The fire service has started a major consultation on a new community safety delivery model for the whole county, with specific proposals for individual fire stations, including Stone.
A drop-in consultation event takes place at the Stone House Hotel on Tuesday 10th March, between 5pm and 7pm, where you can speak directly with representatives from the fire service. You can also complete an online questionnaire about the service’s proposals by clicking HERE. The consultation closes on 22nd May. Responses will then be reported to the Fire and Rescue Authority to support their decisions on which options may be progressed.
As with everything in the public sector at the moment, squeezed budgets are playing their part. Since 2011, Government funding for Staffordshire’s fire service has reduced by £4 million and the service expects further cuts of around £5.7 million up to 2019/2020. The service’s budget for the next financial year (2015/6) includes a reduction in Government funding of £1.75 million (8% down from last year). The service will have to take some money from its reserves. In February, the Fire and Rescue Authority voted to increase Council Tax by 1.95%.
But aside from budget restraints, the service says there has been a reduction in the number of fires in the county – there were 3,183 fires involving property and casualties in 2003/4. In 2013/14 this had reduced to 1,564 – a reduction of 54%.
Because of this, the service argues, the demands placed on the emergency response side of its operation are reducing. It says: “Fewer resources are needed to deal with our emergency calls. The proportion of incidents that require a deployment of just a single vehicle have been increasing. Incidents requiring three or more fire appliances make up a small proportion of the total of incident calls.”
Over the past five years, the service says, fire calls in the Stone area have fallen from 352 to 234, and so far this year (Feb 2014 – Jan 2015) down to 160.
So what is the fire service proposing for Stone community fire station?
You can have a look at the booklet that’s been produced for Stone HERE. In a nutshell, though, there are two proposals for Stone, and both involve the loss of one of the two fire engines (or appliances) that are based there, and one would mean the loss of seven operational staff members.
The options are:
1. Remove the second appliance and maintain crewing at a level which would support the Command Support Vehicle (CSV)
2. Reduce the number of operational staff at Stone and remove the second appliance (this would mean the station’s remaining appliance could not be used at the same time as the command support vehicle)
The fire service accepts that not having a second fire appliance at Stone station would impact on its ‘attendance standards’ for a second appliance to arrive at the scene of a ‘life risk’ fire – according to its calculations, that could be two calls each year that would not get a second appliance at the scene within the service’s standard times (the standards the service sets itself to reach certain types of incident).
More detail here from the Stone booklet (there’s a link above to the whole document if you’re struggling to read this, by the way)…
Over the past three years, of the 570 incidents analysed for Stone fire station, 100 were high severity; 82% of incidents attended by Stone within their station area are classed as low severity.
And the demand for both appliances in Stone has fallen quite dramatically over the last few years…
The fire service is having to work with reduced resources, but also within a different environment than a decade ago, thanks in the main to their own good work. Their efforts in preventative work over the last few years have delivered real community safety improvements across the county as a whole and a welcome reduction in the number of fires.
The removal of the second fire appliance from Stone community fire station may mean an increased risk, however small, of a second appliance not arriving at the scene of a life risk fire within the service’s standard time. Is it one worth taking? The consultation has been set up to gather local views, so make sure you have your say.
[button color=”red” size=”small” link=”https://staffordshirefire.gov.uk/Documents/CSO_Stone.pdf” ]Click here to see the full Stone document[/button]
[button color=”red” size=”small” link=”https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/Communitysafetyoptions” target=”blank” ]Click here to give your views in the online questionnaire[/button]
