Fears over budget cuts at Staffordshire Fire Service

Chief fire officer Becci Bryant has warned that “difficult decisions” will have to be made if the service needs to find the money for its next budget settlement starting in 2020.

The service is waiting to find out how long its next settlement period will be, and how much government funding will be given to them – but might not hear until Christmas.

In the past four years the Government has covered 90 per cent of the budget, but uncertainty still looms on whether it will cover the increased costs.

The latest settlement period ends this year and leaves the fire service in the dark over its future.

Ms Bryant said: “In terms of where we look forward for funding for 2020, it’s an uncertain picture.

“We were hoping that by autumn we would know what the next settlement period would look in how long it would be, and the amount of funding from government.

“It’s now likely that we won’t know until much closer to Christmas, and on one occasion it’s even been as late as Christmas Eve.

“The uncertainty will be drawn out over the forthcoming months and we’re expecting cuts within that, but we don’t know the magnitude of those cuts.”

She added: “One of the additional challenges are the external pressures on the budget, such as changes in pension contribution rates.

“For us as a service, that’s increased the requirement by £1.8 million.

"In this current financial year that’s being funded 90 per cent by government, but we don’t know whether that will be put into our base funding, as £1.8 million is a significant sum of money for the service to find.

“The budget for this year was £40.9 million, that incorporated the council tax increase, and we will start in October, our budget plan for the next financial year.

“I would like to see a multi-year settlement because it allows us to plan on a longer scale, rather than a reactionary scale.

"It may be that there are some difficult decisions to be made in the years ahead - we've already made an awful lot of difficult decisions in getting to where we are now

"I'd like some certainty, the sooner we know about our financial situation, the better it is for everybody."