Meeting of the Parliament 15 January 2026
I thank Maggie Chapman for securing this much-needed debate. The estate of the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service is not fit for the future. According to the Fire Brigade Union’s “Firestorm” report, as of 2023, 75 per cent of buildings in Scotland’s fire estate were rated as having “bad” or “poor” suitability. Having visited Crewe Toll fire station in Edinburgh and spoken with firefighters, I am aware of the poor condition of our fire estate.
However, the SFRS does not have the capital budget that is required to rebuild or upgrade the stations. The SFRS recently told the Criminal Justice Committee that, if its capital budget does not grow significantly by 2031, it will be short of £119 million.
The SFRS’s solution is to consider closing stations, including Marionville in Edinburgh, after RAAC issues were identified. The service explains that rebuilding the facilities would be too costly. However, many members of the community, while recognising the financial pressure that the SFRS faces, strongly oppose those decisions, arguing that the cost of addressing RAAC is being used as a justification for closure, which exposes the community to significant safety risks.
In the recent consultation on proposals to close the Marionville station, opponents outnumbered supporters by a ratio of 10:1. I am one of those opponents and remain convinced that Marionville must remain open.
In the “Firestorm” report, the FBU estimated that the SFRS had a capital investment backlog of around £800 million, and, since then, the SFRS has reiterated those figures to the Criminal Justice Committee. However, the SFRS’s capital budget is only £47 million for 2026-27. Beyond that specific figure, the Scottish Government has ignored the requests of both the SFRS and the FBU for the budget to be allocated on a long-term basis rather than annually as is the case currently. We welcomed long-term funding for the culture budget, so why can we not have that for our life-saving fire services?
The SFRS told the Criminal Justice Committee last September that its ability to manage change, including making strategic investments to enable longer-term savings, is made more challenging because it is limited to working within an annualised budget. The SFRS cannot make long-term strategic plans for its capital investment and is forced into short-term savings while the backlog of capital investment continues to mount.
Last September, the FBU told the Criminal Justice Committee that, without the required real-terms investment, the SFRS will continue to close stations in its attempts to reduce its capital backlog. That is the cost of the Scottish Government’s mistake. If it refuses to increase the capital budget to the SFRS and continues to set that budget annually, more stations will be threatened with closure, like Marionville.
The existence of a station in a community makes a vital difference. The shorter the journey between the station and the incident, the better the chance that lives are saved, traumatic burns are prevented and buildings are saved from being reduced to dust. I thank our dedicated firefighters and service staff across our nation for carrying out their dangerous work and ensuring that our communities are safe. However, I urge the Scottish Government to allocate sufficient funding for our fire services to be fit for the future.
13:38