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08
Nov 2021
'Bleak' future for North Yorkshire fire service due to underfunding
North Yorkshire's fire and rescue service faces a bleak outlook due to chronic underfunding, systemic on-call staffing shortages, crumbling buildings and out of date vehicles, a meeting has heard,
North Yorkshire’s police, fire and crime panel was told the Office of the North Yorkshire Police, Fire and Crime Commissioner and the fire service, which serves about 824,000 people across the county, was working “exceptionally hard” to break even this year.
Chief financial officer Michael Porter told the meeting the service would be drawing on £638,000 of reserves to balance the books until April, but “next year is looking like it is going to be really challenging”.
Mr Porter said a £390,000 deficit had initially been forecast for 2022/23 from reserves to balance the 2022/23 budget, but that was likely to deepen significantly due to pay awards, soaring utility bills and increases in national insurance contributions.
The meeting heard unless restrictions on fire services increasing their council tax demands were eased by the government, the service would need to make more savings. Mr Porter said:
The meeting heard members question why some £365,000 had been spent on “minor works” to fire service buildings, before hearing they were built as medium-term premises up to 70 years ago and constructed with interiors designed for a different time, when there were few female firefighters.
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Mr Porter said the service’s 30 buildings across the county and its fleet of vehicles had been significantly under-invested in for some time.
Sharing buildings
The meeting was told the fire service was considering sharing more buildings with other emergency services to cut costs, but the fire service needed to have bases spread across the county to reach emergencies in good time.
City of York Council leader Councillor Keith Aspden told the meeting recruitment issues over on-call firefighters had persisted for a long time, but overall funding was the key issue.
Interim Chief Fire Officer Jon Foster told members on-call recruitment remained a challenge due to changes in people’s lifestyles and covid had further impacted on it.
He said the service was examining changing terms and conditions and flexibility of being an on-call firefighter as the system was very outdated, paying a small amount for being available and a larger amount to attend calls.
After the meeting, the panel’s chair, Councillor Carl Les said:
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