Mark Dunne has been a fire-fighter in Merseyside for 19 years. He currently works out of Speke fire station and is a Fire Brigade’s Union (FBU) official for Merseyside and the north-west. In this interview, conducted on 22nd February 2011, he talks about the risks to firefighters and the public caused by the cuts to the fire service.

You must be busy at the moment?

Yep, it’s a busy time. Last year we started planning as a union, and also in our brigade, for the inevitable cuts we thought would come from the Con-Dem government. It has taken a lot of people outside our union, and outside our service, by surprise, so they’re now planning with us. There are a lot of fire-fighters who maybe aren’t in a union now but are looking around and thinking, “Who’s going to represent me, who’s going to support me? What about my terms and conditions, my pensions?” And from a professional point of view, [they’re] looking at the amount of cuts to the fire service, and [asking], “who’s going to provide fire cover and emergency response in these areas?”

When George Osborne first introduced the cuts in the Comprehensive Spending Review, he said that, “in recognition of the important service provided by the Fire and Rescue Service, we have decided to limit their budget reductions in return for substantial operational reform.” The emphasis throughout has been that it’s the back office that’s being cut. The actual effectiveness of the Fire Service won’t be affected, but it’ll be made more efficient, more streamlined, more responsive.

It’s completely untrue. George Osborne needs to come down and visit frontline fire stations, not senior Chief Fire Officers or chief executives, who spin their corporate jargon one way.

The reality is that every fire brigade throughout the country, and more specifically mine in Merseyside, is cutting frontline firefighter jobs. They’re looking at voluntary and compulsory redundancy schemes; they’re reducing fire cover. There’ll be longer turn-out times of an evening and emergency response times will take longer. The budget set in Merseyside last week alone was 92 firefighter jobs cut and five frontline, operational fire engines being taken off the road. But at the same time, no management cuts. No management cut in pay.

They’re also talking about a three-year pay freeze [for firefighters] in Merseyside. So even if the national government does magically decide that frontline firefighters, the lowest-paid workers in the fire service, actually deserve at least some percentage pay rise, that will not apply to Merseyside. So, to be honest, he might say one thing to the press and to people who don’t understand the fire service. The reality is that workers within the fire service are suffering, their families will suffer and there are cuts across the board on a frontline service.

How will the emergency response times be affected?

An emergency response time is, from the moment that someone dials 999 and asks for the fire service, describes the incident and gives their address, [the time it takes] for an operational crew of four to five firefighters, or more, to don their kit, get onto the fire engine and attend the scene, to actually turn up at the incident and start getting to work.

It’s most serious if someone’s rang up and said there’s a kitchen fire or a bedroom fire and there are persons reported missing. That’s the one with the adrenaline rush. So we drive there under the blue lights, the sirens are going, people are moving out of the way. We check the address, make sure we’ve got the right address, we know there aren’t bollards from one end or there aren’t road-works, just to make sure we don’t get trapped at one end of the street when we need to be at the other end.

[Response times] have already been affected to an extent. Nationally, government statistics for the last two years are that emergency response times have gone up from five minutes across the country, taken as an average, to seven minutes. With the Con-Dem cuts, if we’ve already got a reduction from five to seven minutes (and we talk about seconds costing lives) those attendance times will only go out further, which means the public are getting a lesser service. And the danger is not only to the public, because they have to wait longer, it’s also to the firefighters who attend, because there’s going to be less of them when [they] eventually get to the emergency. There’s no amount of government spin or rhetoric that can get away from those facts.

The justification for the cuts is that it’s a time of severe economic crisis, there’s a huge budget deficit, so every service has to take its share of cuts. Public spending has been out of control and public services have become bloated, inefficient, overly bureaucratic, and so on. Do you think that’s fair justification for why the cuts are being made?

