Public Audit Committee

Meeting date: Wednesday, January 16, 2013

Official Report 491KB pdf

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“Best Value in fire and rescue services in Scotland—Overview report”

The first of the main items on our agenda is the first of two briefing sessions from the Accounts Commission on best-value reports. I remind colleagues that they will be briefing sessions. The fire and rescue and police services are, of course, still local government functions. The audits are therefore carried out by the Accounts Commission and the reports are not formally laid in the Scottish Parliament. However, the chair of the Accounts Commission, John Baillie, has kindly come to the meeting with some colleagues to give us a briefing and provide the opportunity for members to ask questions.

For the first session, John Baillie is joined by Gordon Neill, who is portfolio manager for fire and rescue services best-value audits for Audit Scotland. Would John Baillie like to introduce the report?

Thank you, convener.

As members probably know, I am fond of short introductions—I suspect that most people around the table are fond of them—but on this occasion I plead indulgence from the committee. I will still be within the allotted time, but I would like to take slightly longer than normal.

As we know, Scotland’s fire and rescue services have played a crucial role in ensuring the safety of communities. However, their remit has continued to develop beyond fighting fires to include responding to road traffic collisions, flooding and civil emergencies.

Our report, which was published last July, draws on recent best-value audits of Scotland’s eight fire and rescue services. The report was published at an opportune time, given the forthcoming establishment of the national Scottish fire and rescue service. The national service will inherit many aspects of strong performance, although our work has found marked differences in how the existing eight services deliver fire and rescue services. Such differences are not entirely explained by local context, and they will present opportunities and therefore challenges in developing the new national service.

Over the past decade, there has been a steady reduction in the numbers of fires and casualties. There are now around 23 per cent fewer house fires and 33 per cent fewer casualties, despite significant reductions in budgets and the uncertainty about the future of the service in Scotland. However, the falls have not been as quick as they have been in other parts of the United Kingdom. The levels of house fires and deaths are almost double those in England and Wales.

The factors behind those differences are complex. They include issues associated with deprivation, such as poor housing, high levels of smoking and alcohol abuse, but it is fair to say that, in themselves, they do not explain the full picture.

We also found that five of the Scottish services are among the six most expensive in the United Kingdom on a cost-per-head basis. I stress that the reasons for that are not fully understood. For example, the remoteness of rural and island communities is clearly an important factor behind that higher cost, but it is not the whole story.

Nonetheless, the way in which services use public money has been improving, with plenty of room for more improvement. Most notably, there has been progress in the use of the integrated risk management planning approach, which provides each service with a structured approach to identifying community risks and using that to prioritise its resources. However, that approach has the potential to deliver much more. For example, the deployment of fire stations and firefighters is not based enough on an objective assessment of risk. Progress in that respect has, frankly, been too slow.

We acknowledge that decisions about changing services, such as closing or merging facilities, can be difficult. The role of elected members in the governance of fire and rescue will change with the advent of the national service. However, we did not, in general, see effective enough strategic leadership by elected members on existing fire and rescue boards, and there are important lessons to be learned about the need for a board to work in partnership with senior officers to help to deliver change.

We are also clear that the new service will need to find ways of engaging effectively with communities and, indeed, the workforce over service change. I also note that we found a commendable willingness on the part of the eight existing fire and rescue boards, working with the senior fire officers, to prepare their local organisations for integration within the national service. That bodes well for the new service as it develops its approach to local engagement.

We also found that the eight existing services tend to work in isolation, with only limited collaboration among and between them. Unsurprisingly, therefore, we found striking differences across the country in how the services are managed locally. Those differences covered a range of aspects, including: the numbers and locations of fire stations; the balance of resources between prevention and emergency response; how performance is measured; the roles of full-time, retained and volunteer firefighters and non-uniformed staff; crewing levels; and shift patterns. We note that the issue of retained firefighters is a particularly significant one that will need to be addressed by the new service, with every existing service having concerns about the sustainability of the current system in terms of sufficient recruitment and training and retention.

Differences can also be seen as an opportunity for the new service. Our best-value audits found much good practice and innovation, which need to be exploited by the new national board. Ultimately, however, I hope that this report has helped to set out some of the difficult decisions that will need to be faced in the new national set-up. The aim must be to retain the momentum of improvement that we found in our work.

