Counties get cash for fire control

The Labour government's plans for regional Fire Control Centres were hugely expensive and inefficient and were scrapped by the coalition. In their place the government has now announced a more modern system which uses the latest technology to allow Fire and Rescue Services to work together on delivering an effective response particularly to major incidents.

In the words of DCLG, "Devon & Somerset, Dorset, Hampshire, and Wiltshire operate their own control rooms and call handling and mobilising systems. Each fire and rescue authority maintains a secondary control facility and has a fallback arrangement with another fire and rescue authority.
The four fire and rescue authorities are planning to implement a new resilient call handling and mobilising system which will be networked to serve all four existing control rooms. The new system will enable each fire and rescue authority to fallback to any of the others in the event of spate conditions or non-availability of their Fire Control. It will provide a full voice and data communications capability using the Airwave network, Enhanced Information Service and Automatic Location Service for Emergency Calls, which will reduce emergency call handling times, and Automatic Vehicle Location System, which will ensure the nearest appropriate resource is mobilised to an incident. It will extend to Mobile Data Terminals and provide for incident messages and risk information to be sent to crews, contributing to improvements in fire-fighter safety. Common operating procedures and ways of working will be developed and implemented. The fire and rescue authorities are planning to have the new system implemented by the end of 2014."

The four authorities have been given £7,200,000 by the government to pay for the scheme.

Details at http://www.communities.gov.uk/news/corporate/2097814