Dear Isle of Wight Council,
The IW Fire & Rescue service has produced a ‘Fire Control Transfer
Business Case’, author Paul Street, chief fire officer. Contained
within this document is a section entitled Supplementary Funding
which is directly quoted in the following two paragraphs.
"In light of the closure of the FiReControl Project, DCLG has
indicated that funding will be available to assist FRSs in making
changes to their current Control Centre arrangements. This is in
the region of £20,000, but could include funding for redundancy
payments (£68,000). If the transfer attracts this funding, the
transitional costs would therefore be reduced by up to £88,000.
It is also of note that this proposed transfer is by far the most
concrete, tangible and advanced of any of the planned mergers or
transfers currently being discussed across many FRSs. It is on this
basis that a business case will be presented to CFRAU for
additional assistance with transitional costs, on the basis that
the lessons learnt from the transfer will inform and de-risk any
subsequent transfers across other FRS".
1. Could you please provide me with a copy of the business case,
referred to above, that was presented to CFRAU?

The Isle of Wight Fire and Rescue, in common with all other Fire and Rescue Services sent a response to the DCLG consultation documenton the future of Fire and Rescue Control services in England. The response is included at the end of this letter.

2. Could you please provide me with a copy of any additional
material which was also sent to CFRAU?

No additional material was sent.
3. Could you please provide a copy of any subsequent response
received from Q1 & Q2?

The hyperlink below is the response from the Fire Minister Bob Neill 5th July to all Fire and Rescue Services.

Isle of Wight Fire & Rescue Service Response to CLG Consultation

‘The Future of Fire and Rescue Control Services in England’

Isle of Wight Fire Authority welcomes the opportunity to respond to the Government’s consultation - “The Future of Fire and Rescue Control Services in England”.

The Executive Summary, states that fire and rescue authorities “..... have continued to maintain their current control services in good order – and have been funded to do so.” Whilst we have continued to ‘maintain’ our Fire Control system, it should be noted that this is not utilising new technologies or the latest, most stable platforms and has been upgraded from within Local Authority Capital resources. MDT’s have been procured and developed in collaboration with Surrey Fire and Rescue Service as the RCC project could not deliver an adequate solution within the time frames required by this Service. This innovative approach is being built upon with the proposal to collaborate further with Surrey Fire and Rescue Service through the outsourcing of mobilising from the Isle of Wight to Surrey. Within the consultation document it is stated that ‘simply outsourcing control services does not necessarily increase resilience’ we would argue that the fact Surrey has far more modern and supported systems would actually improve our resilience and create the cost savings achievable based on the fact that the Isle of Wight has the most expensive fire control per cost of call in the Country.

We believe that Government should provide additional funding to assist the Isle of Wight Fire Authority in moving this proposal forward. Furthermore, and in support of our colleagues in Surrey, we believe CLG can help in developing interoperable technology standards and the allocation of legacy equipment to Service/Groups moving in the right direction. It should help fund teams developing interoperable C2, operational ways of working, interoperable technical solutions and help the infrastructure costs that also underpin and are linked to national resilience as a result of the cancellation of the FireControl project.

A positive outcome from the project was the work carried out by the SE Operations Policy and Procedures group (SEOPAP). SEOPAP works across all nine SE FRSs to harmonise pre-determined attendances (PDAs) and produce standard operating procedures (SOPs). The region remains committed to continuing this work to establish coherent cross region responses. It is believed that support from CLG to this approach across the sector would promote the standardisation of operational procedures and response, which would lead to considerable cost benefits, safety advantages and better interoperability.

Consultation questions:

Lessons from FiReControl

Q1Do we agree with the assessment in the consultation paper and what lessons can we learn?

We concur with the comments made within the paper. Unfortunately a point was never reached where a joined up approach between CLG officials and Officers was achieved. Whatever the reason it is our view that the department should not undertake the delivery of such projects in the future. The sector itself has a wealth of experience in delivering major projects successfully and the role of central government should be to facilitate but not deliver such projects in the future.

In our view FRS’s were neither adequately represented nor involved, both in key negotiations and decisions and in day-to-day development, in dealings with suppliers. This led to concerns regarding the projects lack of openness and transparency and in particular that it would not meet the needs of the end users (FRS’s), these concerns were never addressed right up to project closure.

Q2Is resilience, enhanced technology and efficiency still important, what has changed since the project was initiated?

