Official Report 822KB pdf
Our next item of business is consideration of the forthcoming Scottish Fire and Rescue Service reforms. As members may already be aware, we expect the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service to publish its proposals in the new year. Today, we have an opportunity to hear from the Fire Brigades Union its views on the proposed reforms. I intend to allow up to 60 minutes for this session.
I refer members to papers 5 and 6. I also note that the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service’s annual report and accounts for 2024-25 have now been laid before Parliament; the clerks have circulated a copy to members in the normal manner.
I welcome, from the Fire Brigades Union, Colin Brown, executive council member for Scotland, and John McKenzie, Scottish regional secretary. You are both very welcome. I invite you to make some short opening remarks—over to you, Colin.
11:15
Thank you. We will try to be succinct, as always, but for John and me, that is probably quite a challenge.
Oh no! [Laughter.]
On behalf of the Fire Brigades Union, we welcome the opportunity to address the committee as it considers the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service’s service delivery review.
The committee will be aware that the FBU recognised the need for reform in our 2023 “Firestorm” report. That was a detailed piece of work that put members’ voices at the forefront of the conversation, and it is a vital piece of work as the SFRS considers the service delivery review.
First, I want to say that it can often sound like we, as trade unionists, are being critical of the workforce and the workers—but, by default, those are our members, and I want to give an assurance that we are absolutely not. I commend the thousands of FBU members across Scotland who, every single day, working in our fire stations and control rooms and in support roles, do incredible things against a really challenging financial and societal backdrop. We should never lose sight of the fact that it is our members who carry out that work, every single day, against that challenging backdrop. Although a lot of our support staff are represented by other trade unions, the work that they do is often the hidden part of the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service, and without them, our members cannot function in the roles that they undertake.
On 12 November, the committee took evidence from the chief fire officer, and I wish to push back very gently against some of the comments that were made in that session.
The chief said—quite rightly, from his perspective—that the service is “not ... in crisis”. However, that is not how our members in fire stations and control rooms feel as things stand today. We have a crisis in our control rooms that has led the FBU, in the past two months, to issue safety-critical notices because the staffing levels are below critical. I do not know how something functions at a level below critical, but that is where we are in our control rooms. At present, there is an attrition rate of roughly 36 per cent in our control rooms, which means that 36 per cent of the workforce are unavailable to perform their important function.
I encourage the committee to look at the FBU’s “Operator” film, which is available on YouTube; I am happy to share a link at some point. The framing of the role that our control firefighters play every single day is exactly right, and it is harrowing to watch. That is a trigger warning, if you decide to watch it, but it is vital that people who are involved in decisions around fire and rescue understand these roles.
The chief fire officer’s description is not the experience of our members in stations either. The Health and Safety Executive was informed by the FBU about issues in Shetland, which led the HSE to issue improvement notices to the service earlier this year. The safety-critical notices and improvement notices are being worked through, but the fixes are not quick and the issues have been years in the making.
There may be dispute between ourselves and the chief as to the definition of “crisis”, but our members’ experience is that they have appliances and specialist resources off the run every single day. They have the retained duty system, and of the 345 pumps that should be available on the streets of Scotland every single day, protecting communities, roughly 200 can be unavailable at any given time. The push to increase reliance on the retained duty system through the service delivery review should be of concern to the people of Scotland. It is certainly of concern to our members, and it should be of concern to the committee, and to the public.
The withdrawal of 10 whole-time pumps in 2023 was an entirely financial decision. The service had a budget crisis that it had to address with the temporary removal of 10 pumps. However, that is not the true story; the fact that 166 firefighter posts were slashed at the same time is the story. When a fire starts, it is a firefighter who puts it out—it is not a pump—and that cut of 166 posts took us to around 1,200-plus firefighters lost since the single service was created in 2012-13. That is really significant.
The wad of paperwork that I have in front of me is one month’s statistics for the availability reports for specialist appliances across Scotland. If you give me a date in October, I will pull out that date and tell you exactly the impact of what I have described. It should be remembered that 10 pumps and 166 firefighters were taken out in 2023, and we still routinely see around nine or 10 appliances off the run every day. We see specialist rope teams reduced to a crew and resource level that would be challenging. Water rescue teams and mass decontamination teams are all being reduced across Scotland daily. We are not providing the service that the politicians who are sitting in front of me today believe that we are providing right now. Although the service delivery review is a vital and timely piece of work, some of the direction is quite a problem for us.
I hope to have the opportunity to take questions on the nearly £900 million that is projected to be saved by the service. That is almost three times the amount that the move to a single service was anticipated to save. That money has not been reinvested in fire and rescue—it has not been reinvested in making the service better or safer. We still have crumbling stations and reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete panel issues that the service is struggling to get on top of. We do not have dignified facilities, and we are not able to implement the FBU’s decon processes across stations.
Those are statutory responsibilities, and there is guilty knowledge now that the service is struggling to get on top of the situation, and the current budget cycle and the SDR are not going to resolve the issues quickly enough. Dealing with three stations a year, when there are 365 fire stations, means that the process is not going to happen quickly enough to save the health and wellbeing of our members.
I also hope to be able to speak about response times. In his evidence to the committee, Andy Watt, the deputy chief fire officer, touched on response times being “complex”. They are complex—a multitude of factors are involved. However, it would mean applying mental gymnastics if we were saying that response times are linked to traffic jams, road works and traffic calming measures but not speaking about the extended travel time, with fewer fire appliances and fewer firefighters having to travel greater distances—we would be kidding ourselves on and not addressing the facts.
I appreciate that I am over my two minutes, convener—I could go on, but I will pause there to allow committee members to come in. I look forward to taking the committee’s questions and providing evidence today.
Thank you—there was a lot for us to think about in your opening statement.
I was going to ask you about the service delivery review and what may come from it that you feel may be positive. However, I want to pick up on the reduction in firefighter numbers that you mentioned. I am interested in probing that a little more and looking further at the reasons for it.
A lot of organisations are seeing a change in their staff numbers as a result of all sorts of different things, such as the introduction of technology, artificial intelligence and innovation—and, in your case, fewer fires. Can you expand on where the cuts are coming from?