Finally, the report sets out a range of recommendations—42 in all—to contribute to that momentum. They are aimed particularly at those who are concerned with the development of the new service, but also at existing players.

My colleague, Gordon Neill, and I will be happy to respond to any questions that the committee has.

You have painted a picture of the legacy that the new national service will inherit. Although there are some positive aspects such as progress in reducing the number of house fires and deaths—it is important to acknowledge that—you drew attention to two striking measures of performance and productivity: the fact that we have five out of the six most expensive fire services in the UK; and the fact that, in spite of the reduction that you mentioned, there are still almost double the number of house fires and deaths from fire in Scotland that there are in the rest of the UK. That is striking. Could you say a little more about why that is the case?

The auditors struggled to find definitive reasons to explain the situation. There is, of course, the deprivation issue, but England and Wales also have deprivation. It is an area for further research by the national board and others. I suspect that this is the point that lies behind your question, but I think that if we can get to the bottom of the matter it might signify or suggest a significant change that might be made to the approach taken in Scotland.

With regard to creating an audit trail for the new audit framework for the new national service, what is the information that is lacking and which the new service should pursue in order to shed some light on the issues?

There are several issues, particularly the fact that the funding for the service in England and Wales almost created the incentive to take a certain approach. I ask Gordon Neill to tell the committee about the issues that emerged in his audits and which highlighted the differences between us and England and Wales or ideas that are at the moment speculative or conjectural rather than based on full evidence.

The one striking difference between Scotland and England and Wales is the specific funding for prevention, which is higher in England and Wales. There is some evidence that the increase in funding had an impact on reducing the number of fires and deaths in subsequent years.

On your question about the significantly higher costs and the higher number of fires in Scotland, the situation is, as John Baillie made clear, complex, with a number of factors to take into account. We never got to the bottom of the issue entirely; in fairness, though, I note that the fire and rescue service itself does not fully understand the situation.

As John Baillie has suggested, rurality is undoubtedly a factor, because it means that the service has to spread resources thinly over a large area. As a result, it cannot reap the benefits of economies of scale. It was telling that one of the cheapest and most cost-effective services was Lothian and Borders, which has a number of stations such as Tollcross that have very high call-out rates and therefore produce economies of scale. Another factor is undoubtedly deprivation, which is generally higher in Scotland than it is in England and Wales, and one might argue that the type of property is another factor, given the emphasis on tenement buildings in urban areas.

Beyond that, however, it is difficult to tell. You start to get into obscure arguments about the shape of cities: because Dundee, for example, is a very long city bounded by the Tay, you need a number of stations at regular intervals; on the other hand, Edinburgh’s circularity means that you can have a number of stations in the centre that then feed out.

The only other point that I would make about costs is that the pattern in fire and rescue is not unique and tends to be seen in other services such as education and police. However, I certainly think Scotland’s rurality is a factor.

Is there information or data that the service should be keeping and which should be available to the auditors but which is not there—or is the issue not that at all? Is it just that the research has not been carried out to identify all the factors that correlate with the outcomes?

High-level cost information is available and allows us to say, for example, that Lothian and Borders is less expensive than Highlands and Islands. However, things start to get difficult when we try to get under the surface. The information does not tend to be held consistently or in a way that allows us to see how much is spent on prevention, home fire safety visits, emergency response and so on. Because we do not have that kind of underlying information, it is difficult for us to match costs to impact.

So you think that the formation of a national service will provide an opportunity to correct that situation.

Absolutely.

10:15

Good morning. My question relates to the work of locally elected members in councils around the country. I should, at this point, own up and declare my membership of the Justice Committee, which heard the same criticisms about locally elected members of fire and police boards—for example, the lack of effective leadership and various other matters—as are highlighted in the report before us.

Do you agree that perhaps the problem for the locally elected officials who sat on those boards was that they were limited in what they could do in dealing with operational issues, on which they could not have any great say? It is difficult to lead an organisation when you have no role in the operational side of things and you are stuck with the stuff that comes around the edges, such as pensions, salaries, and terms and conditions. Do you agree that, with the new set-up, having a national board will give the locally elected members opportunities in their dealings with the local service leadership, so we may not get quite the same problems that we had in the past?

