The London Fire Brigade is reviewing how it works. London Mayor Boris Johnson has told it to save money such that they need to cut frontline services.

What does this mean? It means closing fire stations, downgrading fire station from two to one fire engine. It means specialist crews being merged into non specialists losing flexibility.

 

You can see the full proposals and give your responses at – http://www.london-fire.gov.uk/lsp5.asp

 

This proposals seems more focused on limiting services than developing them. With a rapidly growing London population with increasing numbers of households and greater threats from terrorism it seems bizarre time to cut services and flexibility of response.

 

The response times for London are too generous and should be reduced from 6 & 8 mins – which means at least keeping the existing fire stations and engines.

What would help is if members of the general public were training to some auxiliary level. This would result in a trained person attending fires much earlier and taking the first essential steps to save lives.

 

Other countries also use more varied vehicles to speed up response times. London appears to have one stock answer of a full fire engine.

 

In Germany and US they have large numbers of volunteer fire fighters, respectively 1.4m and 0.8m, which means a trained person is much more likely to be on or nearby to the scene of an incident. Less likely in big cities but this principle of wider community support has a huge impact of prevention and quickly cancelling false alarms. Nearly half of all London call-outs are false alarms of one type of another.

 

The London Fire Brigade should have a training programme of volunteers from the general public. Relying solely on employed professional full-time fire fighters misses an opportunity. In health mass training of CPR has had an appreciable effect on medical emergencies. I could see a Fire First Aid scheme having a similar impact . Such a scheme would alert people to the dangers of fire and go some way to prevention and where fires occur such people would know what they can safely do to save life and prepare a site for fire fighters to arrive.

 

What do you think the London Fire Brigade service future shape should be?

Please do get involved and tell them what you think.