I will bring in John McKenzie in just a moment, but I will open up the thinking around that.
Yes, the single service stripped out a swathe of duplication in the service; I think that the chief and his team referred to that when they gave evidence on 12 November. However, in our written submission, you can see what the service’s own papers say—we have taken graphs from the service that show the year-on-year reduction in whole-time staff. The cut of 166 firefighter posts in 2023 had a direct correlation to the budget.
I have the latest statistics here. There is the reduced target operating model, which is the number of firefighters who should be in whole-time positions in order for our duty system to give 24/7 fire cover in every single fire station and on every single fire appliance across Scotland. We are currently sitting at 103 below the reduced level that was implemented in 2023 and which was supposed to resolve the issue.
The projected number of retirements and leavers, which it is complex to try to anticipate for a service the size of the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service, is anticipated to be 200 in 2026. The recruit courses that are due to run over that period of time will bring in 144 firefighters, so we are already losing another 56 ropes, because the service cannot recruit quick enough to keep up with attrition. We put pumps off the run and reduce specialist teams every day, and we never quite catch up.
I will pose a question to the committee. The service said that there are around vacant 200 or 300 retained duty system firefighter posts—not posts that have been removed but vacant posts, because the service cannot recruit into those areas. Bearing in mind that the service has already had to come back for more than £1 million to cover its primary function in response to wildfires this year, what would happen to the service’s budget, if every single one of those posts was filled? We would be looking at another 200 or 300 retaining fees, another 200 or 300 turnout fees and another 200 or 300 payments for training evenings. That would bankrupt the service right now. Those posts may not be occupied—they are vacant—but, in our view, the service cannot afford to fill them.
I will pause and allow John McKenzie to come in with more detail around some of those numbers.
I do not wish to repeat any of Colin Brown’s points. Broadly speaking, there are two areas where there are cuts to firefighter numbers. Up to the year to date, 1,239 posts, or 16 per cent, have been lost since the introduction of the single service in 2013. That is a really significant number; we have seen the impact on response times, which I am sure that we will get into later.
I said that there are two factors driving this. For full-time firefighters who do this as their job, it is their primary source of earning. They are available 24/7 and they cover the vast majority of fire stations across the central belt and up the north-east coast, predominantly in our more densely populated areas. The cuts here are purely down to funding; there is no confusion there. The resource budget for the service is, in real terms, £84 million less than the equivalent budget in the last year of the legacy services in 2012-13. The resource budget is £332 million, so that is a huge and really significant amount of money. That is what has led to more than 720 whole-time posts being lost since 2013—a cut of almost 18 per cent of the total, which has had a really significant impact.
The other element relates to retained firefighters—people who do this as a secondary job or who respond to a pager, and who are predominantly, although not exclusively, in more rural and remote communities. There are socioeconomic challenges with regard to depopulation in some of those areas, which makes it difficult for the service to recruit members to fill the duty system. That is not purely down to funding. Although remuneration is a key area with regard to recruiting and retaining people, the issue is more complex than being purely about money. However, I want to be really clear that any reductions to the number of whole-time firefighters and control operators are exclusively driven by funding.
It is really helpful to get your evidence about extended travel time. Can you say more about response times? It is very concerning that there seem to have been considerable increases in response times over recent years. The Fire and Rescue Service would say that there is a health warning with regard to response times: the response time is a statistic that relates to the first appliance arriving, when, sometimes, you need three appliances and the right configuration of firefighters and equipment before you can do what needs to be done. However, how concerned should we be about the significant increases in response times and the prediction that they will continue to increase?
There is no denying that response times are not the only measure that we should look at. The driving force behind my entire career in the fire service, since my first day as a recruit, has been about trying to prevent fires and accidents from happening in the first place—the community safety aspect. However, as I touched on earlier, when something happens, it is a firefighter who needs to attend to resolve it. For example, because of the complex and dynamic nature of the wildfires across Scotland this year, crews were deployed on to hillsides for protracted periods. Then we see response times for the first appliance to arrive of 57 minutes. Sometimes whole streets are being wiped out as a result. That is not an exaggeration: it is evidenced in the statistics and in the press. These are all incidents that have happened, so we have a problem.
Although we might be talking about three, four or five of those incidents in Scotland, I ask committee members what would be a tolerable increase to the response time if you were in a house fire or if your family member was in a ditch in a car awaiting rescue? I do not think that there is a tolerable increase. Yes, it is a dynamic and complex situation, but the reality is that we have seen year-on-year increases. Comments have been made in the chamber that the increases are to do with health and safety measures for firefighters, which mean that they now don their personal protective equipment before getting into an appliance so that they can put their seatbelt on. The FBU pushed for and whole-heartedly supported those measures in their entirety. However, they have been in place for the 17 years that I have been a firefighter. They are not new, yet we see year-on-year increases to response times. Traffic calming measures have been used as an excuse for those year-on-year increases, but they are not new either. With reference to the service’s internal risk ratings, traffic calming measures and road works never appear on the board’s risk register, so those are clearly not the driving force behind increased response times.
We have also seen increased call handling times in our control rooms, which lead to increased response times. As we have reported, our control rooms are so understaffed that they are running at below critical levels, which potentially leads to the creep of human error, because fewer and fewer staff are having to do so much more. That leads to increased response times. There is also the issue of increased travel distances, as we have taken 10 fire appliances that might have been the first to respond to an incident. When the distances are greater, it seems counterintuitive to remove more firefighters and more fire appliances and to have even greater distances to travel to what are routine incidents. The increase in travel distances is one of the main drivers of increased response times. John McKenzie might have additional comments.
11:30
Response times are a really important subject, and Colin Brown has covered accurately the fact that there is a whole range of important metrics when it comes to measuring how the Fire and Rescue Service is performing. Our members have done excellent work to increase preventative work, which has resulted in a reduction in many incident types. However, to be really clear, there is no more effective measure of the resilience of the fire and rescue and emergency response to the emergency aspect of what our members do than response times. Seconds count, and the ability of our members to make life-saving interventions is absolutely critical.
