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November 05, 2007

Ongoing tragedy ...

One of the prime reasons given for tearing our fire and rescue service apart and parachuting in all sorts of people with no fire background and at all levels of senior management was to "create a leaner, more effcient and safer" fire service. It was stated that these parachutists would bring "skills lacking in management, training and community relations". In reality it was a baldfaced attempt to ethnicise the service and make it more cuddly and feminine. The results have begun to show.

The training system which had served us very well for over fifty years was deemed to be "elitist" and "exclusive" and thrown out. Knowledge based learning which supported skils with underpinning knowledge and built on experience gained by working your way up through the ranks with selection - everywhere apparently except London - based on merit and ability. Yes, there were a few "rotten eggs" and bullies, but the service soon found them out and they seldom prospered. Then the politicians and civil servants got their dirty hands into the service. Out went the structured training. Out went selection on ability, in came Itsy Pitsy Diddly Squat as the longer serving men and women named the "new" "competence" based system which declared that knowledge was unnecessary and so were qualifications. All you had to be able to do was squirt water and operate the equipment. Alongside that, in came a range of "Selection Criteria" which focus on matters having nothing to do with what the service actually does - the element which is based on knowledge and understanding of fire fighting, rescue and extrication is 10% of the selection process - and is optional. This to allow people from the Job Centre to parachute in as "Managers" - the service is no longer led by "Officers" - Mister Prescott would not allow the use of that word or "commander" the alternative and forbade it.

Now we have services led by Chief Executives who have never actually ridden a red lorry - probably only encounter one when they need a publicity shot for the local paper and certainly have no understanding of what it is like to have to search the remains of a building for your dead colleagues. And those who have quite probably last actually attended a fire more than ten years before they rose, by political manoeuvering, to their current level. Oh, they make all the right noises and shed a few tears in sympathy - but they don't feel the anger, the sense of betrayal that their decisions to allow buildings such as the one in Warwickshire to kill your colleagues by relaxing requirements to fit sprinklers or to cut the manning on appliances and reduce turnouts using that other great "management" tool invented by the Whitehall Wankers - "Integrated Risk Management Planning" - a system which allows the Service Managers to reduce the fire cover in industrial and high fire risk areas because there is "no significant life risk", engenders in every professional fire fighter. Except of course to the fire fighters entering the building to try and save the livelihoods of a couple of hundred people and reduce the damage to the economy wrought by fire every year.

Intergrated Risk Management Planning worls ONLY if it is supported by a regime of strict application and enforcement of the provision of sprinklers and other "active" fire suppression systems in ALL high fire risk premises. That is to say, EVERY industrial, commercial, mercantile and storage facility, EVERY theatre, cinema, Shopping Mall, hospital and high rise.

You can manipulate the numbers as much as you like CFOA, DCLG and all the rest - you signed up to this, and you, and you alone, are responsible for these latest deaths, just as you are all guilty of the increase in fire fighter injuries and deaths since you "modernised" a service which, while it had its faults, was described only two years before your vandalism, as "The best managed Public Service in the country, delivering an efficient and cost effective service at all levels." IPDS, IRMP and all your other "Integrated" initiatives have brought us a less trained, less professional, less efficient and much more dangerous service - and if you are reading this and live in London I would add this. DON'T under ANY circumstances have a fire. The once proud LFB is now so afraid to enter a building on fire that it will burn out before they even begin to lay a hose - and if you are in need of rescue.? Forget it - fire fighter discipline has gone, replaced by "personal Risk Assessment". In short, if I don't like the order I'm given I can refuse. After all, its just a job.....

Try saying that to the dedicated Firefighters who died in Warwickshire - they have given their lives needlessly as it happens, doing something they believed would make a difference.

Congratulations Whitehall and Westminster. You and your parachutists have killed another four honest, hard working a dedicated men whose only mistake was to believe your hype and to think they could make a difference. Their blood is firmly and irrevocably on your hands.

My prayers for the dead and for the bereaved will include a plea to the Almighty that those who have brought the service to this state receive here or in the hereafter the punishment and misery that they have brought to these families.

Posted by The Gray Monk at November 5, 2007 09:56 AM

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