Union's staff fear if brigadepresses on with station plan

UNION leaders have expressed grave concerns that a multi-million pound scheme to build a new fire station in a Yorkshire city could be thrown into turmoil as scores of firefighter posts are under threat from the Government’s funding cutbacks.

Fire authorities across the country are having to contend with grants from Westminster being slashed by 25 per cent during the next four years.

North Yorkshire Fire and Rescue Service has revealed that it is expecting to have to cut its budgets by up to 1m for each of the next four financial years to cope.

Despite the tough financial constraints, the brigade confirmed that it is pushing ahead with a 4.5m scheme which includes proposals for a new fire station in York city centre.

However, the Fire Brigades’ Union (FBU) has claimed senior officials are “living in a financial dream world” and questioned whether there will be adequate resources to properly staff the new station.

Figures released by the FBU estimated that the 4m in savings equates to the loss of about 140 firefighter posts, although fire chiefs stressed that the financial cutbacks would not be solely made up of redundancies.

But the FBU’s brigade secretary for North Yorkshire, Ian Watkins, said: “It is amazing to think that we could end up with a brand new fire station with not enough firefighters to actually staff it.”

Union members staged a protest yesterday when they paraded a coffin through York to signify the death of the fire service.

However, Chief Fire Officer Nigel Hutchinson urged the public not to be “misled by scare-mongering”.

Brigades elsewhere in the region are bracing themselves for having to enforce redundancies.

In South Yorkshire, non-frontline staff have been briefed about job losses, although it is not yet known how many of the 240 support staff posts will be affected.