Government confirms fire service project delays

FireControl will establish nine regional control centres

The government has confirmed that the first three regional fire control centres will be delayed until summer 2010.

The East Midlands, South West, and North East regional FireControl centres have already been constructed, and were due to go live in October 2009 but central IT problems with the £350m scheme are holding up the project, as Computing revealed last month.

The communities and local government minister Sadiq Khan said last week that he hoped the other six regional control centres will be open by spring 2012, five months later than planned.

"I want to emphasise however that, as with any project of this nature, we will only have certainty about the timing of these later stages of the project once earlier stages have been completed successfully," said Khan.

The 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, but the delays will help stoke already-widespread opposition to the scheme from within the fire service.

A 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.