It follows that we must know the spare capacity at Leamington Spa to deal with Kenilworth fires in the absence of a response from within the town. If almost half of the incidents responded to from Kenilworth are outside the town, what proportion of those incidents are in Leamington, or in Warwick which would also lose its operational response under these proposals and therefore need to be covered from Leamington? If Leamington Station cannot cover all the fires in its own area now, how will it do so when no help can be provided from Kenilworth or from Warwick? These proposals require Leamington to do that and to deal with fires across the whole of the rest of Warwick District too. Even with an extra 25 firefighters across the County, not all of whom I imagine will be based at Leamington, that seems ambitious to say the least.

Response Times

This is of course a vitally important issue. Given that minutes and even seconds can be crucial, the statistics used must be clear and comparable. It is said that retained duty firefighters incur a 5 minute initial delay in comparison with their wholetime duty colleagues before responding to a call. Presumably that is an average figure and retained firefighters can, and often do, respond more quickly, for example if a second call comes in as they are returning from the first? Similarly, wholetime firefighters based at Leamington in the early hours of the morning may be at the station but in bed, incurring some delay themselves before being ready to leave? Have these factors been taken fully into account in making a fair comparison?

Turning to a specific comparison between response times from Kenilworth Fire Station and from Leamington Spa Fire Station as the proposed alternative in relation to fires in the Kenilworth area, the
consultation documents include a map to show the areas which, it is said, can be reached from Leamington within 5, 10 and 15 minutes. I appreciate that the statutory requirement is to respond to a call within
an urban area inside 10 minutes and I note that, according to your map, all of Kenilworth would be within reach in that timescale. I have
to say that I doubt that is realistic given the often congested nature of the relevant roads, but let us accept for the sake of argument that the map is accurate. I assume that the 5-minute response time has some
significance or it would not have been included. Although the scale of the map makes it difficult to be precise, it appears that at least 2 and possibly all 3 of the ‘Primary Fires with Casualties’ which occurred between October 2007 and July 2009 and are marked on the map would not have been reached from Leamington within 5 minutes. What is the significance of that?

The Station Ground Information states that according to the Fire Service Emergency Cover Toolkit Computer model, “there is no additional risk to lives in the area” involved in removing operational response from Kenilworth Fire Station. I find that very difficult to accept. It may be argued that any consequent increase in risk is small, or is compensated for by improvements in services elsewhere, but I do not see how it can be said that moving operational response further from the population of Kenilworth involves no additional risk to them.

Availability

In looking at the figures for the availability of retained fire fighters at Kenilworth in the Station Ground Information, I am concerned that a misleading impression is being given as to the year 2009/2010. The percentage average availability for that year so far is given as 64.40% compared to 68.01% for the year 2008/2009. Looking at the coloured bar chart above it however, it is immediately apparent that availability was slightly lower this year than the previous year in April, but higher in all other months. In July and August it was considerably higher. The figures cannot therefore support an analysis of less availability of retained firefighters in Kenilworth this year compared to last year.
I am also interested to know the potential reasons for unavailability. If they include training, maintenance, mechanical failure or sickness and injury, to what extent do these pressures not apply to wholetime firefighters at other stations?

The unavailability described in the Station Ground Information and referred to elsewhere in the consultation documents is, presumably, that of a full crew from Kenilworth. My understanding is that Kenilworth firefighters often join with their colleagues from other stations to make
up a full crew for an additional appliance beyond those which Leamington, for example, would be able to provide. Is this taken into account in the figures and on how many occasions during the 2004-2009 period on which these figures are based have Kenilworth
firefighters joined with colleagues from Warwick, in particular, to provide an additional appliance which would not have been crewed
under these proposals, given the intended removal of firefighters from both stations?

Cost

These proposals involve a significant reduction in the number of retained firefighter posts in favour of an increase elsewhere in the number of wholetime equivalents. It would be useful to know the relative costs of a retained firefighter as opposed to a wholetime firefighter. For the purpose of clarity, can I take it that no suggestion is made as part of this process that the quality of retained firefighters is inferior to that of wholetime firefighters?

With reference to the proposed Small Fires Unit, in which the costs of running Kenilworth Fire Station will be reinvested, on how many occasions is it envisaged that such a unit will require additional assistance or equipment, necessitating another appliance at the scene and how have those expectations been integrated into cost calculations?

Finally, there is no doubt that flooding is becoming an increasing problem in South Warwickshire and I welcome measures to enhance the response, but my understanding is that DEFRA is still considering the allocation of central money to assist affected areas. Would it not be more sensible to assess what monies may be forthcoming from central government before committing resources which could then be released to be spent elsewhere in the Fire and Rescue Service?

I look forward to your response and to discussing these proposals with you in person. I do not doubt that much of what is in them is desirable but I am unpersuaded that the evidence underpinning the 12 station plan in particular is robust enough to justify the effective closure of Kenilworth Fire Station and the implementation of a Fire and Rescue Service which, for my constituents in Kenilworth, will be neither better nor safer.

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