Union Fury At "Plans To Sack" Greater Manchester's Entire Firefighter Workforce

Tuesday, 20 September 2016 15:18

Every firefighter in Greater Manchester will be sacked and only those agreeing to a new 12-hour shift rota will be reinstated, a union has claimed.

The Fire Brigades Union (FBU) said Greater Manchester Fire and Rescue Service's (GMFRS) managers are planning to sack all of its firefighters using Section 188 of the Trade Union Labour Relations (Consolidation) Act 1992, then re-engage those who agree to a new 12-hour shift system. The union further claims the whole process has begun with limited discussion and no agreement from Fire Brigades Union (FBU) members – an estimated 95% of all firefighters in Greater Manchester are members of the FBU.

The union claims that the proposed new arrangements mean that one in five firefighter posts will be slashed, 250 posts in total, with the remainder having worse conditions imposed on them. Firefighters would hardly see their families under the new 12-hour shift arrangements. Greater Manchester brigade secretary Gary Keary said: “To start the process for dismissing firefighters to then simply re-engage them on an un-negotiated contract is really appalling.”

Councillor David Acton, Chairman of Greater Manchester Fire and Rescue Authority, said: “Government cuts of £28million over the last six years have meant a reduction of over 400 firefighters from the front line in Greater Manchester as well as significant back office cuts. Currently Greater Manchester Fire and Rescue Authority faces a further Government budget cut of £14.4million over the next four years. The scale of these Government cuts has left us with no alternative and no change is not an option. For this reason we published and consulted with local people and the Fire Brigades Union (FBU) on our plan which is called the Corporate and Integrated Risk Management Plan 2016-2020. This document details how we will save the money we have to save and keep people safe in the best way we can. The FBU responded to this document and their views were taken into account in the final version.

“Our ultimate aim is simple - to ensure as many fire engines as possible are available when we have the most incidents and are able to get to people as quickly as we can. That is our bottom line and will remain our top priority. To achieve this we are already taking a third of the cuts from senior management and the back office, but we have developed a new shift duty system for firefighters which changes from a day shift of 10 and a half hours and a night shift of 13 and a half hours to two equal shifts of 12 hours. This system saves almost £10million whilst retaining 32 more firefighter jobs on the frontline than would be possible by trying to maintain our current system, providing up to 56 fire engines to our communities when they need them the most.”

“In addition, the new system means we will be able to engage with our communities on valuable prevention activity and fire safety support, which has been so effective at keeping people safe in recent years. The Fire Minister recently acknowledged that fire statistics have begun to rise in the last two years and so this is clearly more important than ever as a focus for our work.”

“We will be moving to these new shifts from April 1, 2017. We consulted on this and received no alternatives which would save the amount of money we need to cut. We have been negotiating with the FBU since January on this issue alone. For this reason, the Fire Authority agreed implementation. We are now trying to work with our firefighters and the FBU to agree how we move to the new system. We have not issued notices to anyone at this stage. We have no intention to make anyone redundant. We do need to save this money and provide the best fire and rescue service we’re able to for the communities of Greater Manchester. If we cannot agree on how we do this together we will have to implement it on April 1, 2017.”

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