A new fire station for Theale?
The Royal Berkshire Fire and Rescue Service head office in Dee Road could close and move to a new site nearer the M4
WEST Berkshire could soon have a new fire station at Theale and combine their control rooms with neighbouring authorities if plans discussed at a recent meeting of the Royal Berkshire Fire Authority go ahead.
At a meeting held in at Shaw House, Newbury, last Thursday (February 17), the authority indicated that Royal Berkshire Fire and Rescue Service's (RBFRS) head office, currently in Dee Road, Tilehurst, may move to a new site closer to the M4, A4 junction.
This would allow for quicker responses to the motorway and better coverage of the western part of RBFRS's area.
They may also join forces with one of the neighbouring authorities in creating a regional control room to save costs.
Despite having to make cuts elsewhere, the authority allocated £576,000 to the search for a new site in this year's budget and £476,000 next year.
The Fire Brigades Union criticised the plans saying the authority should not be thinking about building a new head office when regional services may be amalgamated in the near future.
Union spokesman Maurice Whyte also said that should the move to Theale go ahead, he believed the authority would close Pangbourne and Mortimer fire stations.
RBFRS Assistant Chief Fire Officer, Paul Southern, said that the spend was necessary because of the shortcomings of Dee Road Fire Station, a 1960s building which has ‘concrete cancer' (concrete which has deteriorated) and is in a less than ideal location in terms of fire coverage.
Fire Authority chairman Paul Bryant (Con, Speen) said that going ahead with the plans would save money in the long run as economies of scale could be gained from a cross counties control room.
He said that a timescale for the move has not been decided and that a site has not been selected, but added: “What I want to do is to move with all speed, because the quicker we move, the quicker we will have better fire coverage and the quicker we can start saving money.”
He said that savings of up to half a million pounds could be made from a combined control room, but that discussions with Oxford, Buckinghamshire and Hampshire were still in the very early stages.
Earlier plans to create a regional fire control centre which would have covered the entire South East had been scrapped after the fall of the Labour Government.