Not at all. There’s two strands to this argument. The Tories have always had an ideological plan of privatising as much as possible. I think even if there wasn’t a budget deficit, firstly, that the Tories as a party, and Cameron as their leader, would come out and say this, because that is their ideology. Nice contracts to their millionaire friends. We all know and it’s well publicised about the millionaires in the cabinet. The budget has given the [excuse] to follow their political ideology and they are doing that with gusto.

What you need to understand is: they will privatise. Public money will still be spent, but it’ll be spent for private companies with big huge contracts. A lot of millionaires in the cabinet will have friends who have big business and that public money will be siphoned off and given to big business to be used how they deem fit. No doubt there’ll be stocks and shares and bonuses given to those directors of those companies.

But the other side of it is that there’s a naivety, a lack of knowledge and an ignorance about what happens in the fire service. I’ll use my brigade as an example, because I know my brigade best. In my brigade now, we have a huge staffing problem that can’t be avoided. Prior to any announcing of any public expenditure cuts, they had already reduced the fire service to the bone. It can’t be propped up with overtime, although they would like to do that. If you’re using overtime, then what you haven’t got is someone else to train up, pay into a pension, being paid.

Instead of five firefighters attending on a fire engine to an emergency incident, for 90% of the cases it is down to four. If we have a house fire or a building fire, for example, because we are understaffed, we are turning up to an emergency incident as quickly as we can with only four firefighters instead of five, which is the minimum number for safe staffing.

What should each of the five do?

We’d have an officer in charge, who would take charge of the incident, get information from the public, look at what’s evolving, look at the materials and resources that we have, send radio messages to control, tell everyone what’s going on. We’d have a driver, who drives us safely to the incident, then becomes a pump operator. So he’d be in charge of the hose, the water, helping the officer, sending messages. And you’d have two firefighters who, for example for a house fire, would immediately don breathing apparatus and enter the fire, either to extinguish the fire or search for the occupants to get them out.

If it’s a serious fire, you can’t see your hand in front of you face, so you’re immediately adopting what we call a BA shuffle, which means using the back of your hands to feel for objects, walls, corners, at the same time gently tapping with one of your feet in front, keeping your weight on your back leg, in case the fire has burnt holes in the floor. You don’t want all your weight on your front leg to fall down. From that, to establish the approximate size of the room, where we are, maybe picking up objects in the room - “this is a kid’s toy, we’re in a bedroom”, whatever - then trying to search for the occupants in the dark, finding them and getting them out as quickly as possible.

If we had a fifth firefighter, which we don’t in Merseyside at the moment, [he’d] be in charge of the breathing apparatus board [to monitor the breathing apparatus]. He would be logging the air that you’re using, where you’re up to; he’d be in constant communication through radio headsets to let you know how much air you’ve got left and also be able to tell the firefighters any relevant information that the officer in charge has got: the kids are in the back bedroom, or the fire is in the back kitchen but has spread upstairs, for example.

Ideally, it’d be nine firefighers. Technical Bulletin 197 states that you shouldn’t be committing with less than nine [in two fire engines]. In a two pump station [two fire engines], you’d have five on the first, four on the second.

At the moment there’s only one fire engine going?

At Merseyside a second fire engine might be dispatched but that might be coming from another fire station, so it’s travelling further to get there, so their attendance will be longer.

Once the second team comes, we’d then look to either double up the search team or one team would go to extinguish or contain the fire, while the other completes a full search. Until we’re happy that everyone has been found or every room is clear of any occupants - that all persons are accounted for - we will not send that message. So even if we’re double- or triple-checking rooms, we won’t send that message. With the right amount of resources and back-up, we’re extinguishing the fire at the same time. So there are a couple of roles to consider once you’re in there.

Now when we’re turning up to a house fire, because we only have four firefighters, we have the moral dilemma of, “do we commit when we’re under-resourced?” There’s not a firefighter in Merseyside who, once they’ve turned up at an incident, will don the breathing apparatus then turn round to the officer in charge and say, “you know what boss, because the other fire engine is four, five, six minutes away, I’m not going to commit myself into this building because there’s not a safe number of firefighters for me to do so.”

