The following questions were received from Members of the Public.  As the questioners were not able to attend the meeting to receive their responses in person the Chairman would send a written response to their question.

The questions and responses are included in these minutes as a matter of public record.

Public Question from Dawn Tindall of Sussex Control Centre:

“Why do you think it will be good working practice to go to Surrey to work alongside two Services with poor records, one of which has already divorced our Service?  Better cross border working will not be a good answer as we currently do not use Surrey”

Response:

Cross border working is not just about sending appliances from one area to another when there is an incident.  We believe that this partnership offers all the services involved an opportunity to share operational learning and experiences, as well as to provide greater resilience.  In time, this will have the potential to deliver further operational improvements for all three services.  In the short-term, this arrangement would allow the introduction of borderless mobilising between Surrey, East and West Sussex; the latter of which was always an identified benefit from the original SCC project.

We understand that the improvement plan to address concerns raised in the Surrey HMICFRS report has now been delivered.  The Surrey HMICFRS report made a number of references to Surrey Control and the majority of them were positive; for example “confident approach to intelligent call handling” and “good systems to pass on risk information to crews”.

Public Question from Sue Ivatt of Sussex Control Centre:

“Our Chief, Dawn Whittaker, categorically stated that we would never enter into partnership with another Service who are County Council led, so why have we?”

Response:

The CFO did indeed say that we would not enter into another Control room arrangement with a single County Council led service after West Sussex took the decision to give us notice and the reason for that was the financial risk associated with that being repeated.  In fact that is a matter of record in the principles established in the Phase 1 of the Mott MacDonald work

However what is now being proposed is not a partnership with a single County service - it is a partnership with two other services, so the financial cost and risk is spread and also we would seek to put in place a much more robust contract agreement with full schedules, unlike that previously in place.

It is important to remind ourselves that the list of options agreed by Senior Leadership Team to be evaluated as part of the Project 21 detailed due diligence process has always contained two options involving Surrey FRS, a fact that everyone in the Service and on the Fire Authority were fully aware of.

The other fact is that in other areas of work we do collaborate with other County Council led FRS, for example in our Occupational Health contract, which involves Surrey FRS and the Police.

Public Question from Neal Martin of Sussex Control Centre

“Why did the option to work from Lewes Police HQ and buddy with Warrington (North West Fire Control) get pulled?”

Response:

This is the “NWFC hybrid option”.  It has never has been “pulled” – it was one of the options under active consideration throughout the due diligence process.  This option has not been recommended as the preferred option primarily because it was the most expensive and involved working with a partner 250 miles away.

Public Question from Claire Andrews of Sussex Control Centre

“If we stayed in the County and work from Lewes Police HQ, we would have more support from ESFRS staff and officers.  Being at Haywards Heath over the last few years has seen less support than we had when we were based at Eastbourne HQ.”

Response:

We recognise that the move from Eastbourne HQ to Haywards Heath meant a big change for staff and we take on board the comments about support.  We will look at how we can address this in the immediate future and going forwards through Project 21.  Any future mobilising strategy will look carefully at how we ensure a strong and positive working relationship between all colleagues.

Public Question from Paula Jones of Sussex Control Centre

“Why is it costing over 11 million pound?”

Response:

Our current joint control room with WSFRS already costs just over £1m a year to run.  The £11m figure is the anticipated “whole life” cost of the recommended solution over a 7 year period from now through to the end of the financial year 2025/26.

The £11m figure splits into two different types of cost, one being one-off “transition costs” to build, configure, test and implement the new solution and the other being year on year “revenue costs”.  The transition costs are currently estimated at £4.6m and the annual revenue costs £1.2m per year, equivalent to £6m over the 5 year lifespan modelled as part of the due diligence.  The transition costs include not only the cost of on-boarding to Surrey, but significant investment in our MDTs, Pagers and Alerters and integration to other ESFRS systems.

The remaining £0.5m is an assessed contingency sum bringing the total to £11.1m over 7 years. 

Public Question from Sue Norton of Sussex Control Centre

“East Sussex implemented a new pre-determined attendance (PDA) for ambulance calls WEF 21/10/19.  This involves various configurations of what will be mobilised, we manually mobilise as the system cannot do this for us.  This is just an example of a new attendance, we have many attendances that are completely different to Surrey & West Sussex.  Does Vision have the capability to work out different attendances for different Brigades or will we conform and send whatever Surrey or the system say?  Is this just the start of ESFRS losing control of its own resources?”

Response:

At no point will we lose control of our own resources.

Capita Vision as a system does have the capability of applying different PDAs to differing geographic areas.

Our aim is to work with Surrey FRS and West Sussex FRS in partnership to develop common and best practice Ways of Working across all three services over time.

Public Question from C Watch of Sussex Control Centre

“What will happen to local knowledge?”

Response:

Any ESFRS Control staff whose roles will be affected by this decision will be protected under the TUPE transfer regulations.  They have the right to move to Surrey FRS when responsibilities transfer in future.  If they choose to do this, the new control function will benefit from much of the ESFRS local knowledge.

We also recognise that local knowledge comes from experience, and anticipate that this will grow over time.  In addition, it is also worth reflecting that a large amount of local knowledge is also held by local operational crews.