At Rawreth Parish Council tonight, councillors expressed concern about news they had seen in the Echo about restructuring of the fire service – including the possible loss of one of the fire engines at Rayleigh Weir fire station.
You can see more on the Essex Fire and Rescue Service website here. In fact all three of the options include removing the second fire engine from Rayleigh Weir.
PParish Councillor Paul Beckers asked for this to be included as an agenda item for future meetings at Rawreth Parish. Actually this is clearly something that all councillors – parish, district and county – need to be thinking about. We will write more here on onlineFOCUS when we have studied the information.
Sorry to reiterate the “infrastructure ” point again but reducing the the FB and Police Force coincident with adding thousands of households to the area seems, shall we say – somewhat short sighted …….and let’s hope we don”t
get another ‘ unusual rainfall event ‘!!!!.
The Acting Chief Fire Officer said on TV that response times would continue to be met under the new arrangements but the point is that they are not being met now. With more engines manned by part time’on call’ crew, it MUST take longer to respond (not to mention further delays from ever increasing road traffic). Yet another case of public officials deliberately misleading the public. How can we have any confidence in them?
No mention of reductions in senior staff and administration – why not? About time they sorted out the suspended Chief Fire Officers position as well.