Fire chiefs have brought forward proposals to modernise BFRS, tackling the long-standing decline in availability of On-Call staff and the changing demands on the service.
Today, 99.7% of all fire and rescue incidents are dealt with by the service’s 12 whole-time crewed fire engines within target time.
But, of the remaining 18 On-Call units, 8 have virtually no availability due to lack of On-Call staff. Those units have been idle and unavailable to put out fires or save lives for a very long time.
As a result of changing attitudes to work-life balance and increasing reluctance of employers to release staff at a moment’s notice, there is now a national problem in recruiting On-Call staff, affecting all fire services across the country. In Buckinghamshire, the number of On-Call staff has declined significantly and that problem is only expected to get worse, not better.
So Fire Chiefs have recommended a plan based on:
- retaining all existing firefighters and all the existing whole-time crewed fire engines
- removing 7 unused fire engines that have been long-term short of On-Call crew
- retaining and reinvesting in the remaining 11 On‑Call crewed engines
- reinvesting in specialist vehicles that better match future needs
- closing the fire stations at Great Missenden and Stokenchurch, neither of which have sent out a fire engine on a call for at least five years
- investing in improving training, facilities, and resilience
- empowering the Chief Fire Officer to make faster future resource management decisions
Cllr Llew Monger, Chair of the Fire Authority since May said “These issues have been with us for years because the previous Conservative controlled Fire Authority failed to act. In 2019 and 2023 reports from independent HM Fire Inspectors slated the situation, criticising the high number of idle fire engines, which they described as a ‘ghost fleet’.
" Public money can be used better and it is welcome that the Fire Service has come up with proposals to reinvest in improving the service.”
“I ask the public to support the Chief Fire Officer’s proposals, as they have been by the new members of the authority, as we can’t go on kicking the can down the road.”
“The final decisions will be made once the public responses to the consultation are reviewed. And I’d like to reiterate that there will be no reduction in firefighter numbers or adverse impact on response times.”
The consultation goes live today on the Buckinghamshire and Milton Keynes Fire and Rescue web site and will be open for 10 weeks.