The Government’s decision to abandon its plans to abolish Surrey Police are welcome. Police force regionalisation would have made the police more distant and wasted time and money on expensive restructuring.
Yet Whitehall is still moving ahead with John Prescott’s plans to regionalise the fire service, scrapping Surrey’s existing 999 fire control room in Reigate, and replacing it with just one centre in Fareham, Hampshire to cover the whole of the South East – a population of 8 million people.
A cross-party House of Commons Committee has recently savaged these proposals, warning that they will do little to improve efficiency, civil resilience or the quality of service. Just as we are seeing with the NHS in Surrey and across the country, the Government’s obsession with restructuring threatens to sabotage the delivery of frontline services.
The public have little confidence in John Prescott’s ongoing pet project of regional empire building. Our emergency services must remain accessible and accountable to local people.
Cllr Sheridan Westlake
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