The government’s £350m programme to provide a new network of control centres for the fire service has run into problems and the first three sites due to go live in October 2009 will miss the deadline, Computing has learned.

The East Midlands, South West, and North East regional FireControl centres have already been constructed, but central IT problems are holding up the project.

Concerns have been evident for some time, said councillor Peter Roffey, chairman of the East Midlands Fire and Rescue Regional Management Board.

“We have been aware that the predicted timescales were looking less and less achievable, but we have been waiting for this to be acknowledged by the Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG),” he said.

That acknowledgment was forthcoming last week as the DCLG wrote to the three pioneer control centres to warn it was working on a revised delivery timetable.

“We are resolving two technical issues which could affect the project schedule and will publish a new delivery timetable,” said a DCLG spokeswoman.

The FireControl project will consolidate 42 local control rooms into nine regional centres, with a goal of greater resilience and the ability to transfer load between sites at busy times. It was originally intended that the project would save local authorities £14m a year, but it has emerged that many authorities will not see these cost savings.

Minutes of a meeting of the North East Fire and Rescue Regional Management Board held in December last year revealed that “as the costs associated with FireControl and Firelink are becoming clearer it appears unlikely that there will be any
significant financial savings from the project at local level.”

As well as the loss of projected cost savings and technical problems, the scheme has also faced significant opposition from firefighters.

A recent YouGov poll commissioned by the Fire Brigades Union found that 92 per cent of firefighters think plans for regional control centres will make the fire and rescue service’s response worse.