Call for emergency services to collaborate and share control rooms welcomed

johndwyer

The Police & Crime Commissioner (PCC) for Cheshire has welcomed today's announcement by the Home Office that local emergency services will have a duty to work more closely together, to improve their efficiency or effectiveness.

Minister for Policing, Fire, Criminal Justice and Victims, Mike Penning, said "We believe that better joint working can strengthen the emergency services, deliver significant savings and produce benefits for the public."

Mr Penning also called for emergency services to share control rooms, saying "This is about smarter working. It simply doesn't make sense for emergency services to have different premises, different back offices and different IT systems when their work is so closely related and they often share the same boundaries."

The Government also announced today that they will legislate to enable PCCs to take to take responsibility for their local fire service, where a local case is made, and create a single employer for police and fire personnel.

In response John Dwyer said "I welcome the Government's announcement today (Tuesday, January 26) to provide a statutory 'duty' for emergency services, and primarily police and fire, to work more closely together with the aim of encouraging greater operational collaboration.

"The Home Office has recognised that a 'one size fits all' approach is not the right way to go forward, and that a 'duty' to collaborate will enable Police & Crime Commissioners to work closely with colleagues on fire authorities and ambulance services to agree local solutions that are best for local people. The key is to build strong and effective working relationships between the emergency services, and it is what we have done here in Cheshire."

"It's why our ground-breaking plans to bring police and fire closer together are some of the most advanced in the country. The programme will establish a single, shared headquarters by 2018 and create a single employer for support functions for both services.

"We estimate that the move will produce combined annual savings of over £1.5 million. But it won't just be more efficient – both organisations recognise that closer collaboration will make us more effective, making Cheshire residents safer."

Tags:
Cheshire Police & Crime Commissioner, John Dwyer
Advertisement
Advertisement
Advertisement
Advertisement

Comments

Here's what readers have had to say so far. Why not add your thoughts below.

Jon Armstrong
Wednesday 27th January 2016 at 4:41 pm
Last year I had to call 999 and my experience showed greater collaboration with neighbouring forces is needed, as well as better technology.

I spent about 5 minutes trying to explain to the operator where I was, as she was unable to find the name of the road I was giving her. I resorted to giving her what I thought should be easy places to find nearby and describing how to get from there to where I was, but she couldn't find those either. Eventually she said, "What part of Manchester are you in, exactly?", which sort of explained why we'd been getting nowhere as I was in Cheshire. It turns out that having been incorrectly (and automatically) routed through to GMP, they couldn't even see where I was because their mapping software stops at the edge of the GMP area.

Anyway, I told her I wasn't in Manchester and that I was in Cheshire, but it turns out she couldn't even transfer my call to the Cheshire Police control centre, she had to take details and then transfer them to Cheshire offline and someone from Cheshire should then phone me back.

As it happened, the delay that all this created didn't make any difference to the outcome, other than adding stress to an already stressful situation, but if I'd been calling to say there was a bank robbery in progress or something equally time critical it was all less than ideal.
Peter Bradley
Saturday 30th January 2016 at 8:39 am
I hope someone with operational experience of integrated control rooms will be responsible for this exercise, otherwise I see another political disaster about to unravel. It will be interesting to see see what the data, operational and procedural strategies are being designed and implemented.