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June 21, 2005

The end of "service"?

The demise of the fire and emergency service as a professionally run and efficient organisation is now well advanced. The Inspectorate has been dismantled and suppressed, except that the uniformed and competent inspectors of Her Majesty's Fire and Emergency Services have been replaced by arrogant incompetents whose arrogance is equalled only by their ignorance of the service they purport to "manage".

The Inspectorate, whose remit was to ensure that the emergency response to fires, accidents, floods, and any other civil emergency was efficient, approriate, and properly led; equipped and professional has been replaced by "audits" by none other than the Audit Commission. Here is an extract from their "Mission Statement".

Read it and weep for a service destroyed by political vengeance, incompetent leadership, and the ambitions of a small minority of people whose egos far exceed their ability. Only a set of ignorant and arrogant civil servants could assume that their counting of the beans of how many "targets" for matters not related to emergency service, unrelated to professional standing, development, or management could possibly make for an "efficient" service. One has only to look at the NHS to see where that leads, where the paperwork now exceeds the actual delivery of health care to the patient in importance at every level, and doctors fume in frustration at the insistance that patients must wait in line because they are not a "target" group! Only a bunch of accountants could write the statement below and believe it!

"Comprehensive performance assessment (CPA) for fire and rescue authorities helps them improve the management of services they deliver to local people. CPA is an assessment, at the corporate level, of how well the authority is being run. It does not give an opinion on how well the fire service responds to emergency incidents."

What more can anyone say?

Posted by The Gray Monk at June 21, 2005 10:24 AM