It is fair to say, as the report says, that there is a general feeling of disappointment that local boards have not been as effective at strategic leadership as might have been expected. Of course, like everyone else, the board members need to respect the operational autonomy that falls to the chief fire officer and so on. However, I think that part of the issue is that the service and authority have been very much officer led. To me, that is down to there being not enough training and support to board members locally on what they should be doing and how to find out things when there have not been the resources to provide them with the information. The board members are busy people, so provision of support is important.

Added to that is the difficulty that all council members have of taking a corporate view on the one hand while looking after their ward interests on the other. On the deployment of fire stations, for example, the ward interest can be very vocal—most of us want a fire station that is a mile down the road—so there is an extremely difficult balance to be achieved. Those issues partly explain the councillors’ position but, with better training and more support, members locally and nationally would be in a better position to be more effective. One could also add in the issue of poor scrutiny, although it all falls into the same general box.

I do not know whether Gordon Neill wants to elaborate on anything that I have said.

Clearly, board members cannot get too involved in operational matters, but that has not been an issue in fire and rescue to any significant extent. This is a generalisation—there are some very good elected members who have set the correct strategic approach—but elected members have generally not been involved in setting the strategic direction or monitoring what is happening and matching that against the strategic direction.

That may sound a bit jargony, but I mean that, for example, integrated risk management planning—that also sounds very jargony—is about trying, at a high level, to match resources to where the community risks are. There is a lot of objective evidence produced for that.

Elected members have generally been slow to engage with the process and have tended not to get involved in whether resources such as fire stations and firefighters should be in one location rather than another. The members have been slow to monitor what has subsequently happened and have really left it to officers to get on with things.

My second question follows up what you have just said—and the same question might apply to the police, which we will consider later on. What extra help can we give the locally elected members who will be dealing with the senior fire officer to ensure that they are able to do their job? How do we get away from the reality that, when the board members would head down to the local senior fire officer, they were in effect working off the chief fire officer’s agenda? The board was supposed to provide a degree of scrutiny, but in effect that was being dealt with by the fire officer himself. How do we avoid the issue about reporting on and reporting to? How do we get around that?

We need to start by asking boards some broad questions about what they are trying to achieve and whether they have prioritised the fire service in the way that they think it should be prioritised. Of course, any disagreement in that respect is a question for discussion between the boards and the chief fire officer. Inevitably, some disagreements will arise, but that is quite healthy.

The question is the extent to which locally elected members cite operational issues as the reason for not getting involved. As we will probably see when we come to discuss police boards, there is a tendency to accept that reason rather passively instead of challenging it and saying, “Hang on, this is our area and community. We engage with the community and should know what it wants. We have looked at the IRMP and see where the risks are. Why are those risks not being matched with resources?” There are quite a number of examples of that around Scotland, because fire station locations are predominantly historical in nature.

What can we do to help?

First of all, we need to get the general point across and then supplement it with more active and positive training and, indeed, more support. Of course, it is easy to say that more support is needed; there is a question about how it will be funded. Councillors are very busy people—

I was one myself.

—and we know that in allocating their time they constantly have to balance all sorts of issues. More support on information, the interpretation of information and indeed the prompting of questions about information would help as it helps anyone who sits at the top of a particular function to work properly. He or she will not have the time to devil too much, so there is a clear need for support for the scrutineers—in other words, the members.

Mr Baillie, you will be familiar with the report that was carried out by Her Majesty’s chief inspector of fire and rescue authorities on the Highlands and Islands service following your own Accounts Commission report. Assuming that you have read it—which I am sure you have—I wonder what your observations on that report might be.

I should point out that Gordon Neill was part of the team that worked on the issue. It is fair to say that the momentum created by our criticism was followed through and, being positive, I think that the board has taken to heart a number of points that we made and which have been followed up in the report that was issued this month.

Clearly, there will be much local discussion about the deployment of fire stations, which was one of our major criticisms. I have already mentioned the issue of history. The effect of history has prevailed more in that region than in most, partly because of remoteness and—again—rurality. Generally, however, I see the report as something positive that is continuing the momentum. In some ways, it is pushing at a door that is more open than it was perhaps a year or a year and a half ago.

Perhaps Gordon Neill can elaborate on the point.

