Who? Tony McGuirk. Why? Because I want to have his babies, that's why! No, no, scrub that last one but you know what I mean. Mr. McGuirk has possibly one of the least romantic-sounding jobs in this, our 'septic Isle', he is the Head of Fire Services in, God help him, Merseyside. The other day he did the impermissable these days, that is, tell the truth, by telling us all that "we’ve got some bone idle people in the public sector”. Well, I didn't fall over with shock, either, but they needed smelling salts at the TUC conference! Anyway, I am beholden to Andrew Haldenbury of Reform who wrote a piece for The Coffee House. In it he describes how Mr. McGuirk revolutionised the Fire and Rescue Service for which he was responsible:
Ten years ago there were 2,140 fires in the Merseyside FRS area and 15 deaths from fires. Last year there 1,300 and 7 respectively. Ten years ago there were 1,400 fire officers. This year there are 850.
How did he do that, one wonders, whilst suspecting, given the age we live in, that he insisted on 'Elf 'n' Safety warnings on boxes of matches, except of course, we know that that approach achieves nothing. No, what he did was this:
What they realised was that speed of response wasn’t the answer. Instead, prevention was the key. At that time – although a great deal of emphasis was placed on statutory fire prevention in offices, shops and so on – no fire and rescue service in the country committed any major resource to preventing fires in the home. The leaders of Merseyside FRS resolved to visit every home in Merseyside, and apply a simple points system to grade the risk of individual homes. They would provide basic fire safety advice. And they would fit smoke alarms in every home in the area, all 650,000 of them.
They did this by using existing fire crews, by recruiting new kinds of fire staff (such as “advocates” that took the fire safety message to individual ethnic communities), by increasing the number of part-time officers and by forming new partnerships with local health and social services.
They realised that the traditional shift patterns of fire officers left them under-employed for long periods when they could carrying out fire prevention. So they changed shift patterns and made efficiencies worth tens of £millions according to an Audit Commission evaluation.
As sure as winter follows summer, the donkeys led by mules did what they always do:
The steady improvements in fire numbers and fire deaths were not a strong enough argument to prevent the fire brigade union calling a strike, in 2006, over changes in working arrangements. Of around 1,000 officers at that time, 800 went on strike and 200 stayed at work.
Happily, the result was:
Those 200 officers were enough to run the service at full capacity. [My emphasis] The strike was defeated in six weeks. This is, of course, another reason why Tony has got up the nose of the TUC.
So three enormously hearty cheers for Mr. McGuirk whose job was probably on the line during that testing time.
Of course, there is a lesson to be learned here by members of other public service unions planning on strikes for the autumn. It takes a strike to show more clearly than anything else how redundent most of them are. Will they learn it? Of course not, so we can all look forward to the unemployment figures going up.
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