IT delays pose a threat to fire service's ability to function

Senior managers say government's interim solution is 'a dog's breakfast'

Two vital fire service technology programmes run by the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister (ODPM) are in danger of joining the list of shambolic government IT projects.

The procurement for the Firelink national radio system for fire and rescue services has already been running, in various guises, for six years - an unprecedented length of time even for the public sector.

And having missed the latest set of deadlines - slipping from July 2004 to November, then from March 2005 to the end of May - current negotiations are working through the impact of these delays on the planned implementation dates.

The ODPM maintains the Firelink network will be rolled out on time, as per the original schedule (see box). But insiders doubt that this is wise, considering the contract will be signed so long after the original deadline.

'Any project plan that sacrifices early milestones and keeps the end ones should be a cause of some scepticism,' says one source close to the procurement.

The latest delays on Firelink, in the autumn of last year, resulted from the ODPM's internal reorganisation of three related programmes: the radio procurement; the FireControl plan to consolidate 46 local control rooms into nine regional centres; and New Dimension, a programme to equip fire services with nuclear and biological decontamination apparatus.

Sources say the three programmes are not sufficiently co-ordinated, particularly considering the close dependence of FireControl on the Firelink network.

It is not that the ODPM review is unjustified: the question is whether it has helped clarify the confusion. Sources in the fire service say there is almost no effective communication between the two programmes.

'Neither project is talking to the other at any level,' said one senior officer who works closely with central government teams.

The procurement for IT systems to go in the new FireControl regional centres is also delayed. The technology contract was due to be signed this month, but is now not expected before the end of the year because the ODPM underestimated how long the specification process would take (Computing, 13 January).

Insiders say it is likely to slip further, predicting it won't be signed before 2006. They say that though the FireControl tendering process is being run on the same model as Firelink, its timetable only allocates 10 weeks for the negotiation phase that for Firelink has taken 12 months.

All these delays and re-organisations are causing considerable problems for fire services, quite apart from the ongoing controversy about the regionalisation of control rooms.

A number of brigades have delayed updating their legacy systems because they are expecting Firelink, only to have been left waiting for a number of years. And because Firelink is to start rolling out before the FireControl contract is even signed, there is a complicated two-phase rollout programme that could damage some brigades' ability to function (Computing, 3 February).

Bigger, more advanced, fire service control rooms use an integrated communications control switch (ICCS) to receive and process both radio and telephony calls. So when a 999 call is taken, ICCS automatically 'talks' to the station's command and control software and mobilising systems to manage the brigade's handling of the incident.

An ICCS is too expensive for Firelink to be integrated into all 46 control rooms' command systems, given the plan to consolidate them into nine regional centres soon afterwards.

Rather than wait for the regional centres to be up-and-running before implementing Firelink, the ODPM plans an interim solution. Until they move to regional centres, voice calls will come in over Firelink but will not be managed through an ICCS. The two systems will run side by side with the new one carrying voice and the old one carrying data.

For more technically advanced brigades this means a step backwards from their current systems.

'It's a dog's breakfast and would probably require brigades to change the way they operate their control rooms,' says a senior source in the fire service.

Firelink: a history of hold-ups

THE current completion date for the Firelink deal is only 11 months late. This is slightly misleading, however, because plans for replacement radio systems for fire services have been in the pipeline for six years in various guises.

Plans for an upgraded radio system were first mooted in 1998 and were to be put together at brigade level with common standards to ensure the necessary interoperability. Whitehall then changed its strategy and launched a plan to procure the radio systems regionally instead.

By 2001 at least one regional contract was on the point of being signed, and a number of others were not far behind, when the strategy was scrapped and the national, centrally-run Firelink procurement was launched.

Firelink had already been put on hold once, following the attacks on the US in 2001, and the launch in early 2004 of the FireControl initiative to streamline control rooms delayed it further.

'Every radio network project gets to the point where it is almost about to deliver, and then the government moves the goalposts,' says one source involved in the programme.