What should really concern the committee about the Fire and Rescue Service’s direction of travel is that, every year, we see response times increase. The pattern for the past 10 years has been that, year on year, response times have increased. Are we comfortable with that position? A 90-second increase in response times over a 10-year period is really significant.
Katy Clark touched on the fact that what is measured is the response time for the first appliance only. In many incidents, what one appliance can do with regard to making a meaningful intervention is limited; in some in some incident types, it is non-existent. We have that one limited—although nonetheless useful—area of data. With many incident types, the real measure is the time within which you can get a second and third appliance to provide the weight of response that is needed, particularly in high-rise incidents, more complex incidents and incidents that involve more members of the public.
We do not want to pretend that response times are the only key measure, but there has been too much of a drift away from them in fire and rescue services across the United Kingdom. Often, the reason that politicians and chief fire officers are keen to move away from that metric is that the direction of travel has been consistent for 20 years. The reality is that, if you are in a house fire or trapped upside down in a car in a road traffic incident, response times are absolutely critical to you, and our members recognise that.
Convener, would it be okay to ask a question about decontamination and the extent to which that is covered in the review?
I will come back to you for that later, Katy. I will bring in Liam Kerr first to keep the order of questions right in my head.
Good morning. I have a question for Colin Brown on a not unrelated point. When the committee heard from the SFRS on the service delivery review, the SFRS made it clear that the review and the decisions in that regard were not driven by budgetary concerns. In your written submission, you disagree with that. On that basis, do you conclude that, had different budgetary decisions been taken by the Scottish Government in relation to funding, the service delivery review would have come to different conclusions, and, if so, in what way would they have been different?
That is an excellent question. We believe that the review would have been different. We talk about the removal from the service of £900 million, potentially, by 2027-28, but had that been reinvested in the service, it would not be having to look at ways of freeing up resource and capital funding from its current budget levels to implement projects. For example, Katy Clark briefly touched on the work on decontamination. The service is looking to modernise its estate to provide decon-compliant and dignified facilities, but it is not getting the level of capital funding that it needs to effect that level of change in a timely manner across the entire estate. Funding is a primary driver, because the service is having to find capital from within the system in order to implement massive capital projects.
This year, health and safety improvement notices were applied to some stations, and the service is having to find a way to resolve that from its current budget. In many ways, that is fiscal responsibility, and, quite rightly, the Government and politicians absolutely focus on that. A taxpayer-funded organisation should look at how it spends its money.
However, changing a fire station from having sleeping accommodation that enables firefighters to be on call from that location and available at a second’s notice to being a building that does not require to have such facilities saves millions of pounds. The service wants to reinvest that money in the service. Our question is whether that decision would genuinely have been considered if the £900 million, or even a third of it, had been reinvested in the service. Our view is that the constant stripping away of capital and resource has led us to a situation in which the service is having to ask, “How do we replace 14 RAAC panel-constructed stations from our current capital budget?”
Thank you—that was clear. As we are talking about stations and the estate, the delivery review proposes to close eight stations that are described as “long-term dormant”, six of which have been non-operational since before 2016 and five of which are not staffed. Do you agree with the proposal? Given the situation, are you comfortable with that?
In theory, that is a challenging question for a trade union that exists to represent firefighters and protect their jobs. We take very seriously our members’ responsibilities to their local communities. That said, the reality is that there has not been a firefighter in those stations for upwards of 10 years, so what are we actually protecting? The stations in question are long-term dormant; overwhelmingly, they are volunteer system stations, and we have concerns about that model for a professional fire and rescue service as it is.
However, that relates to an issue that I have already mentioned—overreliance on a model that is already causing us to consider closing nine stations. Increased reliance on such a model should be of concern to us, because population and societal shifts away from people living and working in their local community, as a result of the economic draw of large city centres, have resulted in remote and rural communities being left without people to staff retained and volunteer duty system stations.
Some of those stations are in very small island communities. I apologise to the residents of the island of Kerrera, but I think that the population is around 60 and the age dynamic is in the upper percentile. None of them wants to be an RDS firefighter. You do not create a crew from zero, so, with the best will in the world, those stations will never be operational again. It takes three years to train a competent firefighter, and you need two of them to make a breathing apparatus team. It takes an additional minimum of a year to get a crew commander in place and an additional year or so to get a watch command team in place. You cannot generate experiential learning and exposure to fire incidents when there have not been incidents or turnouts for 15 years, so you can see that such crews will never exist again. It is entirely sensible for the service to consider shutting those stations, because I would guess that the service is spending upwards of £1 million a year for appliances, equipment, maintenance and testing for stations that are absolutely not functioning.
I understand.
This slightly relates to the point that Audrey Nicoll put to me on the breakdown and root causes, and it touches on your first question. The FBU is fully supportive of the service looking at the resources that it has and where those are. The “Firestorm” report made it clear that there are areas in the service that need to change, a number of which Colin Brown has clearly set out.
We are not against change or against looking at the issues; our issue is with the fact that that change is set in a context that is entirely driven by cuts. I disagree with the service’s position that the SDR is not driven by cuts, although I understand why it would make that comment. The reality is that the 10 fire appliances that were removed in 2023 form part of the SDR consultation. The service has been crystal clear that those changes were driven by its not having sufficient finances to staff the 166 posts that were required to keep them there. That is the context.
With regard to your specific question, the proposal does not relate only to the eight dormant stations. At the other end of the scale, the second busiest station in Scotland is potentially earmarked for closure. That relates partly to issues that predate the current Government—issues that go back many decades in relation to capital infrastructure spend across a range of public services, but particularly the Fire and Rescue Service. We now have a legacy of what is, in effect, an £800 million problem that must be solved at some point. Some of the areas that we are discussing are wrapped into that.
We are looking at a context in which the second busiest station in Scotland for incident responses has been pushed into that situation because sufficient capital has not been spent on the building. That is one of the options, along with stations that have been dormant for six, seven, eight and—in some cases—even 10 years.
