Hansard

First, I thank all the members who have stayed behind this evening to support the debate and those who have signed my motion. To those who have not signed it, I say that I am a great believer that sinners may repent in the future, and I look forward to a few sinners who are in the chamber signing up at 6 o’clock.

I expect that there is not one person in the chamber who underestimates the job that our firefighters do day after day responding to industrial disasters, terrorist attacks, floods and chemical spills. They keep our communities safe in the event of fires, through their vital preventative work, through their crucial role in attending road traffic accidents and in many other ways.

When the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service was created, the Scottish Government gave the Parliament a clear and categoric assurance that the introduction of the single service would not result in the loss of front-line jobs, yet on 28 April last year chief officer Alasdair Hay advised the Justice Committee that the service, in an effort to live within its budget, had worked with the Fire Brigades Union to agree a resource-based crewing model that would reduce the 3,890 whole-time firefighter posts to 3,709—a reduction of 181 posts.

The service had to reduce its cost base by £48.2 million in the first three years, and the situation was made much more difficult because the service is not VAT exempt. I will touch on this again later, but the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service is the only fire and rescue service in the UK that pays VAT on goods and services. It pays about £10 million per annum in VAT, which is equivalent to 350 firefighter posts.

In November last year, the Fire Brigades Union submitted a written statement to the Justice Committee noting its grave concerns that budget cuts will have a detrimental impact on 999 response times. The union stated:

“There has been a continual year on year reduction in the numbers of frontline firefighters since the decision to introduce a single SFRS was taken in 2011 due to sustained periods of recruitment freezes.”

It stated that

“There are now over 400 fewer full time firefighters than there were in 2010 and almost 300 fewer than there were in 2013”,

when the national service was introduced. The Scottish ministers assured us that that would not happen.

The FBU claims that “unrelenting pressure” to save money is impacting on front-line services, and it states that the reductions have inevitably affected the staffing levels and the ability to adequately crew all the front-line fire appliances all the time. I understand that the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service took a decision to remove up to four front-line appliances each day, in part from the west service delivery area, which was formerly known as Strathclyde Fire and Rescue.

In January 2014, a decision was taken to reduce the number of fire control rooms in Scotland from eight to three, with the control rooms in Inverness, Aberdeen, Fife, Falkirk and Dumfries being marked for closure while those in Johnstone, Edinburgh and Dundee would remain open. With my colleague Rhoda Grant, I fought hard against the closure of the Inverness control room, which serves the Highlands and Islands, and I know that many of my Labour colleagues—and indeed MSPs from across the Parliament, including Mary Scanlon—also fought against the closures in their respective areas.

The decision still provokes controversy. Indeed, some have argued that control room staff are front-line staff, too, being the first point of contact for members of the public in emergency situations. We have been assured that technology is in place to safely allow the closures to take place, but I ask about the loss of the local knowledge that local staff build up. In my region of the Highlands and Islands—which, as members will know, is the size of Belgium—years of specialist geographical and logistical knowledge have been built up by staff, but it will soon be lost to the service in the Highlands and Islands when the Inverness control room closes.

The police control room at Bilston Glen, which was recently criticised in a watchdog report, was unable to take 999 calls for several hours last month due to technical difficulties in the early hours of the morning that meant that 999 and 101 calls had to be delivered to other centres. It is fortunate that, on that occasion, no tragedies resulted, but if a similar technical difficulty was to occur with fire control, lives would almost certainly be lost.

The FBU believes that the key motivation behind the creation of a single service was to

“protect and improve local services, despite financial cuts, by stopping duplication of support services—like control rooms—and not cutting front-line services”.

However, front-line services have been cut in a bid to balance the books, and the number of front-line firefighters has reduced by around 10 per cent over the past five years. The FBU states:

“Any further reduction of firefighters beyond this shall have an unacceptable impact on public and firefighter safety and our ability to continue to deliver the key benefits of reform; Improved frontline outcomes, equitable access to specialist resources, improved engagement with local Authorities.”

In June last year, my Labour colleague Ian Murray MP tabled an amendment to the Scotland Bill to ensure a review of the controversy surrounding VAT liability for the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service and Police Scotland. The VAT liabilities arose from the Scottish Government’s reorganisation of both services. At the time, the Treasury explicitly advised the Scottish Government that its approach would mean the emergency services losing VAT refunds. However, despite the warnings, the Government pressed ahead with the reforms, costing Scotland’s Fire and Rescue Service millions of pounds.