Blaze control centre go-ahead

A single fire control centre for most of the North-West has been given the go-ahead — more than a year after the Government vowed to dump a near-identical scheme.

Greater Manchester Fire and Rescue Service — with authorities in Cheshire, Lancashire and Cumbria — were jointly awarded £8.4m to get the project in operation by 2014.

999 calls to the fire brigade in Greater Manchester will be answered at a state-of-the-art control room in a Warrington business park — the same site proposed by Labour in the party’s ill-fated FiReControl project, scrapped in 2010.

The only difference between the two schemes is that Merseyside Fire Authority has now opted out — that authority has been awarded £1.8m for its own command centre in Warrington. Merseyside chiefs think the all-in scheme would cost jobs and negate the usefulness of local knowledge.