EFFICIENCY PROMPTS A BIZARRE REACTION

15:00 - 10 January 2008

Just before Christmas, I went with a clutch of Dorset MPs to see the Minister about our fire service.The tale is all too familiar. We are blessed in Dorset with one of the lowest cost and most efficient fire services in England - as the graphs and charts proudly displayed by the chief fire officer amply demonstrated.

This efficiency and cost-effectiveness is no accident. It is brought about, in great part, by the intelligent use of retained firefighters. These are among the unsung heroes of rural life.

They work in other occupations most of the time. They and when they are not self-employed, their em- ployers, are sufficiently flexible to enable them to rush out at short notice, put out a fire, and rush back to work.

There are, of course, other people of a similar sort on whom we all rely and whom we take much too frequently for granted.

The people who man our lifeboats are a classic example. They brave dangerous seas, just as the firefighters face dangerous fires, and they rush out to do it at a moment's notice.

We all benefit hugely - not just from their brave endeavours, but from the fact that these vital emergency services are incredibly cheap.

So you would expect, would you not, that when we went to see the Minister it would be to witness the chief fire officer receiving some kind of accolade for running the fire service so well and so cheaply.

But, of course, that was not the purpose of the meeting at all. Instead, we were having to plead that Dorset did not deserve, what are in effect, cuts in its grant at a time when other areas, with far larger budgets and no more effective services, are receiving large increases.

If this were a unique case, one would assume that something had simply gone wrong with the formula for fire services. But, as we all know, it is far from a unique case. Our schools and social services have both been put under enormous pressure, over the years, because there is something about low-spending rural counties, such as Dorset, which seems to provoke a bizarre reaction in bureaucratic circles.

Instead of saying "oh, how marvellous; you are clever to do it all so cheaply; here's a pat on the back and a little thank you present from the taxpayer", the formulae all seem to say, in effect, "oh, how splendid, you do it all so cheaply; you must be capable of doing it even more cheaply; so let's have some money from you to give to someone who is a bit more extravagant".

The Minister involved is a nice man, who was obviously about to see a number of other such delegations and was not having, so far as I could tell, the happiest of Christmases. He seemed genuinely pained by what we had to say - though he was inevitably non-committal about whether anything could or would actually be done to remedy the situation.

As I walked away from the meeting, I reflected on all those retained firemen, with their very low wages and the considerable inconvenience and danger to which they put themselves in the public service. I wondered, ruefully, whether we would have been getting a much bigger settlement if we had to rely solely on full-time professionals at much greater cost and with much further to travel to the scene of the fire.