The draft service plan for West Sussex County Council’s Fire and Rescue Service is out for public consultation until 8^th October 2010.  See  http://www2.westsussex.gov.uk/CustomerInsight/FRS_consultation.pdf for a summary of the proposals.  What they term their “Fire Redesign Improvement Proposals” involves the reconfiguration of fire services based on ensuring a consistent level of risk based response across the county. 

For Burgess Hill the review is good news as the plan provides for an upgrade of the station by providing some staffing resources to enable it to cope with a relatively high number of emergency calls for a retained fire station.  The outcome should be increased speed and reliability of response over a wider area during peak call times, and an increase in prevention and protection activity. 

Of course this comes at a cost – the closure of Keymer and several other retained fire stations, some of which have seen 50 incidents in the last year.  The aim is to provide an equal level of coverage in terms of speed of response across the county, this may mean hard decisions for some; and with increasing restraints on public spending, at some point this may mean Burgess Hill is on the receiving end of reconfigurations in public services, rather other areas. 

We need a fire service that reflects changing risks and population centres, with some success having been achieved with fire prevention, it can be noted that more people are killed in road traffic accidents than in fires, and access to the road network is an important factor in fire station location.  The document provides admirable clarity to the more immediate strategic issues facing our local fire service.