I met with Matthew Warren, Cambridgeshire Fore and Rescue Services Chief Fire Officer, to discuss some of the challenges facing the Fire Service owing to lack of funding.
I spoke to Matthew in depth about the funding formula that sees Cambridgeshire Fire and Rescue Service underfunded. You may recall my campaign to push for a similar review of police funding and the fire funding formula is no different with it being based on the population density of Cambridgeshire in 2001. The county has grown by hundreds of thousands of people since then, none of whom are theoretically covered by current Fire service resources.
The Government is currently consulting on how the formula should be updated, and I will be writing to make the case for Cambridgeshire before the deadline next week.
St Ives fire station is an on-call station and owing to a lack of on-call firefighters is only available a small amount of the time. Whilst its strategic location in St Ives means the fire station itself isn’t at risk of closure, but its lack of availability means that fire and rescue call-outs in St Ives are likely covered by crews from further afield. If you’re interested in becoming a firefighter in St Ives you can find out more below:
https://www.cambsfire.gov.uk/careers/on-call-firefighter/