I have a final point about an aspect that I would be highly surprised if we were able to cover today. Three quarters of fire stations in Scotland are staffed by retained or volunteer firefighters. Those stations are in communities where we are seeing increasing depopulation of the kind of people who we would expect to join the service. That is a significant issue, which goes beyond funding. However, we must not lose sight of the fact that many of the changes are specifically driven by the significant funding gap in the past 12 years.
Do you want to come back in, Liam?
You mentioned the second busiest station in Scotland. Just for the record, which station is that?
Cowcaddens, in Glasgow.
As Colin Brown and John McKenzie will know, my area could be impacted by proposed changes to Cumbernauld fire station, although I should say for the record that it is not a full closure that is proposed. I also put on record that I am very grateful to the FBU for the interaction that I have had with it, particularly its local members.
My first question is about the process, which I would like to get your perspective on. Many advantages have been derived from the fact that we now have a national service. I have seen that locally in the tremendous response from firefighters across the entirety of central Scotland to wildfires and the St Mungo’s church fire, which you will be well aware of. Your mention of Cowcaddens is pertinent to my question. I have been struck by the fact that the proposals seem to have been made on a localised or regional basis. Cumbernauld is part of the proposals that were set out for Lanarkshire, but my area might be just as impacted by, for example, the closure of Cowcaddens or changes that have been posited for Springburn.
Are you also concerned about the process? We have a national service, but the manner in which the proposals have been laid out does not necessarily seem to have reflected that or to have taken advantage of the fact that we have a national service.
I appreciate the question. The service is referred to as having pan-Scotland resources and the ability to bend and flex to incident types and needs. Wildfires are a perfect example, but there are also specialist incidents, such as rope rescue incidents. There are four rope rescue teams across Scotland, which is a crushingly small number when we think of the geography of Scotland and the potential for that type of rescue. That is one element. Rope rescue teams might have to be moved or reduced. Whatever happens to them is described as being part of a different part of the review.
There is a degree of sympathy for the service. How do you consult on something that is so broad reaching? How should we consult someone on Skye, for example, on a proposal for the centre of Glasgow? People’s lived experiences and interactions with the fire service are usually remarkably different. There is an issue with regard to how we meaningfully consult, but, with us now being a pan-Scotland resource, there should be interaction between those two areas to say what the impact is, because there is every likelihood that closing a station in location A will have an impact on stations across the country.
We could talk about the process of consultation and the concerns that we have about that, but maybe the issue is less about the process and more about the proposals that have been consulted on. Has enough consideration been given to how what happens in one area might impact on another? That is a concern for me.
I will bring in John McKenzie. In the second document that we submitted to the committee as written evidence, which relates to the pre-consultation phase with stakeholders, we said that we should not be pitting one against the other, and that is the feedback that we have received from our engagement with communities.
Maryhill is a striking example. People asked, “Why are they saying that we can have a pump back, but only at the cost of the station down the road?” That element of pitting one against the other has been raised as a concern. It is certainly of concern to us.
I think that I understand the broad principles of the question. We have certainly come across questions about the rationale behind some of the options. However, a far greater concern is that the whole process is cart before horse. The money has not been there for years now. We are sitting at 10 per cent below what the current operating model should be for whole-time firefighters in fire stations today. The options that we are talking about are largely driven by that. They are reactive to the fact that 10 per cent of the workforce that should be there to support the resources that are currently sitting in fire stations is not there, and that has driven us to where we are today.
Some of the options need to be done quickly, but they are all directly interlinked with resource—physical resource or, predominantly, people. That is what is driving the issues. I can absolutely understand why MSPs focus on constituents’ issues, and a lot of that is to be welcomed, but the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service does not currently have the people in place to maintain the existing resources.
11:45The reality is that the 16 whole-time pumps that were listed on a bit of paper in August 2023 as provisionally being in place to protect communities are not staffed, because they were temporarily removed from operational duty in September 2023 or because the people are not in place to respond to incidents right now. That situation cannot be maintained. We cannot say, “We have X resources,” when in reality they are not in place to respond to the very emergencies that they were designed to respond to.
From that perspective, we welcome the SDR, because what the service has been doing for many years is completely unsustainable, but the response is critically linked to resource. If we do not have the resource, we cannot have the response. That high-level question is what we need to see the Government and others outside the service wrestling with. Do we have the correct resource in place to provide the resilience that is expected by members of committees such as this one?
I will not get too drawn on Maryhill fire station, even though it is the one that was closest to me when I grew up. I totally understand your point, which is that you do not want to get drawn into pitting one area against another. However, do you accept my point that, given that we have a national service, with all its advantages, the national picture and how areas interact with one another should be part of the equation when it comes to service redesign?
I absolutely accept that. To give a very succinct and brief example, when storm Arwen swept Scotland’s east coast several years ago, entire communities were cut off and could not access the national resource. When there is water ingress in electrified houses, we regard that as a very significant situation. Persons that are reported as being inside such houses are potentially at risk from significant fire. However, those communities were completely cut off from resources that they could normally access because the road network was inundated with water or completely washed away.
The idea of having a national resource in normal conditions is really important and very effective, but we need to think about whether we are closing off access behind natural barriers that will come through at peak times. We need to consider that challenge alongside all the issues that we have discussed today.
I have one other area to raise on service redesign. You mentioned the need to provide dignified facilities and to address the presence of RAAC, which is an issue at Cumbernauld fire station. Clearly, there are constraints around capital—I do not mean for the service; I am speaking in general terms about the pressures on the Government as a whole—and, to be even-handed, you have recognised and cited that the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service understands the issue of RAAC and the need for dignified facilities.
On service redesign more widely, the world has changed. You yourselves have set out in the “Firestorm” report that the service might need to be redesigned and thought through. You will probably not be able to get into too much detail, given the time that we have, but can you set out some of the high-level points that would require to be addressed as part of a review or change to the service provision?
I do not want to personalise this, but the reality is that, if it is not your constituency that will be affected by changes, whose will be? A local community will always say, “We don’t want the fire station at the end of our road to be closed, moved or taken away,” because, regardless of the fact that the industrial risk that led to that station being put there is not a risk any more, the individuals who live there still want their houses to be protected, still want community safety engagement and still want the safety blanket that is provided by the service and the station being local. That will always be a challenge in such consultations.
