Three Surrey fire stations to have night-time cover removed

Surrey Fire and Rescue Service insists it is in the interest of public safety when three fire stations are left with no night-time cover from next month.

But the Fire Brigades Union says the risk to the public can only increase when night-time crews at Banstead, Painshill and Egham are entirely removed in the second phase of the Making Surrey Safer Plan.

From October these areas will need to rely on neighbouring stations if a fire breaks out between 7pm-7am. These are between 3.6 and 5.3 miles away.

Fire Brigades Union secretary Graham Whitfield said: “The consequences could be catastrophic. What happens to the physically immobile?

“A smoke alarm is great and it’ll alert you to a fire but it won’t come in and rescue you.”

Chief fire officer Steve Owen-Hughes said: “It was in the public interest to change the way we were operating, to shift resources around from response that wasn’t quite right and HMICFRS inspectors had picked up on, and to do more protection and prevention which will save more lives.

“We are busier in the day-time than the night-time, our plan addresses that.”

A Surrey County Council impact assessment ahead of the changes recognised a reduction in night-time cover may affect the time it takes to rescue people and said the most vulnerable would be the elderly and those with mobility and mental health issues.

It said there may also be an increased risk to young people, particularly 17 to 20-year-old male drivers who are seven times more likely to crash than all male drivers, according to Brake. The road safety charity highlights the risk is 17 times higher between the hours of 2 and 5am.

The fire service says it has tried to mitigate this as much as possible by creating 42.5 full-time posts in a community resilience team doing educational safe and well visits for people and businesses.

Deputy chief fire officer Dan Quin said: “What we found was, any fatalities we’ve had, we wouldn’t have been able to make any difference even if we’d responded without our response times. We could not carry on like that.

“People were still dying and they were dying before we could even get there.

“Response is one area of our service, but you need to do more to prevent fires from happening in the first place.”

More than 4,880 people have signed a petition (petitions.surreycc.gov.uk/FireSOS/) demanding a reverse in cuts, backed by Queen guitarist Brian May.

Mr Quin insists no staff have been cut, they have rather been moved over to cover daytime instead of night, or from response to community resilience.

“No one has been or is being made redundant under this plan,” he said. “It is about rebalancing resources.”

Independent HMICFRS inspectors described the plan before its implementation as a “comprehensive and evidence-based assessment of risk”.

It was their inspection two years ago that prompted the plan for change, as Surrey was placed in the bottom three of all fire and rescue services in England.

Mr Whitfield, of the FBU, responded: “How can you take away seven fire engines at night and say it’s not cuts? It’s primary school maths.

“Forty officers can’t train the 1.2 million people in Surrey. We’re not opposed to fire safety training in the community, what about people who aren’t privy to that advice?

“The only people that are going to keep these people safe are the ones they’re taking away.”

He added: “They’re basing this on an algorithm, if it goes wrong they can blame the predictive data. If it’s that good then I’ll pay them to predict the lottery results.

“We’ve all seen what happened with the A Level results. Being reliant on that is doing the people of Surrey a disservice.”

Mr Quin said they would listen to a second independent impact study being done by Brunel University.