13 Bedfordshire Fire & Rescue control systems outages since November upgrade - but no 999 calls lost

The Fire and Rescue Authority Meeting (Wednesday, March 26) heard that the Motorola system has experienced 13 outages since it was upgraded in November.

The cloud-based system is used to handle emergency 999 calls and mobilise fire appliances, but the platform migration introduced “technical hiccups” that have caused repeated disruptions.

Chief fire officer (CFO) Andrew Hopkinson said the “most significant” was on March 8.

“At no point did we lose any 999 calls,” he said.

“We have a backup plan with any system in case we lose the building, lose power, and all of those are very well rehearsed.

“The system automatically switches over to receive 999 calls to a more manual system,” he said.

He added that control room staff used handheld radios to mobilise crews and recorded details manually,

“We did not lose any calls, we managed all of the incidents,” he added.

“I would admit that because it was a more manual process it did mean that response times were slightly marginally slower while the control room handled it without the technology,” he said.

Authority members heard that the fire service has voiced its dissatisfaction directly with Motorola’s UK and global leadership.

CFO Hopkinson said: “I spoke to the UK head of Motorola on that Saturday evening and expressed in no uncertain terms how unhappy we are with the service that they’re providing.

“And they’ve invested a lot of time and effort investigating the problem.

“Any changes or upgrades to the system [have] been put on hold.”

Short- and medium-term fixes have been proposed and the fire service has introduced enhanced monitoring, additional staffing during outages, and extra welfare support for control room teams.

Head of response, Stuart Auger said: “We understand there’s a bit of a loss of trust and confidence sometimes [amongst staff] in the system.

“But they all recognise it is an excellent system, we just need to get the reliability issues [dealt with],” he said.

In a statement to the Local Democracy Reporting Service a Motorola Solutions spokesperson said: “Motorola Solutions takes this matter very seriously.

“We’ve identified a remediation plan and are working alongside Bedfordshire [Fire and Rescue Service] to implement it as quickly and thoroughly as possible.

“The customer has robust business continuity arrangements which are working very well and the public can continue to dial 999 in an emergency as normal.”