Pat Carberry, the FBU national secretary for LGBT+ members, has a 100% success rate defending firefighters at tribunals. He told Francis Beckett why he succeeds and why he remained a frontline firefighter despite his union role.
Pat Carberry is best known in the FBU as national secretary for LGBT+ members, and at home in Leighton Linslade, Bedfordshire, as the first gay councillor and the leader of the local Labour group.
But ask him what he’s most proud of, and he says in his quiet, undramatic way: “I have a 100 per cent success rate in defending firefighters at tribunals”.
Pat, who retires this year, says he succeeds because management fails. “The people who work for the fire service are mostly despised by those who lead the organisation,” he says. “So, in tribunals you have to listen to false evidence, and it’s very satisfying when they are forced to answer a question directly.”
ACCUSED OF FRAUD
I ask for an example, and he tells me about a watch manager whose pager did not work, which caused him to arrive after the 10-minute deadline beyond which he was not entitled to payment. The watch manager signed in, and phoned control to tell them about the faulty pager. “But the brigade tried to say that his action in signing in was fraud, and they knew he was claiming fraudulently because there was overwriting in the book,” says Pat.
Pat found that the firefighter responsible for the overwriting was a colleague whose handwriting made 4 look like 9, and habitually overwrote to make his meaning clear. Pat told the official doing the internal enquiry: “You can’t ignore this evidence.” The official said: “I’ll decide what I can and cannot ignore.”
“It’s about power, about saying I am the person who controls this room,” Pat told me.
The watch manager was demoted by two ranks, so Pat had to go to the employment tribunal to get justice for him.
Pat, 56, joined the fire service in 1986, and joined the LGBT+ national committee when it was set up in 1998 as the gay and lesbian committee, shortly before he came out as gay. A couple of weeks before he came out, he asked his colleagues how they would feel if a gay guy joined.
Replies ranged from “he wouldn’t want a dirty job like this, he’d want to be in the theatre” to “I wouldn’t use the showers, he’d want to come in and look at me.” When he told them he was gay, they asked why he waited so long, and he reminded them of this conversation.
In 2002, “I found my lifelong partner,” David, a prescription clerk for a big doctor’s surgery, whom he married 12 years ago.
When he became the LGBT+ national secretary he decided not to make it a full-time job, but remain a firefighter. “I thought I’d do a better job if I stayed in the workplace,” he says, though he is quick to add that this does not apply to all national officials – many have too great a workload to be firefighters as well. So, “whenever something comes up I apply for leave – it’s normally granted.”
He quickly found that his colleague’s view, that firefighting is not for gays, was shared by some of the top brass. When he started attending the firefighters’ contingent on the gay pride marches, they were told not to wear their uniforms and not to take fire appliances.
To Pat, it was stupid. We need firefighters – why not show gay people that it’s a profession for them? And why not build trust with the gay community – we have to be welcomed into their homes to fit smoke alarms?
That’s all changed. Now, “brigades outdo each other about who will bring the newest and best appliance.” But he’s not complacent. “We are to some extent going backwards. It’s the Brexit effect. All at once racism and discrimination became acceptable, and we have had a prime minister – Boris Johnson – who had written about ‘tank top bum boys’.” (Yes, Johnson wrote that, in the Daily Telegraph in 1998.)
When his branch secretary had a motorcycle accident, local officials asked Pat to take that job on as well, which gave him the task of defending members at tribunal which he found so satisfying. And in 2021 he stood for the local council and became only its second Labour member in what was then an overwhelmingly Tory authority.
As Pat told Firefighter at the time, with typical understatement: “to stand as a Labour candidate who has been outspoken in opposition to Brexit, who is gay and Irish, did present some challenges.”
Two years later the Conservatives were swept out. Pat came first in his once Conservative ward. The Liberal Democrats are now dominant, with a strong Labour group which Pat leads.
