FIRE chiefs in Gloucestershire want to reduce the time it takes crews to get to blazes in the Forest but the question is how would it be achieved?

On paper, the problem is simple: it takes about 14 minutes 30 seconds for the first fire engine to arrive on the scene in the Forest, compared with an overall average of 11 minutes 20 seconds.

A second engine will be dispatched to a house fire and that takes 17 minutes 56 seconds compared to 11 minutes 11 seconds in Gloucester and nine minutes nine seconds in Cheltenham.

In an incident where every minute counts, that could be the difference between life and death.

The Gloucestershire Fire and Rescue Service is set to present proposals to the public on how to reduce response times without worsening its financial situation.

Gloucestershire County Council’s Cabinet has agreed to go out to public consultation with three options.

They are: retain the status quo, add a whole-time day-time at Cinderford or reallocate the night-time crew from Cheltenham West to the Forest.

The third option is preferred by the fire service.

There are currently 21 fire stations across Gloucestershire of which only five are “wholetime”.

The other 16, including the four in the Forest, are “on call” or retained stations.

On-call firefighters are employed on flexible contracts and must live within five minutes of their station.

They respond to incidents via pager from their home address or place of work.

The fire service says on-call firefighter recruitment and retention are “increasingly challenging in modern rural communities” and contributes to lower appliance availability and slower turnout times at on-call stations.

A report commissioned by Chief Fire Officer Mark Preece states that in 2024-25 the average availability of on call firefighters was 67 per cent compared with 76 per cent in 2022-23.

The report by Operational Research in Health Ltd also states that while there were crews for 83 per cent of first on call engines, that dropped to 37 per cent for the second.

While average availability between 6am and 6pm was 60 per cent, it increased to 80 per cent between 6pm and 6am.

That is in the context of 67 per cent of fires happening between 9am and 9pm.

The fire service could just stick to the status quo but that would mean having to tolerate slower day-time responses in the Forest and draw the ire of regulators for not improving efficiency and “risk alignment”.

The second option would be to set up a new wholetime day-time crew at Cinderford.

While that would improve response times, it would come with a significant price tag.

Analysis suggests that making Cinderford a wholetime station, providing between 10 and 12 hours of daytime cover, would improve overall response times by one minute 16 seconds or one minute 11 seconds for house fires.

Creating 14 new posts at Cinderford would bring more financial headaches for a service that has been told it has to find £827,000 in savings.

The financial pressures led to the implementation of a day crew at Cinderford being “paused” last December.

The option of reallocating the 14 “low activity” night posts at Cheltenham West to Cinderford is favoured because not only does it improve response times and bring other benefits but it can be done within exisiting budgets. Paul Hodgkinson (LibDem, Bourton-on-the-Water ad Northleach), the county councillor with responsibility for the fire service asked Gloucestershire County Council’s Cabinet to approve an eight-week public consultation on what he called “the jigsaw of fire cover”.

He told the Cabinet: “This is a really, really important subject because it's about keeping Gloucestershire safe and improving fire cover in the Forest of Dean.

“It's making sure that, across the county, we have the right fire cover in the right places to make sure that people are safe both now and in the future.

“The Chief Fire Officer,is putting together what I would call a jigsaw puzzle of fire cover across the county, so that we make sure that our firefighters are located in the places that make the biggest difference, improve resilience, protect communities, and make sure that Gloucestershire Fire and Rescue Service remains financially sustainable in the face of significant cuts, in our funding from the government.

“The Chief Fire Officer commissioned independent modelling which shows that the proposals would actually make Gloucestershire safer by improving fire cover in the places it's needed most, and in particular, in the Forest of Dean.

“I think this is especially good news for communities in the forest, because what we will do, in this proposal, which we're going consult on, is introduce a whole time day crew at Cinderford, which will cut response times in the Forest of Dean.

“It would strengthen our ability to respond to emergencies, in that very big rural area, and increase opportunities for the kind of vital prevention and protection work that fire crews do during the day that helps stop incidents happening in the first place.”

He said improving response times by more than a minute was “considerable”.

The chief fire officer said the consultation would use traditional as well as online methods to reach as many people as possible.

Mr Preece added: “We don't selectively just choose the pieces of data that support the argument.

“We’ll give access to our staff and the public to the full range of data, and we'll also do face-to-face meetings with the relevant public, staff, parish councils.

“It will be quite extensive because this is an important decision.”

Cllr Linda Cohen (LibDem, Wooton-under-Edge) said: “This is a data driven decision which is about retaining the safety of the people in Cheltenham and ensuring that they continue to have a fire engine attending in almost identical times to the things that they benefit from at the moment.

“Then making sure that the people in the Forest of Dean, who are so much further away, and where it is a much bigger area to cover, receive the same equitable fairness.”

Cllr Mark Harris (LibDem, Cirencester North) said currently the Forest was under served while Cheltenham was over served.

He said: “My understanding is that we're balancing out, so that we're not putting lives at risk in the Forest of Dean by digging our heels in Cheltenham.

“It's both fair, and it's safer.”

Cllr Julian Tooke (LibDem, Pittville and St Pauls) said the move could also help address the perception gets a raw deal from the county council.

He told Cllr Hodgkinson: “I've spent a lot of time in Cinderford and in the Forest of Dean.

“Something that has come through again and again, is that people in Cinderford feel like they're being treated as somehow less important, somehow second class citizens, somehow they've been forgotten, and their lives don't matter so much.

“I am really proud that you are giving a signal, via this, that their lives are valued, and are absolutely as important as anyone else's, and they should have a quality service.”

The county council’s Cabinet unanimously backed the consultation which will run during August and September.

The final decision is expected to be made at the December meeting of the Cabinet.