Scotland and the UK is still caught in the aftermath of a prematurely introduced and ill-considered halving of the coastguard service’s Maritime Rescue Coordination Centres [MRCCs] around the UK coastline.
Now we are seeing the newly unitary services of Police Scotland and the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service take the same route to certain cost reductions and uncertain efficiency gains.
The Police Scotland proposal
Police Scotland proposes to halve its Control Rooms from 10 to 5. This would see the retention of four control rooms at Govan in Glaasgow; Motherwell in Lanark; Bilston Glen outside Edinburgh; and Dundee.
Five control rooms would be closed: at Aberdeen, Glasgow Pitt Street, Stirling, Glenrothes and Dumfries.
The fifth future-facing centre would be in Inverness – which would lose its control room but gain the national command and control centre for major incident and public events across Scotland.
This is a questionable move at a very practical level.
70% of Scotland’s population of 5.3million is in the Central Belt – east to west and including the populations of Glasgow, Paisley, Stirling, Falkirk, Edinburgh, Perth and Dundee.
The greatest volumes of crime, of incidents and of national events will take place in this area.
The police control rooms deal with incoming 999 calls requesting the police; and with calls coming in to the Crimestoppers 101 line.
Staff in the control rooms in the Central Belt will be busy, alert, experienced in response times and in embedding local knowledge.
It is inconceivable that staff at a national command and control centre in Inverness would be anything like as busy – and if they were, Scottish society would be in serious trouble.
The efficient response to major incidents requires a familiarity with the exercise of adrenaline-fuelled, razor sharp response times and fingertip knowledge without the need routinely to consult and search databases.
This simply cannot be engendered in Inverness. The proposed national command and control centre has to be where the action is. The proposal is a transparent political sop to Inverness because its control room is to close. In the 21st century, it is ridiculous that the pork barrel and the political pay off still drive national policy and planning at the expense of public safety.
When you add to this the proposed closure of police station counters, the resulting picture will see the police service struggle to inspire the public confidence that is the since qua non of its role.
The Scottish Fire and Rescue proposal
The Scottish Fire and Rescue Service is going for bust in the competition for Brownie points.
It is going one better than halving its current number of control rooms – publishing yesterday its intention to drop them from eight to three, a 62.5% reduction. Its primary purpose is to rationalise its built estate, in the interests of greater efficiency and of cost savings.
Johnstone Control, the largest in Scotland and handling more than 50% of all current fire calls in Scotland is to be retained. The other two will be chosen by the SFRS Board from four detailed options: Edinburgh, Dundee, Aberdeen and Inverness.
One aspect of the SFRS proposal is more intelligent that that of Police Scotland. It proposes to site a national fire investigation unit at Aberdeen, with ‘training facilities and asset resource centres, housing fleet, ICT and equipment workshops’. This has everything going for it. It locates an appropriate type of resource out of the Central Belt – focused on information gathering, investigation, research, development and testing. Aberdeen, as undisputed capital of the North Sea oil and gas industry, is also the locus for existing expertise in fire control, born from that industry. There is real synergy in this proposal, in terms of hat its location has to offer to its purpose.
It is, of course, in its own way, an advance sop, signalling that Aberdeen is unlikely to emerge as one of the two additional national control centres to be. The report to the SFRS Board recommends that the chosen two should be Dundee’s Blackness Road and Edinburgh’s Tollcross.
Further certainty that this will be the choice lies in the prior paying off of Inverness as host to an extended water rescue capability. The focus here is on freshwater lochs, with the choice of Inverness superficially validated by its position at the head of Loch Ness – which the world has heard of.
But Inverness is high on the east coast and Loch Ness reaches south east to Fort Augustus and its waterway extends to Loch Linnhe on the west coast, through the Caledonian Canal.
There are no other significant freshwater lochs in the area of Inverness.
But Argyll, condemned always to be the cinderella through the national jokes status of our unreconstructed local authority, has Loch Awe, the longest loch in Scotland, Loch Eck and Loch Lomond – the largest surface area freshwater loch in Scotland. These are major water sports activity lochs within easy reach of the massive population of the central and west Central Belt, who use these lochs regularly for their leisure.
Argyll has already experienced the horror of the deaths of four Glasgow fishermen on Loch Awe in March 2009. On that dreadful night, the rescue services had no boat – that had to come up by road from Glasgow – and were forced to stand on the shore in the heavy fog and listen to the dying cries of the men they wre unable even to attempt to help.
There is an infinitely superior logic to basing a specialist national water rescue service in north Argyll, within striking distance both of Loch Ness and the Argyll freshwater lochs. This is not a question of an alternative disposition of a goody bag. It is question of maximising the operational efficiency of a service that, if properly resourced located and managed, really can make the difference between life and death. The Loch Awe incident is sharp in the memory of this part of the world. If there were lessons learned from it, they have yet to be convincingly demonstrated.
Political responses
Early political responses to the SFRS proposal express concern.
Labour MSPs David Stewart and Rhoda Grant see the report is disappointing in that it is subjective.
As northern-based Highlands and Islands MSPs, their concerns are, naturally, for Inverness, whose local provision remains important.
Stewart and Grant had previously expressed concern to the Chief Fire Officer, Alasdair Hay, that there was no-one on the appraisal panel with a local knowledge of either the staffing structure or buildings in Inverness.
Commenting now on the published papers for next week’s SFRS Board meeting at which the decision on the location of the fire control rooms in Scotland will be taken, David Stewart says: ‘The options appraisal demonstrates a lack of knowledge of the building at Inverness which has the capacity to house increased number of staff. Because of this the Inverness Control Room attracts a lower score.’
Rhoda Grant says: ‘The options appraisal report is highly subjective, it gives arbitrary weightings which indicate that buildings are more important than staff. The weighting in the overall report given to staffing issues is a dismal 10% when we all know that staff are the greatest asset of any organisation. This is not a done deal and we hope the Board will interrogate this report and base their decisions on factual evidence rather than supposition.’
The MSPs will continue to campaign for the retention of the Inverness fire control room - as opposed to the national water rescue centre – and have already met with the Chief Officer, Alasdair Hay, and the Communities Minister, Rosanna Cunningham, as well as writing to every Board member.