The plan for a secure national radio system for UK fire services is suffering further delays, Computing can reveal.

The Firelink radio procurement has already been running for six years, and insiders warn it could be prolonged further still if the general election goes ahead in May.

The deal itself has already been pushed back by more than ten months, leaving some local fire services waiting with outdated systems and forcing others to pay for interim solutions.

It will now not be signed until May or June this year, more than a year late, because of delays in the IT procurement for FiReControl - the plan to streamline the 46 local control rooms into nine regional centres.

The contract for the IT systems behind FiReControl -, which will work with Firelink - should have been signed this month but will not be completed until the end of the year because the government under-estimated how long the specification would take.

The Office of the Deputy Prime Minster (ODPM), which is running the two projects, was warned the FiReControl timetable was impractical.

'Everyone threw up their arms in horror and said the timescales were unrealistic when the plan was published in December 2003,' Olaf Baars, CFOA representative on the FiReControl project board told Computing.

Suppliers bidding for Firelink are frustrated by the continuous delays and warn of the effect on local operations.

'Some areas are in a critical state because they still have old legacy systems and are struggling to manage,' said Phillipe Meleard, head of public safety at EADS, one of the shortlisted bidders.

Firelink should go ahead regardless and migrate to regional control centres when they are ready, says Jeff Parris, vice president of Airwave mmo2, the other bidder.

'But if we wait we miss the opportunity to get ahead and provide the benefits of modern communication to local brigades,' said Parris.

User support is also an issue. While CFOA is broadly supportive, the Fire Brigades Union (FBU) says local fire services are not convinced.

'ODPM remains committed though virtually every stakeholder is either publicly or privately hostile,' said an FBU spokesman.

A spokeswoman for ODPM said: 'We are on target to meet our delivery timetable of 2008.'