We have spoken openly about the fact that we want to enter into the process with an open hand in order to understand what it is that we are doing. We fully support the mantra that we need to have the right people in the right place at the right time. However, I point out that the SDR does not propose a single increase in resource in a single community across Scotland, despite the changes in risk—wildfire risk and flooding risk—that we continue to reference. In fact, we are reducing the coverage that is provided by water rescue teams. That is potentially the case in Hawick, where the water rescue team might have day crews only, supported by a retained duty system overnight. We have spoken about the potential issues with that.
We agree that there needs to be a conversation and that thought needs to be given to the issue, but our belief is that it is the financial pressure that is the driving force behind much of the review. When the service is looking to free up resource that it can reinvest in itself, there is the potential for bad decisions to be made. Earlier, mention was made of the potential for making bad policy. The service could make bad decisions—albeit with the best intentions—because of the pressure that it is under to free up capital and resource budgets in order to invest in itself.
For the record, notwithstanding my genuine concerns about the situation in Cumbernauld, we should say that it is not proposed that the fire station there will close or be moved.
Good morning. Among the changes that we are seeing, there is an increased reliance on duty firefighters. In your submission you have highlighted the
“sustained recruitment and retention issues”
that the duty system is facing. Will you set out your specific concerns about staff and public safety, should the proposed options be adopted?
On this occasion I will be succinct, before passing to John McKenzie.
A number of stations are earmarked for closure under the review, because the service has been unable to recruit and retain firefighters for a number of years. We have touched on the fact that 200 of the 345 retained duty system appliances can be unavailable at any time of day or night, which is simply down to the fact that they do not have crew to staff and mobilise them. That is because people are working and living differently from when the system was designed.
On the idea that we will suddenly create even more reliance on the retained duty system, I want to put it on record that the retained firefighters who work across Scotland and across the system in the United Kingdom do phenomenal work, despite having limited time for training and for engaging with being a firefighter. They are exceptional human beings who we should all commend. I know that the committee will do that without my having to say it.
However, there can be no escaping the fact that there are huge gaps. Some 80 per cent of Scotland’s land mass is covered by RDS stations, and 200 appliances are at times unable to respond to emergency incidents in those communities. They are unable to provide community safety engagement and unable to do the work of the Fire and Rescue Service. That should be a concern as the service looks to review how it does things. If there are 100 firefighters at a wildfire on a hillside, the overwhelming majority of them will be retained firefighters, who are taking a cut on sheer earning capacity by stepping away from their primary employment to be a firefighter for their communities. That system is hugely problematic, because the attrition rate means that the numbers keep churning over.
There is so much that we could say about retained firefighters. They are almost unique emergency public sector workers. They earn the majority of their overall earnings from other employers, but they can give up to, and over, 120 hours of availability per week. They are on a pager, and have to respond to their local fire station within five minutes to provide an emergency response. Within minutes they could be making life-critical interventions for people. It is an entirely unique model.
The fact that more than 200 fire stations are staffed purely by retained firefighters is incredible, and that brings its own challenges. There is no hiding away from the fact that changes in population in more rural areas, some of which are losing young people who are moving to the central belt for various reasons, significantly undermine the model that has operated at some retained stations for decades. That is a real challenge, and it cannot simply be resolved by the Fire and Rescue Service; it is a societal challenge.
More than 375 retained firefighters have been lost since 2012-13. The service cannot recruit and retain these people. Some of the issues are very different, or are different in some aspects, from those experienced with the shortages in the whole-time system. It will take more than the Fire and Rescue Service to resolve those issues.
There has been some positive work with the Fire and Rescue Service over the past year, however. Just at the start of this year, we finally harmonised and standardised retained firefighters’ terms and conditions. That is long overdue: the issue dates back to 2013, and it involved a significant piece of work. We negotiated a significant pay increase for retained firefighters. Our earnings are still really minimal in many cases, however, and that is one of many challenges—they are not exclusively about that.
As Colin Brown touched on, retained fire stations make up almost 75 per cent of fire stations in Scotland, so that is a significant area of focus. To link that question and Jamie Hepburn’s previous question, I want to mention one potential area of missed opportunity. Jamie touched on the changes that the union would welcome in the service delivery review process, or are certainly leaning towards. This is about considering what firefighters do and what type of incidents they respond to.
For a long period now, there has been a recognition that there could be additional value in firefighters responding to types of incidents that they are currently not contractually obliged to respond to. In 2022, the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service and the Fire Brigades Union came to an in-principle agreement about expanding firefighters’ roles. Without getting into the detail of that, which is withheld, it would potentially see our members responding to incident types involving terrorist attacks and emergency medical response that they currently do not respond to, or it would increase their role in those.
Why is that important to the potential footprint for retained firefighters? Currently, there is a really good resource—over 360 fire stations across Scotland—where that additional response could come from. There is a danger of putting the cart before the horse if we close some of those stations, because, down the line, the funding might become available or be allocated in a way that means that those resources could have provided emergency medical response in local vulnerable communities that currently have very poor or limited provision from the national health service or the Scottish Ambulance Service. That is an issue where the fire station currently has a footprint that we are at risk of no longer having.
That would not get round the staffing issues that Colin Brown covered in answering Liam Kerr’s question. If we do not have people who are willing to do those roles, or if there just are not people to do the roles in the first place, whether they are willing or not, that is a different challenge. The issues facing the retained service are complex and some are unique to the service.
I have a wee question about colour blindness. The SFRS is the only UK service that removes firefighters as a result of colour vision testing. There is no evidence of risk and there is a poor test quality and no fallback plan. Are you finding that people are being taken off the run or whatever because of the new requirement for colour vision?
I have not become aware of that in my role, but John has more information on it.
I have been involved directly in that issue, and I would say that it is not a concern for the union. The numbers have been limited, and we have been involved in work with the service in that regard.
I would challenge the point that the SFRS is the only service in the UK that does that. I think that that is inaccurate—that is a detail that I just do not think is correct.
