Meeting of the Parliament 01 October 2025 [Draft]
What is taking place in our communities is not a Scottish Fire and Rescue Service delivery review—it is an experiment, and it is one which, as a matter of public record, is causing serious concern to members of this Parliament from all sides, including members from the minister’s own back benches. The Government cannot contract out these decisions to the board of the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service. It is this Government that is putting at risk public health, community safety and even the lives of its own citizens. It is this Government which must be accountable to Parliament.
We know that this risk—this experiment—will not be borne evenly, and that these cuts do not have an equal impact. Look at the awful, distressing facts. Look at what happened at Grenfell: 40 per cent of disabled people who lived in Grenfell tower died that night in June 2017. A quarter of all children who lived in Grenfell tower died as a result of the fire that night.
This is a public service that should be about people, and not about money. That includes the firefighters and their trade union, the FBU, who passionately tell us,
“We don’t just fight fire, we fight injustice too”
and who make it plain that, since the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service was created, there has, in their words, been
“A decade of underinvestment—a decade of real terms cuts”.
There has been a net reduction of 368 retained operational front-line firefighters; a net reduction of 729 whole-time operational front-line firefighters; and cuts to control staff, cuts to volunteer firefighters and cuts to the number of appliances as well.
I vividly remember speaking to firefighters at the Hamilton station back in June 2023, where an appliance was being removed as “a temporary measure”. Over two years later, it has never returned. It was not a temporary measure—a temporary removal—at all. It was, as we warned at the time, a permanent measure—a permanent removal.
At Cumbernauld, we are now witnessing a plan to remove whole-time firefighters and to replace them with on-call crews. The reductions that are planned for stations in Glasgow will have a knock-on impact in Lanarkshire as well. The FBU, in its insightful “Firestorm” report, reminds us that, when the single fire service was set up by this Scottish Government, we were promised that it was about
“stopping duplication of support services ... and not cutting front line services”,
but that is precisely what we are witnessing today: downgrades, front-line jobs and service cuts, redundancies and a significant increase in response times as a result.
In every area, the pros and cons of the proposals have been set out. In every area, the pros include financial savings that are to be made. In every area, the cons include increased response times. In every area, there is a reduction of fire cover. Describing those proposals as anything other than an exercise in financial cuts is the real con. Don’t anybody try to tell us that those are operational choices: they are policy choices, and they are political choices. I hope that, at decision time tonight, they will prove to be political choices that the Parliament resoundingly rejects.
16:30