While discussing a damning government inspection which found Cornwall Fire and Rescue Service requiring improvement in six areas, a Cornwall Council meeting heard yesterday (Thursday, November 16) that morale is at “rock bottom” among some firefighters in the Duchy.

The county’s chief fire officer Kathryn Billing outlined an action plan set out to tackle the issues raised in September’s critical report by His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire and Rescue Services (HMICFRS), the Ofsted equivalent organisation for police forces and fire services in England.

The council’s neighbourhoods scrutiny committee felt it could not recommend the action plan report for approval to cabinet colleagues and the matter was deferred for further discussion in January.

The HMICFRS’s report found Cornwall Fire and Rescue Service (CFRS) wanting in seven of the 11 performance categories the inspectors looked at. The fire service’s performance was only graded as ‘adequate’ in four areas, but was rated as ‘requires improvement’ in six areas and ‘inadequate’ in one area.

The six areas that required improvement include fire prevention, responding to major incidents, best use of resources, future affordability, recruitment (right people with the right skills) and managing performance and developing leaders. The one area that was found inadequate was about promoting fairness and the dignity of its staff.

The service’s action plan includes prioritising the provision of gender-appropriate facilities and uniform for staff at all of Cornwall’s stations. The plan has been sent to the HMI for approval.

CFO Billing told councillors that she would perceive some of the ‘adequate’ findings as good as, in her opinion, “sometimes the judgments are a little unfair”.

Cllr Rob Nolan said: “Everyone in this room is very proud of Cornwall Fire and Rescue but I can’t agree with the fire chief that adequate is the same as good. There are things in the report that seem unfair – the ‘inadequate’ in promoting fairness and diversity. I don’t think you’ll find a better champion of gender equality than our fire chief in the country. I’m sure given time we will see big improvements in that area.

“But there are lots of causes for concern. Most worrying of all, we’re only adequate on our response to fires. We set that target ourselves in 2020 and adjusted the times to reflect the difficulty we were having in getting on-call firefighters into position quickly. We set the time and we’re not managing it. That’s a worry.”

He equated it to “managed decline” and said “that’s not acceptable in the fire service”.

Cllr Nolan added he was unable to approve the recommendation, adding that Cornwall Fire and Rescue Service was “doing its job” but argued the scrutiny committee he sits on isn’t doing its job in monitoring the service apart from once every six weeks when it gets a report.

“I think that we need change our governance so that we can get on top of what they’re doing and monitor it so we can move away from adequate to genuinely good, and we certainly have that capacity among the staff and personnel at Cornwall Fire and Rescue.”

CFO Billing replied: “In relation to the ‘managed decline’, I don’t think we are managing decline – there has been significant investment in the fire and rescue service in relation to keeping the 24-hour control provision. We’ve also seen a 12% increase in our budget this year fundamentally to support the pay increase which was nationally agreed, but also some areas of improvement across the service.

“Whilst the pace of improvement is certainly not something that I wouldn’t like to see accelerated, I wouldn’t suggest it’s a managed decline, I’d suggest incremental but solid improvement.”

Brian Clemens, the councillor for Land’s End, then spoke passionately about fire cover in his area of Cornwall and said he had an issue with the removal of station managers at on-call stations, a nationally driven change, which had made a massive difference at his local station.

“I know in my station morale is rock bottom and I’ve actually had a watch manager ring me on Friday night saying ‘sorry, we can’t man the pump tonight’ – that never happens in St Just; very, very rarely. We will be in a state in St Just in the next two years where we won’t have a fire crew.”

Cllr Clemens added that he disagreed with the HMI report and thought it was unfair to Cornwall’s firefighters. “It’s making a mockery of the excellent service we provide as an authority.”

However, CFO Billing replied: “I would say it is a fair reflection of our service in the majority and it is incumbent on us to collectively address those issues. We have to remember we are a public service and part of a national sector, and while there are elements which do not reflect exactly how we would address risk within Cornwall, the majority of it enables us to move the service in the direction which the people of Cornwall, and visitors to Cornwall, expect us to respond and behave.”

Cllr Dominic Fairman said he was not happy to sign off the action plan recommendation: “We’ve struggled to get incremental gains for the fire service – we’ve talked about managed decline; we don’t seem to be going the right way. The plan for requiring improvement areas needs much more detail and there needs to be a governance structure in place which isn’t just us saying ‘that looks alright’ and then it goes to cabinet. I’m not happy with that.”

Members voted to defer the matter until its January meeting for a further report about whether there needs to be improved governance and scrutiny of the fire service by the committee alongside more details about the programme to tackle areas requiring improvement in the HMI report.