From our perspective, all the discussions that we have had with the employer have been to do with the health and safety of the individuals who are affected and of others at incidents. We have come up with a practical test for the Fire and Rescue Service that involves recognising the colour coding of key safety-critical equipment—that is a sort of layering of testing. We have done that through negotiation and consultation with the employer. I am happy to look at the detail again, but it is not an area in which we have concerns.
That is fine.
I have a question about older firefighters and the fitness test. Is that a concern? I have heard reports that the fitness level for younger firefighters is the same as that for older ones and that, if the level was changed slightly, we might keep more people operational.
That goes right back to 2002 and 2003, when the UK fire minister at the time, Penny Mordaunt, gave assurances that the changes to fitness standards in the testing would not negatively impact firefighters’ longevity and ability to maintain a career through a full 30 and now 40-year career. That is not the reality for firefighters, given the changes to pensions and the like, which are a driving force behind that. We have to look at the issue from a health and safety perspective, in the sense that firefighters have to be operationally fit to be able to respond to very physically challenging environments, but the reality now is that they would have to join the service at an Olympic athlete level of fitness in order to maintain that standard right through an entire career.
John McKenzie has been more involved than I have in the detailed work on that in Scotland, but it is a significant concern that there are no roles for firefighters who do not meet that fitness standard but who have an entire career’s worth of experience and knowledge that they could share. Essentially, they will be retired on medical grounds because they cannot meet that operational standard.
I will be quick on this issue, because it does not directly relate to the SDR. To be blunt, the FBU’s position in Scotland is that the VO2 max fitness testing level should be higher than the service currently has in place. That is not to say that we do not fully expect the employer to support our members who do not meet that level to meet it through support, assessment and everything else. However, at the hard end of this, firefighting is a physically arduous task, and the safety levels that are linked to that are absolutely critical.
You have a level of responsibility for your own safety and also for those who are entirely dependent on your ability to perform the task in that risk-critical environment. Without getting into too-specific detail, the Fire Brigades Union position for the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service, which has been our position for a long time, is that we should use a VO2 max of 42.7. The service chooses to monitor people’s fitness at that level, but would keep them available and instead have a slightly lower level. The union recognises that, but we do not have concerns about the service putting people off the run or about challenges around fitness. If anything, our position would be that the service should be more stringent on that.
12:00
My final question was covered by Katy Clark earlier, but I have a big interest in the issue. In the FBU’s opinion, will any increase in response times for any appliance in some areas ever be acceptable? I read through your “MSP Briefing Note Autumn 2025”, in which you said that, in a contribution,
“the Minister made a number of statements which, at best, were misinformed, and at worst consciously untrue.”
In the briefing note, you made a couple of comments about response times. Do you have any other comments?
I will bring in John again in a moment. The FBU is always open to anyone approaching us for comment, for background information or for balance against what we would term as the managerial brief that is provided by the service, because that is how we get genuinely progressive and thought-through decisions made.
As I touched on earlier, the idea that response times are in some way impacted by something that has been in place for more than 17 years—that is, donning your PPE before getting on to a fire appliance—is, as we said in the briefing note, demonstrably untrue as far as we are concerned, because the year-on-year increases in response times are not impacted by that. There is something else driving it. We have set out very clearly our thoughts on that: it is directly linked to the reduction in the number of firefighters, the reduction in spread and the increased travel times.
There is a direct link to changes in incident types. We have been very successful in driving down the number of domestic dwelling fires, which happen in the local communities where fire stations are based, but we see increases in other incident types, such as wildfires, and there is an increased travel distance to that type of incident. Ultimately, it all still comes down to the fact that, if we do not have the number of firefighters to respond to the same geographical area, the travel distance will be greater and, therefore, the time to get there will be greater.
There was a press release that said that there was an increase in the number of domestic fires. I know that we hear a lot of comments that the number of fires is reducing, but that press release was put out by the Minister for Victims and Community Safety.
There are always peaks and troughs. One incident can completely change that dynamic. If there are zero fires and then we have one fire, that is a 100 per cent increase, so the dynamic can change rapidly. However, I stress the point that the dynamic nature of how people live and work is the key factor, which is why we say that an emergency service cannot be run simply by counting the pounds and pence. Society has to decide whether it wants to fund an emergency service or a health service and to have the adequate insurance policy that we should have.
We would say that, if there are fewer firefighters in communities where we see an increase in some incident types, there are probably fewer firefighters delivering the community safety messages to avoid those incidents happening in the first place. That is a driver for incident types peaking and troughing, because such engagement is restricted by the number of firefighters available to deliver it.
Colin has covered really well the fact that we are seeing increases in some incident types. It is a much more complex picture than just saying that incident types as a whole are reducing in number. I will not return to that.
Any increase in response times should be unacceptable to us all. I qualify that by noting that, in some local communities, with our current model, increasing response times are inevitable. If we do not have people in remote rural communities who are either able to or willing to carry out the firefighter roles, those resources will inevitably close; there are wider challenges in reducing such response times.
We touched on the overall process for response times before. There would not be a fire and rescue service at all if there was not an emergency response to life-critical incidents—the organisation would not be there. That does not mean that all the other areas of work that Scottish Fire and Rescue Service firefighters, control operators and all our members carry out are not absolutely critical. They are, but it is the emergency response that is the absolute foundation of the organisation.
That is linked to making meaningful interventions—it is linked to saving people’s lives, saving property and reducing risk, and response times are pivotal in that. In summary, increasing response times should not be acceptable to any of us. The measure is not as blunt as that, because, due to other societal issues, it is difficult to challenge that approach in some communities. However, it is a metric that can measure the Fire and Rescue Service like no other.
Good morning. I want to explore how we got here. I am familiar with centralisation, and I know that you supported it. You probably did not think that, in 2025, you would be here telling us about cuts of almost £1 billion, because the point of the exercise was not to make all these cuts. The committee heard from the Fire and Rescue Service management team, which was, at least, clear that it needed a certain amount of money and that otherwise it would have to reduce the head count. In that sense, the union and the management are saying the same thing, although you might disagree with the figures. I would say that this is the starkest warning that I have ever seen from justice partners. The police are saying the same thing that you are saying: you went along with the centralisation, you made the efficiency savings, and now you are coming to the committee and telling us that this is going to impact on the people we represent. I think that it is the most serious situation that I can recall as an elected member.
