Fire service has £13 million funding gap in medium term ‘base case’

A medium-term financial plan, which stretches to 2030, has been created to assess its potential income and expenditure.

Devon and Somerset’s fire service could be facing a funding gap of more than £13 million over the next five years.
A medium-term financial plan, which stretches to 2030, has been created to assess its potential income and expenditure.
Income for the fire service predominantly comes from two sources, council tax and government funding, but it only has control over the council tax part.
Even then, there is a limit to how much it can increase its share of council tax, and while it could hold a referendum to request more, it estimates it would £2.3 million to ask residents whether they would stump up extra cash.
Its staffing costs equate to nearly 80 per cent of spending – or £88 million for the 2025/26 financial year, meaning that roughly £4 out of every £5 it spends is on employees.
The medium-term plan range from  a ‘worst-case scenario’ of an £19 million deficit to a most optimistic £7 million surplus.
But Andrew Furbear, its head of finance, suggests a £13 million funding gap is his base.
“It is a big number and we are mindful of it, but I am confident that we have got the processes in place to reduce the gap and find a balanced budget moving forward,” he said.
“We are reviewing our operating model, including the way we pay our on-call staff, the way our whole-time staff roster themselves, and our tactical rescuing provision is being reviewed, so we have got a number of processes in place to review and reduce our costs accordingly.”
Chief fire officer Gavin Ellis said the service needed to “continue to look at how we can make the service sustainable and efficient.”
He continued: “Although we have been able to set a balanced budget for the next financial year, it doesn’t mean that we are out of the woods yet and we still need to make savings in the future,” he said.
Mr Ellis said the service is reviewing how it responds to automatic fire alarms which  simultaneously sound at a premises and call the fire service.
In the past five years the service had received 55,000 such calls, sent crews to 27,000 of those, and yet less than one per cent of those needed any fire fighting.
“It’s a lot of time and effort that we spend going to these premises and dealing with them, when actually it could be dealt with by the responsible person at those premises,” he said.
“We will always respond to those premises at night that have a sleeping risk, though, such as care homes.”
The survey about how the fire service should respond to automatic fire alarms runs until Wednesday 9 April. The survey can be completed on the fire service website, and question and answer sessions are being held online on Tuesday 25 February, Wednesday 12 March and Thursday 20 March.