Flooding - a statutory duty

Conference notes the devastating effect of the floods in December 2015 in many areas of the UK and the vital role that fire service personnel carried out in all affected parts of the country both carrying out rescues and post incident mitigation. With all fire services in the UK now under immense pressure to cut budgets they cannot be expected to continue to resource training, equipment and responding without receiving the funding required to carry out this role. Conference instructs the Executive Council to raise the issue of funding in the Fire Service for flooding with all employers and Governments in the UK.

Conference notes with concern the extent and severity of floods experienced at the end of 2015 and start of 2016 across different regions of the UK. It is alarming that whilst Government Ministers claim these are once in a lifetime episodes, it is apparent that this is not the case and FBU Members are responding on greater regularity to severe incidents of flooding despite the fire service having no statutory duty to do so within England or Wales Whilst we note there is a continuing FBU campaign that has been running for some time calling for the statutory duty to be given to the Fire and Rescue Service, we call on the Executive Council to examine what else as part of this campaign we can do and to reinvigorate the campaign in light of our concerns based on the severity and regularity of such incidents and the drain on finances and resources these incidents have on hard pressed fire service budgets.