New Coalition Government and Fire Service regionalisation

Britain's new coalition Government, the first in most people's lifetime, has just published a 34 page document called The Coalition: our programme for government.

Now I know this might not be your first choice for bedtime reading, may not be a 'page turner' of a novel but bits of it make for interesting reading.

Jump to section 4 (Communities and Local Government) and you'll find the last bullet point on page 12 (left column) worth a read.

For those of us in Suffolk and Norfolk there has been much talk of splitting the local councils in all sorts of ways - at one point it looked like my home town of Lowestoft was going as a free transfer to Norfolk!

But this is what our new government has to say:

• We will stop the restructuring of councils in Norfolk, Suffolk and Devon, and stop plans to force the regionalisation of the fire service.

And the real show stopper is that last bit - "and stop plans to force regionalisation of the fire service".

Does that mean the end to this crazy idea of centralising fire controls? Does this mean that jobs won't be lost in fire controls too?

As yet the new Fire Minister hasn't been appointed, so perhaps we'd better wait and see!

Comments

[Nick Robinson]

Regarding control centres

http://www.thisisderbyshire.co.uk/news/Controversial-plans-regionalise-service-control-centres-set-scrapped/article-2182071-detail/article.html

[Mark]

Well we can only hope it stops regionalisation of controls. I have been told by several Norfolk firefighters that they have command and control systems superior to those available in the regional centre so in effect would have been stepping backwards by being compelled to join.

[Andy]

@ Mark. I too have heard this but I know that it is not true, having had first hand experience of both the systems in Norfolk and those in the new Firecontrol.