Last updated 14:19, Tuesday, 19 August 2008

MORE than £55m of taxpayers’ money is being spent on consultants working on plans to create regional fire centres, including one covering Cumbria.

It has been claimed the cost, revealed by the Department for Communities and Local Government, could have paid for more than 300 fire engines.

The control room change will see England’s 46 local control rooms replaced by nine regional centres.

The shake-up will close Cumbria’s Cockermouth centre, which, the government believes, can no longer cope with modern emergencies on the scale of the London terror bombings.

All North West emergency calls will be shifted to Warrington. A control room fielding calls from across Cumbria, Cheshire, Lancashire, Greater Manchester and Merseyside is expected to be up and fully operational by May 2011 and will allow firefighters to respond more quickly to incidents, it is claimed.

It was previously claimed the move would save up to £20m a year, but now is expected to cost the government about £3m a year.

And new figures have revealed £38.5m was spent on consultants as of the end of June, with a further predicted spend of £16.9m.

An average fire engine costs about £180,000. It would mean an additional 308 fire appliances could have been purchased.

The amount spent is also enough to keep a large metropolitan fire brigade running for a year, according to the Fire Brigade Union.

But a DCLG spokesman defended the high costs and said: “Total staff costs of around £60m average out at about 17 per cent of the overall project costs of £360m.

“We believe this represents good value because the Fire Control project will deliver significant benefits and improvements to public and firefighter safety through the delivery of fire control services.”

The government believes the new fire control network would improve tracking of fire appliances and support frontline firefighters.

Only last month ministers defended the merger, claiming Cumbria lacked the computer equipment needed to respond to emergencies.