I am sure that you will know this off by heart, but, in your submission, you said that, in 2024,
“sustained underfunding forced the SFRS to ‘temporarily withdraw’ 10 frontline fire appliances and reduce operational headcount by 166 firefighter posts in September 2023.”
So, it was temporary, but you predicted that it would be permanent, and you were right, because, as you go on to say,
“The inclusion of ‘permanent solutions’ to the cuts imposed in 2023 is evidence that the FBU concerns were well founded.”
Rather than go over the whole 13 years, why do we not start there? Is there another example that would better illustrate where the big cuts have started to happen? What has the responsible minister been saying to you? I presume that you have met with her and discussed it. Can you share that with the committee?
I will start by commenting on the chief’s comments from a couple of weeks back. I do not think that it is lost on firefighters—probably across the entire UK—that, for generations, probably since response time targets were removed, a number of years back, chief fire officers have overwhelmingly gone along with the approach of, “Cut our budget and we’ll make it work,” “Reduce our head count and we can make it work.” Maybe as a result of the political shifts at a UK level—it is not for me to comment on that in this sphere—there has been a step change in how the National Fire Chiefs Council is engaging in the conversation on budgets, and it is now saying that we have gone too far, too fast and too deep and that we need to reverse the funding situation.
That is echoed across the entire UK fire and rescue service, but, for us, the spotlight is on Scotland. We should commend our chief fire officer, and I want to go on the record as saying that I am incredibly pleased to see a chief fire officer for Scotland come to the committee and say that we are at the precipice right now. Earlier, we spoke about whether or not the service is in crisis. We are on the precipice of a crisis. There might be disagreement between us about the direct situation now, but the chief set out succinctly that we are right at the point of being in crisis, because of the numbers that would have to be cut. The previous chief spoke about, potentially, 700 firefighter posts having to be cut if there was a flat cash budget when the resource spending review was implemented. We are back in that situation, because, although I again commend the committee for its work in recent years to influence the budget setting for the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service so that it is not flat, the budget has not kept pace with inflation and costs. That is a key point.
There has been attrition from the service—a slow creep of head count out. John McKenzie touched on the fact that we are 1,239 posts below where we started in 2013. The key point is that we lost 166 posts at the stroke of a pen: those posts were just written out of our target operating model as a reduction in head count.
I have had the task—let us call it that—of working through the parliamentary record, and I note that the minister overwhelmingly responds to written and oral questions regarding proposed changes to the service by saying, “These are operational decisions for the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service.” There is a space between those two places. We would not want politicians directly interfering in the day-to-day running of the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service—that is clear. It should be the responsibility of a semi-autonomous board under the governance structure. However, there cannot be a complete washing of hands of any responsibility for oversight of such significant decisions, which are generational for the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service—they are the biggest change since the single service was created, in 2013. They are generational impacts that will potentially remove firefighters, fire stations and fire appliances from communities across Scotland, and there should be political oversight of that.
We have called for that, and it has been called for in the chamber. Katy Clark had a members’ business debate specifically on that. It did not go in the way that we would have liked, but that was just about the mechanisms of Parliament. There should be that oversight—and, indeed, greater levels of oversight—of such significant decisions. It should not be solely up to an unelected, appointed board to make decisions that will impact on every single person who lives or works in Scotland today.
What has led us to where we are today? There are a couple of aspects. Colin Brown covered the resource funding aspect really well. We calculate that, to date, the service has saved £750 million in cumulative terms, and the service projects that the figure will be £900 million by 2027-28. Originally, the figure was outlined as being just over £330 million. Our position is that the service has just not been provided with the resources that it needs, year on year, certainly since the introduction of the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service, although I would argue that it predates that quite significantly.
Colin Brown touched on the fact that the funding challenges that the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service faces are not unique. If anything, the challenges are even greater in some fire and rescue services south of the border. However, the capital budget allocation challenges go back decades. You do not build up an £800 million capital backlog in a service with a £47 million capital budget in a matter of years. The problem has developed over decades.
In relation to governance and the roles of the minister and the Parliament, what do our members expect? They do not expect the Parliament to be involved in individual operational decisions. What they expect is that grown-up decisions will be made in direct correlation to what we want firefighters to do. What do we want them to provide for the communities of Scotland over the next 10, 15 or 20 years, and are we matching the resource to our ask? If we are not marrying up those two things, we are asking the organisation to fail.
That is why I asked the question. I highlighted what happened in 2023 and the temporary reduction. Did you have discussions about that?
I agree with everything that you have said. There is an operational board and it is not for politicians to interfere in the running of the service, but the resource is the responsibility of the Scottish Government. I would have thought that a good place to start would be questioning it about the resource that it allocates. We are now at the end of 2025 and we do not know what the January budget will bring for the service.
On every occasion when we have met the minister and previous ministers, we have been clear that the service is underfunded. It is critically underfunded, and that has a direct impact on response—
Are you getting any response to that?
Colin Brown was correct to touch on the 10 appliances that were withdrawn in 2023. On paper, 166 posts were removed, but those 166 posts were already vacant because of underfunding. That point comes up in every engagement that we have with the minister, and probably at all levels politically.
What response are you getting to that?
We have asked directly what the road map is to reverse the temporary withdrawal and reduction. As I said, it takes three years to train a competent firefighter. When we ask what the mechanism and the road map are to reverse the temporary cut, we see blank expressions. Everyone looks at their shoes, because they know that it is not going to happen. They know that it was not temporary. There was no direct public consultation on such significant removals, and they knew that they would have to bring that consultation back. It is now incorporated in the service delivery review process that we are discussing today.