Highlands and Islands has made significant progress on some core issues such as the training of firefighters. It is in a much better position with regard to workforce health and safety, and it is catching up with fire inspections of business and commercial premises. However, it has been able to reach that position as a result of a lot of additional support from other services, which raises the issue of capacity: once that support is withdrawn, will it be able to continue that work? Essentially, the chief inspector’s conclusion was, “Can you keep Highlands and Islands on life support for a bit longer to embed the good work it has managed to achieve over the past eight months or so?”

The other big issue is that deployment of fire stations. We tend to talk in shorthand about closing or merging stations when the question is actually whether stations are in the right place and whether the resources are available where the risks are. That issue has not been fully addressed yet. In fairness, members have gone as far as we could reasonably expect them to go in eight months. Five stations have been closed, but they have been stations at the extremes, where activity was at a very low level. From the point of view of integrated risk management planning, a thorough assessment of where the risks are and where the resources are is something that has not really been grasped yet.

Is that the case in other parts of Scotland as well?

It is not unique to Highland. I would say that the Highlands and Islands is probably at one end of the spectrum, but it is a national issue.

Do you think that the nettle has not been grasped on risk because local fire boards in all parts of Scotland approach the assessment of risk with the view, “We’re going to keep that fire station open”? Mr Baillie made an observation about how councillors act, depending on whether they are wearing their corporate hat. The bottom line is that they represent people who, as he said, take the view that they would like the fire station to be a mile down the road.

My impression—this is an impression rather than a view that is based on solid evidence—is that it is more convenient to retain the status quo. Who is pressurising boards to change and to match resources with priorities? As a consequence, I feel that our report and the subsequent report to which you refer have created a momentum, a climate of change and a greater willingness to look at the issue. The first stage is, of course, the integrated risk management process.

I agree that considerable progress has been made; I am aware of a lot of that.

I want to ask about the pan-Scotland point. The logic of creating a single centralised national service is that the problem we have discussed will not exist because everything will be dictated from the centre. There will be local committees, but local elected members will still be busy—there will not be a change in that regard. They will sit on another local committee that involves the ambulance service, the police service and the other emergency services. How will that improve scrutiny of what happens in the single fire service?

The momentum that I am talking about exists not just in the Highlands and Islands. There is greater awareness of the need to apply the IRMP process, and that in itself will help. The central monitoring of that will help, too.

I believe that a key aspect of the process is national support—which we can talk about separately—and the provision of much better, more thorough local support. I believe that part of the problem has been that members have not had the available data or the training that enables them to know where to look for it.

I take all that on board. I will be persuaded when I see evidence of it.

The Audit Scotland report made some pretty fundamental observations on retained firefighters, but if we did not have retained firefighters there would not be a service in most of Scotland; that is the case across the board and not just in the part of Scotland that I represent. One of the key messages of the Audit Scotland report—I am sorry; I keep calling it the Audit Scotland report, but it is the Accounts Commission’s report—is that the current system for retained firefighters is not sustainable. What is the alternative?

That is a concern. There are several approaches that could be taken. Gordon Neill can talk about this, but I believe that in England the approach to sustainability involves higher retention salaries and the like. Ultimately, the issue might be about money.

There are two factors in recruiting sufficient retained firefighters. One is pay and the second relates to lifestyle. Lifestyles have changed: people tend to work in a different part of the country from the area where they live. The old model, which involved someone who was at work being able to respond to a call-out immediately, tends not to hold as much as it used to, so services have increasingly struggled to recruit sufficient retained firefighters. That is an issue not just in Scotland but throughout the UK.

A few years ago, a new model was adopted in south Wales. It is more expensive, but it places more emphasis on the annual retainer—which is almost a salary—and less emphasis on call-out fees. That model is felt to be more attractive. Some services in England have also made a bigger push to recruit female firefighters. Again, 50 per cent of the population is almost instinctively excluded from recruitment. There are a number of potential solutions to—

10:30

Have those solutions meant that the number of firefighters has reduced in the areas where those different salary mechanisms have been tried?

Yes. There has been some success in south Wales. Tayside had a look at the model in south Wales and started to develop some proposals to introduce it. That has been put on hold with the development of the new national service, but there is scope for the national service to look at the idea.

So your guess on retained firefighters would be that the new national force will have to find a new mechanism to financially support men and women who are firefighters, and at the same time the overall numbers will reduce, because that is the only way in which the service will be able to afford to proceed, given the budgetary pressure that it will be under.

I do not know whether the numbers will reduce—that would just be supposition—but the service will certainly need to find a new model.