Resilience has and continues to be of significant importance for the Service. In fact, resilience and its criticality is the primary driver behind the decision to collaborate with Surrey FRS on this issue. We believe this could be clearly articulated in a national FRS doctrine providing clarity of the planning assumptions which all FRSs should consider, these would allow FRSs to focus on those elements of the National Security Strategy and National Risk Register of Civil Emergencies plus other document very clearly. We believe that technical fall back and physical site security are very important, now that RCC will no longer deliver either these, expensive arrangements must now be put in place locally.

As a stand alone CountyService, we don’t believe we are best placed to provide this directly and so in order to focus our resources most effectively and to deliver the Government localism agenda, an outsourced solution in the absence of an RCC solution is urgently required.

Q3which aspects of resilience set out in the paper are most important and are there any others?

The elements of physical security, resilience through degradation planning plus technical fall back due to outage or spate for example are all equally important to us. Because they have potentially to have an equal impact and could happen simultaneously we intend to deal with all of these as part of normal BC planning recognising that technical interoperability both regionally and out of region is vital. These all represent expensive solutions which RCC was expected to deliver.

Q4Is there a role for central Government in supporting technical enhancements, and what should this be?

Providing technical enhancements that underpin interoperability and resilience is vital to maintaining a nationally resilient FRS network supporting civil contingencies but which also supports local interoperability on a daily basis.

Regionally a decision has already been made not to use the FireControl building at Fareham this leads to the interim option for shared systems and interfaces. We support a localism approach, allowing services to provide the most suitable Fire Control facilities to meet local requirements, but with financial support from central government to encourage authorities working together to obtain resilience (in our case through outsourcing).

Financial support should also be provided for the provision of SAN-H equipment although this could be hosted by one FRS for a ‘cluster’ of neighbouring FRSs.

The completion of Firelink (as intended by FiReControl) would provide full data communications from the Airwave system to FRS C2 systems. This is an achievable technical enhancement and cost saving necessity for all FRSs. It should be centrally managed in the same way as the existing Firelink project was managed, rather than each FRS or group of FRSs independently procuring systems and services.

Q5Is there a role for central Government in assisting FRSs in achieving greater efficiencies in delivering control services?

The development of technical standards and standard operating platforms should be led and directed by Central Government in our view. The risks of disparate local solutions are neither efficient nor effective.

We agree with the view of Surrey that the deployment of San H in the SE will help, it may also need upgrading from its current specification to include upgraded ICCS, mobile data gateway and will also need to allow integration with the varied regional mobilising solutions currently in or proposed for each FRS control rooms. There is also a significant operating cost for the San H which will be a new burden. Surrey is able to host the San H and will have security in place too, as are a number of other FRSs in the region.

Funding needs to be made available to allow FRSs to continue to develop the technical enhancements promised by RCC which will now have to be delivered locally and to further develop these with partners and neighbours to provide better resilience and more cost effective technical solutions which are scalable in the long-term.

Q6Do we agree with any of the approaches to central government support set out in the consultation paper?

Surrey adopts the localist approach in the decentralised framework outlined in your paper; we agree that ‘change is needed but local areas should have the ability to develop their own approach with support from the centre.’

The Isle of Wight approach, we feel, exemplifies this localist approach the Government sees as its preferred option. This proposal is a local solution that increases resilience, creates a more efficient use of resources and gives us access to enhanced technology not just for mobilising but for C2 capacity.

Q7Do we agree with funding priorities and their order as set out in the consultation paper?

We believe that all four of your funding priorities carry equal weight as each are needed and each have critical impacts. Completion of the installation of firelink is important and can only be achieved through the centre. We remain concerned that Airwave costs are rising and that FRSs are now tied to the Airwave contract with the demise of FireControl. We believe the centre should provide the lead and opportunity for freedom of choice including the opportunity to become more efficient in interoperability and cost reduction as already outlined in our submission above. Specifically we feel the following should be supported by CLG:

  • To complete the delivery of Firelink we believe that CLG should raise and pay for a Change Control Note with Airwave to relocate 5 of the CCI ports from the SAN H currently in boxes at the SE RCC to Surrey FRS.
  • The transitional costs for the Isle of Wight to move its mobilising to Surrey these include but are not limited to movement of Airwave equipment, replacement of station end equipment, increased numbers of MDT’s, HR payments, project management costs and ICT upgrades for alerters.

Q8Which technical options set out in the consultation paper meet our needs?

We believe that Option 3 is the most viable solution as outlined in our response above at Q4 and agree that it requires the reduction of the number of control centres to become cost effective. The combination of Isle of Wight and Surrey Fire Controls is the first regional step in this direction and proves the concept. An Option 4 variant could also work if the San H was moved to an existing SE secure site like Surreys as articulated in our submission at Q5 and Q7.