What management is doing is turning round and saying, “well you should [not go in], because it says in the written policy you will not commit.” So they’re covering their back, but you tell any firefighter to wait outside while you’ve got parents or grandparents and neighbours screaming at them. We’ve got to turn round and say, “because of how management have structured our cuts, we have to wait another five or six minutes to wait for another crew to turn up!”

So we’re putting ourselves at risk. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a risk we’ll take every single time. Unfortunately management plays on that risk because they know that every firefighter will go in and commit themselves to that building, to save someone or to try to extinguish the fire.

If the fifth [firefighter] isn’t there, what are the extra risks?

The risks are tenfold: you’re lacking communication. Your officer in charge might be getting pulled from pillar to post by frightened or scared members of the public; your driver will be concentrating on initially getting a water source from the pump, but then looking for hydrants in the street, so he might be distracted (because we’re using a lot of water in the fire). So without the back-up of a fifth firefighter or another pump unit in attendance, it’s basically down to you two inside, in the dark, in the heat, to make the right decisions, making sure that, if there are people in there, to locate them and get them out, but also not to put yourself in too much danger. Because once you’re in there, you are not in control of what that fire’s doing or where it’s spreading, so that’s a major risk factor as well.

You must have been in fires like that with only four people? Has it been more dangerous in practice?

Yep. The adrenaline rush kicks in, but at the back of the mind, although you’re going through your training and your set procedures, it’s nice when you know there’s another crew coming in behind you and you have someone who’s out of the immediate danger who’s saying, “watch your air”, “check this room”, “we’ve got more information from a member of the public saying this.” You’re more at risk and more exposed with four rather than five. The more crews you have there, the more raw power you have there to manage the job. It’s a layer of security that should be there all the time but, at the moment, it’s not. With the cuts coming in on top of this already, it’s only going to create more risks for the public and the firefighters.

So have there been consequences in the last two years where the fifth member hasn’t been there?

National firefighter deaths are on the rise. Since 2003, unfortunately, we’ve had 17 firefighter deaths. In Merseyside, they have tried to get the driver to operate the breathing apparatus board as well. But it’s a stand-alone job because of the importance of it: communication, air supply, letting firefighters know where they are or how the fire’s progressing, or where any potential occupants are. That has to be a standalone job. They’re actually trying to [give] the driver a dual role in that position, which is totally unacceptable, and it’s dangerous. But they’re willing to take that risk by not staffing us to the correct number of firefighters.

It’s an ongoing argument in Merseyside. Speaking to people across the country, it’s an argument that their managers are trying to have with them as well. So although it’s a Merseyside issue that I’m speaking about, this is a national issue that needs to be addressed. Any politician worth their salt, without having to know the technical terms or all the technical equipment, could quite easily understand the difference between five firefighters and four firefighters. So your cuts are there: it’s the most blatant example you could use.

But that’s before the cuts, so is it possible to do it with less than four, or are you not going to be able to respond to some incidents?

In Merseyside we have this ridiculous blue transit van called the Small Fires Unit. And that’s staffed with three firefighters. And though it’s classed as a secondary unit – i.e. it only turns out to small fires (although small fires can progress to big fires as anyone will tell you) – between the hours of 4pm to 10pm at night, this small fires unit is being sent. At the same time, frontline, primary, red fire engines are being left vacant. So they’re using secondary appliances, small transit vans, instead of staffing frontline emergency fire engines.

It makes absolutely no sense but it’s politically driven. If everyone’s paying their council tax, and a percentage is going to the fire service, and if national grants are coming in from the government, how can you possibly justify leaving primary, emergency fire engines empty but at the same time staffing smaller units that don’t respond under blue lights, that don’t respond immediately to calls?

