Mid and West Wales Fire and Rescue Service to rise 6.3% next year

Its estimated budget for 2025-26 is £72.8 million, up from £68.5 million this financial year.

The main reasons for the 6.3% increase are new and improved payments for on-call – or retained – firefighters, which form the backbone of rural fire services like Mid and West Wales’s, and a hike in employers’ national insurance contributions. Strip out these two factors and the budget increase would be 2.4%.

Fire services get their funding from councils located in their area rather than directly from central Government. This means that Swansea, Neath Port Talbot, Carmarthenshire, Powys, Pembrokeshire and Ceredigion councils will need to find extra money from their own budgets to cover next year’s 6.3% rise.

Councils learned last week that they’ll get 4.3% more money on average from the Welsh Government next year than currently, and they are yet to set council tax, which brings in further revenue. Councils will also get help from the UK Government to pay for national insurance employer increases but there is uncertainty about how much and when this money will land in their accounts.

“The headache is for local authorities, to be fair,” said Mid and West Wales’s fire service treasurer Sarah Mansbridge at a meeting of the Mid and West Wales Fire Authority – the group which scrutinises and sets the fire service’s budget.

Mid and West Wales’s chief fire officer Roger Thomas said the six councils have been briefed on the budget proposals, as have their treasurers. He said most questions at these meetings were about fire service operational matters rather than the budget.

Much of the discussion at the fire authority meeting on December 16 was about the new and improved fees for on-call firefighters, whose numbers have been dwindling. Mr Thomas said 43 of Mid and West Wales’s 56 fire stations were operated by on-call firefighters rather than “wholetime” – or full-time – ones. Nine of the remaining 13 stations, he said, had an element of on-call presence.

This makes declining on-call numbers a real issue for the service, and measures such as recognition payments and mobile phone allowances have been taken to address it. Increased payments for on-call personnel – agreed at a national level – likewise have a disproportionate effect on the budget.

On-call Mid and West Wales firefighters currently receive a retainer fee of £3,768 or £2,826 per year depending on how many hours they are available for per week. Those fees will rise to £5,651 and £4,709 from January 1, 2025, and three new bands will come into effect for staff who are available for smaller blocks of hours per week. The basic salary for a wholetime firefighter, meanwhile, is £37,675.

Councillor John Davies, deputy chairman of the fire authority, said he welcomed the new and improved fee bands but wondered what the impact would be on crew availability if on-call staff opted to halve their hours knowing that they’d earn the same as what they used to.

Assistant chief fire officer Craig Flannery said this was “a really valid question” as 33 out of 34 fire services where new on-call bands had been introduced had seen a drop in crew availability.

Mr Flannery said the longer-term trend of declining on-call numbers had reduced last year for Mid and West Wales Fire and Rescue Service, and that availability from April this year had actually risen by 1.6% – the equivalent of a crewed fire engine operating 24/7 for 100 days.

He also said requests by on-call firefighters to cut hours would involve discussions about this would affect the operation of the relevant local fire station. “We may a see a decline in availability, but controls will be there,” he said.

As well as approving the £72.8 million day-to-day budget the fire authority approved a five-year capital programme for things like investment in fire stations and replacement vehicles. It’s expected that around £7.6 million will be spent on capital schemes in 2025-26 compared to some £8.3 million this financial year.

Meanwhile, Ms Mansbridge said North Wales Fire and Rescue Service was looking at a 7.1% revenue budget rise next year while she’d been informally advised that the service in South Wales was considering a 5.7% increase.