A supplementary to the causes already mentioned is the unwillingness of employers these days to release people for retained fire service duties.

Yes. Thank you.

The timing of the report is important, given the changes that are going to take place in the fire service, and I am sure that it will be interesting and compulsory reading for those who are putting together the new national fire service.

There are three points that I want to look at. First, I note from paragraph 56 on page 16 that

“many chief fire officers are frustrated at the lack of information shared by NHS organisations”.

That is in connection with the data protection legislation. Are there any signs of movement on that? Is there a way through it? It seems strange that that problem exists with the national health service in particular, and that social work, housing services, the police and others do not have the same restriction.

It is fair to say that that is one of the things that the new board will have to address. Perhaps part of the problem in the past has been the need to deal with eight separate boards and eight separate interpretations. I am hopeful—although, again, it is a hope rather than something that is based on evidence—that something can be done to resolve that, because it is clearly important.

Was the problem with the NHS across the board or with a particular health board?

The problem was with the NHS across the board. There are sensitivities in the NHS about releasing what it perceives to be sensitive information. For example, we could be talking about an elderly person who lives on their own and who has just been discharged from hospital, or about someone who suffers from mental health problems. There are clearly concerns about releasing sensitive information to other people, so we can understand why the NHS has the problem.

There have been initiatives in different parts of the country to try to address the problem. Tayside has started to inch forward and make some progress and Strathclyde introduced—forgive me; I cannot remember exactly what it is called—a community planning unit where people from police, housing, social work and the fire service were located in one building. There is certainly some evidence that that is helping people to build up a network and relationships, and to start sharing information better. However, it is a national issue.

So, we will have to wait and see what the new organisation can negotiate.

Yes.

Paragraph 59 states:

“In 2007, Audit Scotland commented on the need ... to improve ... performance information”.

Paragraph 62 says that

“effort was made to establish a national performance framework in 2009”,

but it continues by saying that

“Only in recent months has progress been made in agreeing an initial set of common measures.”

Would it be correct to say that there has not been much focus on that, or that it has not been prioritised?

Yes, I would say that that is a fair comment. The Chief Fire Officers Association Scotland agreed a menu of performance measures, but in practice individual services picked from the menu as they saw fit, and some of the definitions that they used were different. Progress has been slow.

That is astonishing. Paragraph 62 states that, even when services have agreed the performance measures, the definitions are different. To have standard definitions seems to me to be a pretty basic thing.

Yes.

Okay.

I will elaborate. The Accounts Commission and Audit Scotland have banged on about performance indicators and performance information for years and years. Members are probably familiar with the recent benchmarking project for councils. We were part of that, with the Convention of Scottish Local Authorities and the Society of Local Authority Chief Executives and Senior Managers.

Generally and initially—I have put two adverbs together—there is hesitation among those whose performance might be on show as a consequence of indicators. Why would people be keen to provide information if they could get away with not doing so, given that it involves the public clearly holding them to account? There is general reticence around the place, but once the process starts people realise that they can use the tool for their own purposes. Most information should start from that; people should use it for their own purposes, but they should also, as it happens, be accountable to the public for what it shows.

Once we start the ball rolling in an area, it starts to gain momentum, and doing the work becomes a non-event. I encourage the new board to get that under way and to follow it through.

The business of definitions is not as easy as it sounds. Ultimately, a definition is agreed and everyone applies it, but from what I have seen of the benchmarking project, it is astonishingly difficult to get data that are fully clean, collared and held on to consistently up and down the country in each data set. However, you are right that that can and should be done. I agree with you.

I hope that the incoming national organisation prioritises the issue.

My third point runs on from that and relates to paragraphs 57 and 58. In my area, Lothian and Borders Fire and Rescue Service is active in, and puts a great deal of effort into, fire prevention and safety programmes. It is disappointing to read in paragraph 58 that

“no robust assessments of the impact of these educational programmes”

has been found, and that

“it is difficult to assess”

whether organisations are wasting their time. I suspect that they are not wasting their time, but nothing backs that up.

I will offer a general point and Gordon Neill will speak about specifics. The general point is that, without the fire services getting cost data that measure spending on preventative programmes, and allocating costs to see whether programmes are value for money, it is difficult for them to prioritise properly what they do and to decide how much to emphasise prevention. There is a general call for the new board to get work under way on proper cost data and measurements of the spending that is allocated to activities.