So we were already under-staffed prior to the announcement of these cuts. What these cuts have done is made Chief Fire Officers, or, as they like to be called in my brigade, chief executives (they don’t attend emergency incidents any more, they sit behind a desk), they’ve said now that most of the budget is for frontline firefighters and [so they] have to cut again.

We can’t have it both ways. We can’t have them saying [they]’ll get rid of the bureaucracy and the made-up management positions, when the reality is that the frontline firefighters are being made redundant and their jobs are being cut.

Isn’t it the case that responding to house fires is only part of the job? A lot of it is prevention?

Yep, there’s community prevention, there’s working with kids in schools, there’s engaging with all sorts of different areas. But once your primary government grant is cut, you have to revert back to your core responsibility. And the fire service does not exist to be an addition to social work. It does not exist to make Cameron’s Britain work through some sort of Big Society. Our primary role is: when people are in trouble, whether it be flooding, car crashes, chemical incidents, house fires, whatever, to mobilise firefighters in a quick and efficient manner to respond as quickly and as safely as they can to either save property, save life or to respond to extinguished fires, cut people out of cars, or whatever it is.

What’s happened in Merseyside - I know it’s happened in other brigades - is that money has been taken away from the primary role and used for seminars, conferences, award ceremonies, medals, badges, buffets, consultants’ fees... We don’t need any consultants in the fire service; we need the correct amount of firefighters with the safest kit responding immediately. That’s a key issue as well is immediate response. As soon as the call comes in, we should be going out to the member of the public who’s made the call and helping them in the best way that we can.

Sensible government really needs to get a grip of rogue chief fire officers who are getting these grants, taking it away from primary firefighting roles and spending it in other areas. That is what’s happening in Merseyside.

But Merseyside has been used as an example of best practice and a reformed service. This is from the Economist in a piece about the reforms that have been made: “[the reforms] were prompted by the death of a child in 1999 that the fire service could have anticipated...” Because of that, the authority realized prevention was the key and started: “checking 350,000 homes and fitting 700,000 smoke alarms. They liaised with social services and recruited new kinds of staff, such as “advocates” who took the safety message into ethnic communities … All this involved cutting the number of fire officers, who … were underemployed for long periods during their shifts. Anyway, fewer fires required fewer rescuers.”

So if prevention’s the thing, and that’s stopping more fires, there don’t need to be as many firefighters, right?

Not at all, no. What does the army do when it’s not at war? Do we get rid of the whole of the army? Does [it] cease to exist because it’s not at war?

We have a situation where, when a member of the public dials 999, whether they’re rich, they’re poor or they’re middle class, they deserve the safe amount of firefighters in the safe amount of emergency engines turning out as quickly as possible. It doesn’t matter whether those fires are a day apart, a week apart or a month apart: they need those resources. Those resources simply are not there in Merseyside any more. The budget has been spent in different ways.

I’ll give you an example: We have fire bikes - totally unnecessary; we have quad bikes - totally unnecessary; we have hovercrafts - unnecessary. We’re the Thunderbirds of the UK fire service! And quite honestly, while all these schemes and all these trinkets and nik-naks are being used, fire engines are being left unstaffed. Ask any member of the public in Merseyside, whether they’re living in a socially deprived area or a millionaire’s house: when they dial 999, they want the safe amount of firefighters there as quickly as possible. Not on a bike, not on a hovercraft; on a fire engine that can put out the fire and deal with it.

If the grants are getting cut, then unfortunately the other areas [that the service] has branched out to need to be looked at because, as good intentioned as they are, a smoke alarm [only] alerts you to a fire; it’s the firefighter who gets you out if you’re trapped. You can go round and give people fire escape routes, that’s all laudable; but the bottom line is, when prevention fails, you need a safe number of firefighters turning out to save you or your family or you property. At the moment, the balance is very, very wrong.

How else would you want to see the fire service be reformed, in a way worthy of the word?

