Wirral fire service cuts danger

CHIEF Fire Officer Danny Stevens states in your paper that by losing three fire appliances from Wirral, he is still confident that we will still have excellent response times when compared with other parts of the country.

By other parts, I presume he includes the Yorkshire Dales, the Peak District, the Scottish Highlands and central rural Wales.

This is the only way his statement can be completely true.

He also uses the word "confident" because he cannot be "positive".

Out of the six stations in Wirral, four of them have only one fire appliance.

Also, two of these stations have no crew standing-by ready for immediate turn-out at night.

This means he is taking away almost half of the Wirral’s fire cover.

Perhaps if the public knew were losing three out of eight appliances, they would be more aware of how much more at risk we will be.

George York, Wallasey (retired firefighter).

 

Comments(1)

bickyboy says...
9:46am Wed 13 Mar 13

Unlike his cynical, empire-building predecessor, Dan Stephens has been relatively honest about the effects of government cuts on the fire service. I don't think he's pretending that the service is as good as he would like it to be, but ultimately he is hardly in a position to resist financial realities.

Politicians simply don't care about the fire service. I wrote to Angela Eagle a year or two ago about the impending loss of the second pump at Wallasey. The reply I received might as well have been generated by a machine, so disinterested and blase' was its tone.

Only at election time do our MPs sit up and take notice of the erosion of a service which for the most part we would rather not use, but certainly miss; if, as is increasingly likely to be the case, it wasn't there when we needed it.

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