With less than three months before Cumbria dives headlong into the new council regime, one recurring anomaly raises its head.
Police and Crime Commissioner Peter McCall will, on April 1 (is the fact it is April Fools’ Day relevant?) take responsibility for the fire service alongside the police.
It does seem strange that having gone through the whole rigmarole of having a local authority overhaul, to make local services more accountable within a slimmed down system, we seem to be giving one man more and more power.
And only this week, the Fire Service Inspectorate underlined the dangers when it rated Cumbria Fire Service inadequate because of the uncertainty surrounding the change, uncertainty that, in a large part, is because of the PCC.
Already there is talk of having a Cumbrian mayor to oversee both councils and take on responsibility for the major local services portfolios which has to be creating even more uncertainty.
This is the bit that doesn’t make sense.
Why did the Government opt for the two council model for Cumbria yet allow two of our major services – police and fire – to sit over this structure with one man in charge?
The tongue in cheek response may be £10 when they attend a bin fire and £20 when it is a house. But seriously, how much do we actually know about the fire service in order to put a monetary value on it?
Maybe if we know what they do. They attend fires (obviously!) but also work on fire prevention. Attend incidents where their expertise is invaluable – extracting victims from car crashes or water rescue, which, in the Land of Lakes, is more often that we may think.
And, of course, we need to have them close enough to be able to get to locations across our rural community in time to actually do some good. And that means having a number of fire stations from the fully staffed, 24-hour-a-day stations in larger towns and our one city, and those either staffed part of the time or where on call staff can assemble quickly to get the fire engine on the road.
So, Mr McCall’s question doesn’t make a lot of sense. Is adding £5 to the fire service precept good value?
Indeed, was Mr McCall be having a bad day when he suggests that is equivalent to 10p a week/just over 1p a day. Surely the £5 is per month if it is to add up to £85 to £90 a year is more that a penny a day?
My cat maths suggests if it is £85 a year for a band D property, that is £8.50 per month, remembering that council tax precepts are only gathered 10 months of the year. That is around 23p per day per household. (Maybe Mr McCall would benefit from Rishi Sunak’s proposals on extending maths teaching?)
But to the wider democratic issues, do we need a police / fire Tsar over and above the new council arrangement? Can’t we just have a selection of councillors from each? We could call them ‘Watch Committees’ to watch over the safety of our communities.
If we go down the road of a Cumbria Mayor, it completely devalues the new council structure and that is before we give it a chance.
Again, this week, while local Tories were clamouring for an early move to an elected mayor, mainly due to the fact they failed to win control of either council in last year’s elections, at least the Labour leader of the Cumberland Council, Mark Fryer, was suggesting we need to wait and allow the new structure to bed in.
So why not think about linking this all together?
If we need a focus for the management and delivery of the key services, police and fire and those who would benefit from scale, social services and education, for example, then why not draw this from the two councils.
Either bring the key services under shared oversight or rotate the mayor between the councils on a one or two-year cycle.
I would suggest to Mr Fryer that any talk of adding another layer into the local government landscape with a mayor should not just wait but only be pursued if the two new councils come to recognise that some services need a county wide oversight and only when they have agreed that collaborative working is not suitable.
To have a new local authority structure and then usurp it by having a completely separate structure for key services, let alone chuck money at a four-year mayoral election cycle, seems absurd, at least before we have explored other ways of working.
If the new councils are to have any chance of success, we need to ensure they are not encumbered by political chicanery and the councils, separately and collaboratively, are given the chance to succeed for all the people of Cumbria.
What do you think? Cumbria Cat would love to hear from you! Email [email protected]
About Cumbria Cat
Born in Cumberland and, from later this year, will be back living in Cumberland, having spent most of the past 50 years in some place called Cumbria, this cat has used up all nine lives as well as a few others.
Always happy to curl up on a friendly lap, the preference is for a local lap and not a lap that wants to descend on the county to change it into something it isn’t. After all, you might think Cumbria/Cumberland/Westmorland is a land forged by nature – the glaciers, the rivers, breaking down the volcanic rocks or the sedimentary layers – but, in reality, the Cumbria we know today was forged by generations of local people, farmers, miners, quarriers, and foresters.
This cat is a local moggy, not a Burmese, Ocicat or Persian, and although I have been around the block a few times, whenever I jump, I end up on my feet back in my home county. I am passionate about the area, its people, past, present and future, and those who come to admire what we hold dear, be it lakes and mountains, wild sea shores, vibrant communities or the history as rich and diverse as anywhere in the world.