We saw no evaluation of the community education projects beyond happy sheets—the sheets that ask how a course has been presented. That is not to say that the projects are not worth while; they are wide ranging and involve the police, health service people, fire and rescue services and a number of professions, and do not address just fire and rescue issues, but much wider social issues, and their benefits are long term.

We do not pretend that measuring the impact is easy. It is difficult, but if money and effort are being put in, it is important to find out whether they are making a difference. As we went round, the intuitive feeling among all the professionals was that the projects are worth while and important. The worry was that such projects might fall between stools as a result of budget cuts, and that shared initiatives might end as services cut their individual budgets.

In his opening comments, Mr Baillie talked about “limited collaboration” between the services. It might be a bit naive of us to assume that that collaboration will become perfect when we have the single service.

I am thinking more about the relationship between fire services and councils, particularly in relation to the deployment and maintenance of things such as smoke alarms, and councils’ approach to installing sprinkler systems in new houses. The picture is bound still to vary throughout Scotland. Is work going on to iron out inconsistencies in the approaches of existing fire services and to ensure that the approach to issues such as I have mentioned will be more consistent when the new single fire service starts to operate in April?

I do not know what the new board is addressing, as of today. However, I know that the inconsistencies among regions and boards are being looked at in order to see what is the best way to proceed. A judgment has to be made about the extent to which inconsistencies should prevail because some things fit particular areas well. The new board is considering those matters and trying to come to initial views on them.

The introduction of a national integrated risk management plan will undoubtedly help, to an extent. There will be much more consistency nationally on issues, including the emphasis on prevention and matching resources to risk. However, as John Baillie suggested, one of the costs of democracy is variability; some issues are for local democratic decisions.

Mr Coffey mentioned sprinklers, which is a good example. A year or two ago, Fife Council decided to fit sprinklers in every room in all council new builds. That is expensive, but it can be argued that it will be cost effective in the long run. It is for individual councils and housing departments to decide on such matters; the fire service cannot in itself make those decisions.

Mr Coffey asked a good question, but it is not easy to give a simple answer.

The report was written about six months ago, in July last year, so I expect that the current fire services will have addressed some, if not many, of the issues in it, and that some evidence that improvements in collaboration—even with the existing services—have taken place. I suppose that we can take up that matter with others.

I want to ask about the fire services’ rescue capability. There was a fairly well-covered incident in my constituency, which is in the Strathclyde area, involving a rope rescue which was the subject of various reports, reviews and inquiries. Do you have evidence that that issue has been addressed across the fire services in Scotland and that there is capability across Scotland should further incidents of that type occur?

To be honest, I cannot give a definitive answer to that. That incident caused shockwaves throughout the fire and rescue service, and I know that people have learned a lot from what happened or did not happen. However, I cannot give you positive assurance, as we did not look at that issue in the audit.

Could we come back to the committee on that if we have any data?

Of course. That is probably an issue for us to follow up. Rope rescue is a major part of any fire service, but clear deficiencies were identified in the report on that incident. As an elected member, now that we have moved on from that particular incident, and given your comments about limited collaboration, I am keen to know whether lessons have been learned and whether there is capability throughout Scotland to deal with such incidents.

Perhaps you could write to the committee on that, Mr Baillie.

I am happy to do that.

I appreciate that.

Convener, can I ask a further question?

Yes—if it is short and a supplementary.

It is a short supplementary on Mr Coffey’s point.

Mr Neill said in response to Mr Coffey’s question that resources would be matched to risk in the context of a national integrated risk management plan. Does that mean that, when a body does that assessment, resources will inevitably go to the main centres of population? Mr Neill talked about the Tollcross station, which will always have more call-outs than other stations. Is it the case that the assessment of risk will always find that the needs are greater in the centres of population?

No. There is already a big fire station in Tollcross, so I do not think that the data will suggest that there is a need for another one, although I am just an auditor and it is not for me to second guess what the IRMP will show. The point is that there is a limited amount of resource, so consideration needs to be given to whether it is where it needs to be. It is not a given that a national IRMP will draw resources from the Highlands and Islands down to the central belt. There are risks in the Highlands and Islands.

