From the Copeland Local Committee

Long day today

Spent the morning at Copeland Local committee which I had booked as leave, then the rest of the day at the office, through to well into the evening.

Came home to the news of the vote.

Will probably post a longer report on the committee later but there was one particularly important point I should probably flag.

One of the major items on the agenda was the Fire Service Integrated Risk Management Plan.

One of the proposals in this plan is to introduce "Rapid response vehicles" (RRVs) to replace some of the Cumbria Fire service current fleet of vehicles. 

"Rapid response Vehicles" are about a third the size of a standard pump, can generally get to an incident more quickly but do not carry as many people or nearly as much equipment.

The committee was not opposed to the principle of having a greater range of vehicles and recognised that there may well be parts of a county where the use of RRVs as part of a balanced fleet would improve the service.

For example, Maryport currently has two pumps, one of which has not always been available. There is a proposal to keep one and replace the other with an RRV. This is in the Allerdale's area rather than Copeland so I'm not going to write anything which could be seen as telling my Allerdale colleagues what to do in their patch but I mention this part of the proposal to indicate that some of the proposals coming forward suggest a balanced fleet.

However, the one specific proposal in the Copeland are for Frizington, which is one of three fire stations in Cumbria which currently house a single standard large fire engine or "pump" and where the draft Integrated Risk Management Plan proposes to consider replacing it with a much smaller RRV.

The majority of the Copeland local committee did not consider that the case for replacing the current full-size pump with an RRV at Frizington had been made. 

A number of the arguments for RRVs which are cited in the plan on issues like firefighter availability and which may apply at other stations are not applicable in Frizington, and the population of the area served by the Frizington station is much larger than that for the other areas where an equivalent proposal to replace a single full-size pump with an RRV has been put forward  (including the area where it is planned to hold an RRV pilot.)

Accordingly the local committee voted to oppose the replacement of the Frizington fire engine with an RRV at this stage. (This was our input to the consultation on the plan, the final decision will be taken by full council.)

The vote today was seven to nil: there were ten councillors in the room at the time the vote was taken, and seven of us voted for a motion to indicate opposition to the replacement of the Frizington fire engine by an RRV. 

If my memory is not playing tricks on me, and I don't think it is, the other three councillors did not raise their hands to vote for or against the proposal or to record an abstention.

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