I’d have national attendance times that must be adhered to no matter what part of the country you are in. We need to get back to that as soon as possible.

HR [Human Resources] has grown from one manager for every 10 firefighers to one manager for every four firefighters, which is absolutely ridiculous. In Merseyside, in 2001, we had four employees earning over £50,000 a year. In 2010-2011, we have 79 employees earning over £50,000 a year. So you tell me where these cuts have to be made?

If the public are looking at this, do they want firefighters with enough resources, enough materials and enough speed and weight in attack to tackle fires, or do they want managers making statistics, making reports in the background? If cuts need to be made, and if the government is true to its word, there are huge areas where [they] can be made that won’t affect frontline firefighters.

Have most of the current management been firefighters?

It used to be the case. It’s not the case so much now. They’re coming in from other industries.

With management expertise?

Allegedly.

We’ve talked a lot about the last 10 years and many cuts that have been happening under a Labour government. Now it’s the Conservatives and Lib Dems who are in, and so far Labour in opposition haven’t really talked about an alternative. They seem to be saying they’d do roughly the same thing but they’d manage it a bit better: they wouldn’t be so severe; they’d be a bit nicer. So how does that affect your campaigning against these cuts?

On a local level, we talk to councillors, cross-party councillors, whoever is on the fire authority. We will provide reports, ask for meetings, speak to them, and we’ll try and explain in simple terms of numbers, cuts, jobs etc. We always have done and will continue to do so, no matter what government there is. But at the next level, [the FBU] disaffiliated from the Labour party in 2003. Labour got too big and they got arrogant. They forgot who voted them in and what their job is as a Labour party. They need to apologise for what they did.

What that allows us to do is campaign on a local level, but also it allows us to speak to MPs on a national level. In the last two years, we have had national lobbies of parliament over firefighter fatalities and over regionalisation of control, and [they] have been the most well-attended lobbies by any trade union and have been reported back across parties. We’re still members of the TUC, so we work in conjunction with them as well.

It’s allowed our members to take control of local campaigns for local engines, local stations. When cuts come in from local fire authority, to approach them and go to the next tier above and speak to MPs. And through the national lobbies and demonstrations - which people say don’t work, which is a load of codswallop; of course they work! - we provide pressure. It also allows MPs to understand the arguments in simple terms.

Labour in opposition, we believe, are in a “must work harder” scenario at the moment. The Tories and Lib Dems are getting much too easy a ride and, while Labour do have to accept the blame for some of what’s gone on, they’re now in opposition. And the first job of any opposition is to provide alternatives or to put forward the arguments raised by people who support them. At the moment, FBU members in general have got their arms crossed, looking at them and sort of thinking, “well, go on then; let’s see what you’ve got.” And at the moment, the voice isn’t as strong and the opposition isn’t as strong as it could be.

That’s the consultative side, but there has also been talk of industrial action. Do you think industrial action is necessary?

Any industrial action is a last resort and there’s no FBU official who would use [it] unless every other avenue had been exhausted, and that would include negotiations with national employers, MPs. There’s no stone unturned. We always welcome any help or intervention to solve the issue.

However, our members are aware that sometimes the strongest voice to get to the negotiating table, in the last resort, will be used. There’s no firefighter who would want to withdraw their labour, but there’s no firefighter who would want to be treated like a modern-day slave.

Do you think that could be counter-productive given the vehemence of the media against it?

We’ve experienced local and national disputes and, no matter what the issue is, certain elements of the media will always ridicule, undermine FBU officials or firefighters in general. Then two weeks later, when there’s a house fire, they’ll be front-page heroes. So I think we take it all with a pinch of salt. We know that once they start the “let’s all hate the firefighters” bandwagon, that will roll, but our members are a bit more resolute than that.

