Across swathes of public life, the ‘change’ that the Labour government of 2024 had in mind is becoming apparent – writes Mark Rowe, who takes control rooms as an example of how ‘change’ may not be for the better as Labour hoped.
In local government, on the railways, and in policing, ‘change’ under Sir Keir Starmer’s Labour came to mean a redrawing of boundaries. Councils in England are facing ‘shaking up’ for a few years as they are dissolved or change shape as they go to unitary authorities; the privatised train operators are in effect returning to state control under Great British Railways; and the abolition of police and crime commissioners and the drastic cutting of 43 police forces to about a dozen regional ones shows no signs of being altered by new Prime Minister Andy Burnham.
In all three cases the change may be only cosmetic; new names on the coffee cups and buildings, new logos. What the public actually wants is a good and consistent service – a response from the police to crime, trains on time, potholes filled and dustbins emptied.
On the railways, as in the emergency services, and to monitor highways, the authorities need control rooms. The end to county and district councils means a divvying-up of assets – offices, IT infrastructure. For a council running a CCTV and alarm monitoring centre, it could mean a windfall of taking over some other council’s asset, if a city council extends its boundaries; or the opposite. What we can assume is that the available control room assets for the new council areas either did not feature at all or was only a factor in the decision how to divvy up each county.
FireControl project
The disastrous FireControl project of the Labour government in the 2000s, a waste of at least £469m on attempted nine regional fire control centres that the National Audit Office in 2011 pronounced as ‘hurriedly implemented and poorly managed’, shows that central government does not have a good record of project management. Also, the ECHO scheme for the automated handling of calls from alarm monitoring centres to the police, has far from all police forces plugged in, not because of any shortcoming in the idea (everyone gains, human error is cut out of the calls, police cut vital minutes off response and are likelier to catch thieves) but because police forces’ IT resources to do the ‘plumbing’ are finite.
In any change, an acquisition of a company in business or fewer police forces in the public sector, those delivering the actual service carry on regardless. But that service (and any improvement to it) depends in part on command and control, and communications. Train operators’ control rooms have to be folded into Network Rail’s. A contact in a train operator’s control room comments: “It’s a mess.”
Justifiable?
Meanwhile, the work of control rooms has to go on, and the financial reality under Burnham as any other PM is of many demands – for social care, housing for the homeless. The July meeting of Bristol City Council asked for a briefing note and options paper about Bristol Operations Centre, to review whether its model remains ‘fit for purpose’. Councillors read that Bristol Operations Centre was designed as a commercial model ‘because its functions, while critical, were not established as statutory functions. It supports other council departments and also bids for external business.’ In other words, CCTV or other monitoring, while useful (for community safety, management of a city centre, such as raising bollards) isn’t something a council has to do by law, like offer a library service or empty the bins. Hence Bristol’s, and many councils’, control rooms have to justify themselves to councillors besides the paying public.
