Calls for a public inquiry into the £1 million Essex Emergency Fire Control fiasco continue following the new Fire Minister’s visit to the Essex Fire and Rescue HQ at Kelvedon Park on Friday. The mobilising system failure also affects Bedfordshire.
The FBU has asked the new Fire Minister and Essex MP Mark Francois to support the call.
The request made to Essex Fire Authority to establish an independent inquiry has fallen on deaf ears. No response has been received from the fire authority despite the £1m tax-payer bill for a system that has never worked properly since its installation in January this year.
The so called ‘state of the art’ IT system malfunctioned so badly that on occasion fire crews were mobilized to ‘ghost’ incidents which firefighters say could have put lives at risk should a real incident have broken out at the same time. The system was shut down in May and there are no guarantees it can ever work efficiently to do the job it was installed to do.
Essex FBU members are further incensed that managers initially tried to say the technical issues were ‘teething troubles’ before attempting to blame ‘user error’.
Essex Fire Brigades Union (FBU) Brigade Secretary, Alan Chinn-Shaw, said:“It is extremely disappointing that the emergency fire control staff were initially blamed for system failures that were beyond their control. These accusations have resulted in low morale amongst professional fire control staff leading them to feel stressed, bullied and demoralized.
The new system was not fit for purpose. Even when it completely collapsed, the Fire Authority councillors whose job it is to provide the political scrutiny of the fire service were kept in the dark about the malfunction. This was plainly unethical.”
The failure to successfully establish a functioning control room has serious implications for Bedfordshire Fire Service who are ‘partners’ in the IT project. The intention was to share the system, but there seems to be no Plan B for Essex or Bedfordshire which is very worrying. It is in the public interest to have an independent inquiry into this huge waste of taxpayers’ money and to examine the mistakes made to prevent a repeat of this unfortunate sequence of events. We now urgently need to avert the possibility of the public or operational firefighters being put at risk.”
