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Search forTaxpayers face £55million bill for consultation on controversial TriService move
Wednesday, August 20, 2008, 08:00
The cash is being spent on consultants working on controversial plans which will see emergency fire calls made in Gloucestershire handled in Taunton.
The county council and Stroud MP David Drew say they want to keep the service in Gloucestershire with regional back-up.
The consultants' cost, which could have paid for 300 new fire engines, was revealed by the Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG) to MPs.
Coun Barry Dare, leader of the county council, said: "I have always fought the idea of regional fire controls. We already know they will cut the number of people answering 999 calls in the South West by 50% and that the project overall is £96m over budget.
"News of more waste is no surprise. Labour, and in particular fire Minister Parmjit Dhanda, need to admit what a mistake this has been and scrap their plans to close local fire controls."
Mr Drew said: "These costs have been made known to me by the Fire Brigades Union, which is why my preference is for a county centre with regional back-up."
Nationally, the project will replace 46 existing fire control centres with one for each nine English regions.
It will see the county's dedicated control room at the combined emergency TriService centre at Quedgeley close and move to a regional headquarters in Taunton.
It recently emerged that the extra work involved in setting up the new centre was set to cost more than £8m.
And now it has emerged that as of the end of June, £38.5m has so far been spent on consultants for the scheme nationally, with a further £16.9m forecast to be spent on "advice".
The estimated cost of a fire engine is about £180,000, which means an extra 308 appliances could have been bought for the consultancy bill.
And union leaders say the amount is enough to run a large metropolitan fire brigade for a year.
But the costs have been defended by the Government.
A DCLG spokesman said: "Total staff costs of around £60m average out at about 17% of the overall project costs of £360m – we believe this represents good value because the FireControl project will deliver significant benefits and improvements to public and firefighter safety through the delivery of fire control services."
At Westminster a cross-party group of MPs is concerned that the ability to handle calls at the new regional centres is well below that currently able to be handled at peak times by the existing control rooms.
Campaigners argue the TriService centre proved its worth during the 2007 floods crisis, as all three main 999 services' control rooms were next to each other, and all were next door to the Gold Command at the police headquarters. But the Government insists that everyone will benefit under the new nationally-linked regional network, with better protection for the public.
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