Archived decisions
Chairman
South East Regional Management Board
East Sussex FRA Headquarters
20 Upperton Row
Eastbourne
East Sussex BN21 1EU
Appendix B
Head of FSED
FRSD
Allington Towers
PO Box No 50200
Zone 4A
Allington Street
London
SW1E 5WY
Direct Line: 7944 6060
Fax: 7944 5664
GTN No: 3533
Web Site: www.odpm.gov.uk
18 October 2005
REGIONAL FIRE CONTROL CENTRES
Thank you for your letter of 19 September 2005. May I take this opportunity to thank you and the South East Regional Management Board for your continuing work on the FiReControl project.
As you will now be aware, the site for the South East regional control centre will be at Kite's Croft in Fareham, Hampshire. Having this information should now help control staff start to make plans for the future. As part of the location announcement, we gave a wealth of information to individual staff members. This included the design and feel of the new control centres, and assured them that their terms and conditions would be protected should they transfer.
ODPM has committed to fund any net additional costs to local arising from the FiReControl project under the New Burdens principle. This means that there will be no impact on costs to local tax payers. In our FiReControl Finance Working Group, we are working with representatives of all regions to decide which costs should be covered by ODPM and which by Fire Authorities. A paper on this, which incorporates comments from all regions, will be produced for further discussion at the next meeting on 27 October. Christopher Salt attends this group to represent the South East.
As you know, the decision to go ahead with the FiReControl project was based on a number of independent reviews which demonstrated that substantial savings would be made through control room rationalisation. The project business case details how these savings will be made and the latest Office of Government Commerce Gateway Review of the project found that the business case was still sound. We are always trying to improve the information in the business case, and it is in this spirit that we have undertaken our recent consultation on out of scope activities, to which all Fire and Rescue Services will have the opportunity to contribute. This will enable us to get an even clearer picture of what the costs and savings will be. We are sharing financial information and assumptions from the business case with the Finance Working Group, in order to give information to FRAs to help them with their budgeting processes.
I will be happy to answer any further questions at the RMB meeting on 19 October.
Marie Winckler