Consultants win, community loses

The track record of Guernsey's fire service is pretty impressive. Prevention of fires and fire safety advice has been a major part of that success story.

The Home Department, without proper consultation with business organisations and the general public, decided to take a big risk with future public fire safety to 'save' the grand total of about £12,500 by bringing in these charges. If the figure to be saved was in the hundreds of thousands, it might have been worth looking at, but not when the financial and other consequences of more fires and other hazardous incidents are taken into account.

It is likely that many small- and medium-sized businesses, possibly even larger ones, will be put off using the advisory and other non-urgent services provided by the fire brigade to save money, which will potentially put them and the community at greater risk.

The idea was, not surprisingly, yet another one from the FTP consultants, who will get a commission for this 'saving'.

They gain, the community loses.

They have so much influence they are like a political party, where no one dares question the party line.

In the States, despite a very poor-quality Home Department policy letter, only two States members, Deputies Barry Behaut and John Gollop, to their credit, spoke up and voted against. Two out of 47 States members. It only demonstrates that there is no scrutiny of policies coming to the States (and this is not proposed to be put right by the States Review Committee's recommendations). The States itself should be acting as the final scrutiniser of policies, but this is clearly not happening.

Another FTP proposal of the Home Department saw an end to Guernsey's part-time fire fighters, just to save about £20,000.

The fire services can be extremely stretched if more than one incident happens at the same time, as happened only recently.

It just did not occur to States members that our part-time fire fighters were actually giving excellent value for money.

Apart from the normal needs for the fire services, there is now a major increase in the threat of terrorist acts in the Bailiwick, particularly with fundamentalist extremists returning from Syria and Iraq. It seems our authorities have put our community at risk by failing to ensure that everything is done to keep us safe. I earnestly ask the ministers concerned with these decisions, Deputies Jonathan Le Tocq and Peter Gillson, to reverse them.

TONY WEBBER,

anthonywebber@cwgsy.net.