999 fire calls will go to Cambridgeshire within a year
Monday, 29th November 2010.
The fire service control which takes and co-ordinates 999 calls in Suffolk is to be hived off to Cambridgeshire in the first of the big cost-cutting moves promised by Suffolk County Council.
Some of the 23 staff who work in fire control in Ipswich would transfer to the Cambridgeshire control, which would expand to take on the extra workload, but there would almost certainly be some redundancies, county councillors are told in a report to next week's cabinet meeting.
The fire service control was expected to transfer to a regional control centre soon anyway under a national project, but it is now thought less likely this will ever get off the ground, so the new move will provide a different permanent option as well as an interim one.
It will allow the county council to sell the Colchester Road fire station site in Ipswich where the current control room is based, the fire station element having been replaced by a new one elsewhere in the town recently.
Full agreement has not yet been reached with the Cambridgeshire and Peterborough Fire Authority, and if it falls through there is a last resort temporary fallback plan to use a site in Felixstowe.
Essex and Norfolk fire authorities have also shown an interest in taking over the function, but Cambridgeshire is preferred because it was prepared to expand and take on some of the Suffolk staff, whereas the others wanted to carry out the work with their current staffing.
Suffolk’s command and control function handled 12,701 calls for assistance in 2008/09. These calls resulted in the handling of 8,933 operational incidents, most of which were confirmed emergencies. Annual operating costs for the function are approximately £1.3m.
It is currently in need of upgrading at a cost of £350,000, which could be avoided by transfer to the compatible but more advanced system in Cambridgeshire.
The move is not expected to affect call-out times or public safety, though Haverhill is well-placed to benefit, if anything, from being closer and more familiar to a control based in Cambridgeshire than in Ipswich.
The changeover has to be completed by the November 2011 deadline already agreed for sale of the Colchester Road site, when it was thought the new regional control centre would be operational.
This has now slipped back a year, and may well slip further or altogether, as the Coalition Governmenbt has said it is not prepared to put any more money into the project.
Some of the 23 staff who work in fire control in Ipswich would transfer to the Cambridgeshire control, which would expand to take on the extra workload, but there would almost certainly be some redundancies, county councillors are told in a report to next week's cabinet meeting.
The fire service control was expected to transfer to a regional control centre soon anyway under a national project, but it is now thought less likely this will ever get off the ground, so the new move will provide a different permanent option as well as an interim one.
It will allow the county council to sell the Colchester Road fire station site in Ipswich where the current control room is based, the fire station element having been replaced by a new one elsewhere in the town recently.
Full agreement has not yet been reached with the Cambridgeshire and Peterborough Fire Authority, and if it falls through there is a last resort temporary fallback plan to use a site in Felixstowe.
Essex and Norfolk fire authorities have also shown an interest in taking over the function, but Cambridgeshire is preferred because it was prepared to expand and take on some of the Suffolk staff, whereas the others wanted to carry out the work with their current staffing.
Suffolk’s command and control function handled 12,701 calls for assistance in 2008/09. These calls resulted in the handling of 8,933 operational incidents, most of which were confirmed emergencies. Annual operating costs for the function are approximately £1.3m.
It is currently in need of upgrading at a cost of £350,000, which could be avoided by transfer to the compatible but more advanced system in Cambridgeshire.
The move is not expected to affect call-out times or public safety, though Haverhill is well-placed to benefit, if anything, from being closer and more familiar to a control based in Cambridgeshire than in Ipswich.
The changeover has to be completed by the November 2011 deadline already agreed for sale of the Colchester Road site, when it was thought the new regional control centre would be operational.
This has now slipped back a year, and may well slip further or altogether, as the Coalition Governmenbt has said it is not prepared to put any more money into the project.
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