10:45

I want to return to the worrying level of accidental fires in Scotland compared with the level in the rest of the UK. John Baillie suggested that potential reasons for that include deprivation, smoking and alcohol consumption. Another committee of which I am a member has recently considered minimum alcohol pricing, which we hope might help to tackle that issue. Did you compare the rate of accidental fires in, say, Glasgow to the rate in areas in England that have similar demography, such as Liverpool, in order to compare like with like? You have said that there are more accidental fires in Scotland, but we might not be comparing like with like. Have you attempted to do that?

We attempted that to a limited extent, although we had to be careful not to let the audit become a major research project. In areas such as Liverpool or Manchester, the patterns are similar.

The levels of accidental fires in places such as Liverpool and Manchester are similar to those in similar areas in Scotland. There is a more level playing field.

Yes. Research has been done on that.

That is interesting, because the differential is dramatic. As an elected representative, I want action on that if it is needed, but you suggest that the reasons that Mr Baillie set out suitably explain the current situation. However, we still have to tackle the issue.

The report points out that additional funds are provided for preventative measures in England. However, we have established that there are reasons other than funding for the difference between Scotland and England. Is the quality of the additional investment in England being benchmarked to show whether it is getting results?

Yes. I hesitate slightly, because I am struggling to remember the details of a piece of academic research that was carried out in England and Wales that showed that the additional emphasis on prevention is having an impact. I cannot give you the name of the study off the top of my head, but research has been done on that.

It would be helpful if you could point us to that research.

My final question, which is what I have been driving at, is this: how do we pay? It is all very well for the politicians round this table to say that we should spend another £0.5 million on preventative measures, but we would have to find the money. That is the challenge for us all.

It is interesting that fire boards have different strategies for preventative measures. Some use full-time firefighters, some use retained firefighters, and I see that Tayside Fire and Rescue makes heavy use of a voluntary service. Do you have any views on which model is more effective? This is a commonsense view, but it sounds like an expensive intervention to put a fully trained and skilled firefighter in a person’s home to give a fire safety assessment. I do not want to use the word “cheaper”; is there a more affordable and more pragmatic way of doing that work?

Part of the problem is that it is, as I said, sometimes difficult to measure value for money, because the activities are not costed in a way that enables the benefit to be matched to the spending. A preliminary question in deciding whether something is value for money is to ask, “What is the money and what is the value?”

At the end of the day, we are just auditors, so it is not for us to have a professional view on that; it is for fire and rescue professionals to decide on the most effective approach. However, instinctively, to me the approach that Tayside and others have used, with an emphasis on volunteers, seems to be more cost effective. The issue is broader than just the voluntary sector. For example, Fife Council uses its housing department to do such work—although for it, as a unitary authority, that is easier to do than it would be for others. If housing department staff happen to be going into a house, they will do a fire safety check. There are other models that could be used.

Exhibit 17 on page 37 of the report sets out precisely the point that you are trying to make. The model in Tayside of using the voluntary sector is worth while, particularly in relation to reaching the hard-to-reach groups who could be most at risk. Unfortunately, although Tayside has the highest percentage of home safety visits, it actually had a modest increase in the number of fires, and other models are perhaps providing better results. If we look at the issue in two or four years, should we expect to see a dramatic improvement? Is exhibit 17 the benchmark by which we should scrutinise the matter?

We should expect the new board to look at the issue closely and to try to determine any anomalies and the reasons behind particular trends. The presentation in exhibit 17 is really just a starter for 10; at issue is the reason for that situation, which is, of course, what you are asking about—quite properly, if I may say so. The new board needs to research that and then to proceed to the improvements that we hope for.

The point that we tried to get across in exhibit 17 is not so much that that is the definitive way to measure and evaluate the impact of home fire-safety visits. The underlying point is that, nationally, the services do not evaluate that work. As auditors, we had to consider what would be a reasonable way to assess that. One way seemed to be to look at the number of home fire-safety visits and the change in the number of house fires. Tayside Fire and Rescue thought that the evaluation was reasonable, but it pointed out that, actually, the number of fire deaths in Tayside has come down significantly and that that would be a better measure. The eight services would probably argue for nine different measures. The underlying point is that the national service needs to find a proper way of evaluating preventative work.

I thank Mr Baillie and Mr Neill for their evidence. You have given us useful pointers to the areas in which we can hope to see progress when we consider the Auditor General’s audits of the new national service. The discussion has been extremely useful.