The first port of call for public-sector workers are their friends and families and communities. Rather than just rely on the old broadsheets or tabloids, or one-minute snippets on Sky News, where you’re described as a militant dinosaur or something, it’s getting the swell of feeling from the public and not from some pin-striped Tory journalist who hates you before you get in the studio. So local news is important, Internet is important, but friends and family, talking over meals or in pubs, just discussing it, and you get a broader, more balanced picture about what people really think.

It’s [keeping] the argument simple, explaining to anyone who’s either on the fence or is vehemently against what we are trying to do, that we will go down all the avenues, that we will negotiate, that we will consult. And therefore, if it does come down to strike action, it is an absolute last resort that can still be resolved if people come to the table. Because the FBU, and other public sector workers, will accept compromise, and they will accept that, in some cases, cuts have to be made.

There are genuine alternatives to these cuts, and those alternatives throughout the fire service are things I can speak about. That would be not using secondary appliances when primary fire engines lay empty and vacant; staffing to the right amount; looking at how many managers you’ve got; looking at where your resources are and how best to use them, not throwing out premium-rate overtime when you can employ a firefighter on basic rate for less. [There are] all sorts of different areas that the fire service can look at without having to make someone redundant and chucking them on the scrapheap or on the dole.

Let’s get away from statistics and percentages and just say, “you have the ability to stop this happening as a member of the public and a council taxpayer.” I think we can have a huge broad base.

How many call-outs do you have on average?

It depends. It can be related to half-term, what area you’re working in. You could have a day where you only have a couple of shouts, or you could have a night when you’re in nine or ten times. You can’t actually predict with any certainty when you’re going to be in and when you’re not going to be.

I’m asking because it has been claimed that, when you went on strike in 2006, it was not much of a problem for the service. The Economist reported: “in 2006 the fire-brigade union called a strike … 2,000 of them walked through Liverpool … Ironically, it was soon clear that the 200 officers who stayed at work could run the service at full capacity … the strike was defeated in a month.”

It was 7,000 people on the march. The strike wasn’t defeated; there was a negotiated settlement.

We all love the Economist but we all know what it is. There was a lot of rhetoric around that strike but it was a negotiated settlement that had to be put to the firefighters of Merseyside to get them to come back to work. It certainly wasn’t a defeat. I’d argue that some of those policies they had to settle for then, they didn’t honour, but it wasn’t a defeat.

The other thing they fail to mention is those people who decided to cross picket lines and work had to work 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, without a break. And by the end of that 28-day dispute, they were on their knees. They were pleading with senior management to end the dispute, pleading that they were physically shattered, and that this dispute had to end. So everyone has their version.

This is happening in Merseyside, where Liverpool council has been very vocal against the cuts. So if it’s going to happen there, it’s going to happen other places too, surely?

That’s it; it’s a knock-on effect. Manchester as well, Birmingham are looking to shed 7,000 public sector jobs.

Where was the consultation in any of this? Where were the public meetings? It simply wasn’t there. Have the government or their researchers, or their advisers, come to fire stations, spoken to firefighters, spoken to their families, spoken about the pay freeze?

On the one hand, they may say we’re lucky to have a job - and we are; we’re lucky we have our job. But does that mean we get downtrodden, ridiculed? Does that mean our morale is allowed to hit rock bottom because we don’t know if we’re going to have jobs this time next year? [In] an emergency service, where reaction time matters, where you need teamwork, good morale, you need to be looking at those areas, not just looking at financial figures and talking about cuts. They need to look at what effect this is having.

Don’t public sector workers have it quite cushy?

With our gold-plated pensions, as one Tory minister said? Not at all. No-one joins the public sector to get rich. Your cleaners, your lollipop ladies, your police, nurses, firefighters - their pensions haven’t gone up.

There are other people – teams of directors and executives and made-up management positions – who are getting rich through the public sector. But if we can cut that back and get back to the roles and responsibilities of what people join the public sector for, then you’ll find there’s no-one meeting Silvio Berlusconi in a millionaire’s apartment in Italy in their summer holidays.