Fire budget boost after low pay rises

Service saves £6 million

Lower-than-predicted pay rises and an unexpected windfall have helped give the Devon & Somerset fire service a £6 million boost.

As part of its budget for last year, the service set aside cash for an expected pay rise for fire crews. However this was lower than predicted, meaning a £700,000 saving.

Pay is agreed nationally and Devon & Somerset Fire and Rescue has no say on the level set.

The service also received an unexpected £1 million from a refund from its radio system provider.

The Competition and Markets Authority had claimed that Motorola was charging too much because of its “virtually unconstrained monopoly” on  communications network services for UK emergency services.

Elsewhere, the challenges recruiting for the service’s office-based roles saved around £1 million compared to expectations, and it saved a further £1 million on the use of on-call firefighters.

Addressing the fire service authority which made up of councillors from Devon and Somerset, Andrew Furbear, head of finance, this week welcomed the underspend.

“When predicting the usage of on-call firefighters for the coming year we use a three-year average, but the activity in the last financial year was lower than anticipated,” he said.

“In 2022, we had wildfires during the dry summer, but we didn’t have those in 2024/25 and so our on-call costs have dropped.”

The £6.1 million will now be directed into various initiatives, including to help fund station refurbishments and replacing equipment.

More than half – £3.5 million – will go into a reserve fund used for larger capital projects. Bolstering this fund means it is less likely to need to borrow money.

And £2 million will go to a reserve called Invest to Improve for the likes of new technology to help it become more efficient.

This includes the mobile data terminals on fire engines that provide information to crews, including whether roads are wide enough to accommodate fire engines on planned routes.

The remaining £600,000 is being put into a general reserve.  Accounting guidelines recommend fire services have five per cent of its annual revenue budgets in a reserve.

Asked if the underspend may make people who decide its finances feel like it needs less money, Mr Furbear acknowledged it was a risk but that the service would have to justify its funding requirements.

“Ultimately we are accountable to the public, “he said.

Mr Furbear noted that the chancellor Rachel Reeves has not mentioned the fire service in her spending review speech, but hoped the government would release details soon on changes to fire service funding.

The service wants a three-year funding settlement rather than an annual one.

“That would mean we would have a good understanding what our figures would be from central government for three years from 2026/27 onwards,” Mr Furbear said.

“Our funding has been decided on a one-year basis since 2014, so we’ve been working with only one year of money and trying to double-guess where the future will go so the notion of a three-year settlement is a positive.”