Okay. As you have said, there are many implications, and you mentioned at the beginning the wider roles of the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service. Sometimes, we do not talk enough about the role that you have if there is an accident on the M8 or elsewhere and your critical role in saving people’s lives. I will not go into my concerns about shutting the stations in Cowcaddens and Yorkhill, which are in the region that I represent, but I think that Cowcaddens is a good example of a station that fulfils that role. You can correct me if I am wrong, but I assume that the location of a fire station such as the one in Cowcaddens, which is so close to a big motorway—the M8—is critical to the response times for serious accidents that happen on the motorway. Or is that not the case?
12:15
I plead for a single response, because we are short on time and a couple of members still want to come in.
Of course—although, as I said at the start, John McKenzie and I are probably the wrong people to ask to be succinct.
That question betrays some of the issues with the entire consultation process. On the one hand, the service delivery review consultation document said that there will not be a significant change to Cowcaddens and that we will still be able to put the right people in the right place at the right time. However, as you said, the Cowcaddens station is ideally located to respond to those types of incidents.
In the other part of the consultation process, there is Balmossie station in Dundee, which the consultation document said is not near enough to the road network to be able to respond efficiently to incidents, nor is it near enough to population bases to have a significant impact. The station is co-located with the Ambulance Service, and such co-location is a primary driver of public sector reform, but one of those options will potentially be shut. The two statements from the fire service in its consultation document therefore seem to be contradictory. One station is not close enough to the network, and response times are impacted by that—
Sorry—just to be clear, Colin: in your view as a firefighter, are the locations of those stations important in relation to the response time in getting to major road networks or to the response time for any incident? I know that it is not always just about major road networks.
Absolutely. It goes back to response times and how quickly we can get firefighters there. There is a golden hour for intervention and taking people to clinical care, which starts the minute that the accident happens. The sooner that we can get people on the scene, the better.
Thank you.
We are primarily looking at the service delivery review, but we are also looking at the budget. It is difficult to disentangle some of the issues that are involved with the two. I hear what you are saying about your concern that some of the proposals are primarily driven by a cuts agenda. You have clearly set out the challenge that we have in relation to response times, the number of firefighters and the number of appliances.
However, in committee meetings earlier in the parliamentary session, we heard strong evidence on decontamination. As an employer, the fire service has a duty of care towards its workforce to provide safe systems of work. It seems clear that that has not been happening. I know that you have done a lot of work on decontamination and that the service has relied quite heavily on your work. To what extent has that massive challenge been incorporated in the review? It must surely feed into some of the decisions. It would be interesting to get your perspective on whether the review captures the issue.
The review does and does not capture that—I know that that is not the answer that you were looking for. I must commend the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service: when it does things, it tends to do them well. Obviously, our view on the SDR process is slightly different from that statement. However, the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service was a very early adopter of the FBU’s decon work. There are still challenges in other UK fire and rescue services, which do not want to believe the data and choose to ignore it—I will not get into the roots of that.
The Scottish Fire and Rescue Service approached the Scottish Government and developed, under the CivTech programme, a challenge around how we monitor firefighters’ exposure to contaminants. That work is on-going, and I believe that trials are due to start soon.
Therefore, I commend the service for its uptake and its response to decon. However, the challenge again relates to capital and resource. In spite of the service’s best intentions, we cannot replace or redesign fire stations quickly enough to have a zoned flow of exposure within the station at the rate that is required to implement the measures, which needs to be as fast as possible. Anytime we put a new build in place or refresh a station, the service implements all those measures. However, there are 356 workplaces that need that work done now. It is not happening quickly enough.
Finally, I call Fulton MacGregor. Please make it a brief question, Fulton, if you do not mind.
Thank you, convener, and good morning. I must apologise to the panel and all committee members for not being there in person. I am still struggling a bit with a cold.
Like Jamie Hepburn, I, too, have had some contact from local fire officers, and I put on record my thanks to them for coming to me on this matter. A lot of the things that they raised with me have already been covered by other members, but I want to ask a wee bit about your views on the consultation on the review. I have heard some criticism that the review was not clear and concise enough for people to think through the actual implications of the changes and that there was not a great level of engagement with local organisations, businesses and community groups. In fact, a lot of the publicity in that respect came through the SFRS’s Facebook page and social media channels. Do you have any comments on those thoughts—or criticisms, if you like—that have been put to me?
I will be very brief. We submitted a freedom of information request to the service, and the response was that the engagement with the consultation—that is, responses to the survey by letter or email and through the petition format—amounted to 5,726 responses for the entire consultation across Scotland. Of the survey responses, 2,665 opposed the proposals. There is a further breakdown—which I will not go into detail here, because of time—but I can say that only 686 responses expressed support for one or other of the options.
The criticism that we lodged very early on was that there was no status quo option. The “Firestorm” report talks about the status quo potentially not being the best option with regard to the review, but, when we saw that the options for the public were, “Do you want the station next to you or the station along the road from you to be shut?” with no option of saying, “Neither of those,” that was the starting point at which we had issues.
Issues were raised through the consultation. The level of engagement has been a challenging issue, notwithstanding the challenges that an organisation the size of the Scottish service faces in attaining that level of community engagement on such a complex issue. The service ran a number of community engagement sessions, and the FBU ran its own engagement sessions, which were very well attended. We deliberately kept our people out of the services sessions, because we felt that they should have the space to engage without our influencing the conversation and that we could pick the issues up with members of the community and community councillors outwith that.
I recognise the challenge that the service would have had with regard to the level of engagement required, but there has been significant criticism of some of the process and some of the way in which it has been conducted. However, I would put that on the service to pick up rather than the FBU, to be honest.
Fulton, do you want to come back in, or are you happy with that response? [Interruption.] I do not know whether you were able to hear me. I was just asking whether you wanted to come back in, or whether you were happy with that response.
That is me now, convener—I have been unmuted.
I am happy enough with that response. Just for clarity, though, I should say that I was asking the question as it was put to me; I was not saying that this is for the FBU to take forward. However, I think that Colin Brown has answered that point, so thank you very much.
Thank you very much.
We are now over time, although I am sure that we could stay here for another good while and have a further discussion. I thank the witnesses very much for coming along today. I think that the session has been helpful for everyone.
12:23 Meeting continued in private until 13:02.