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• Reference: 2023/1010
• Question by: Chair, London Assembly
• Meeting date: 09 February 2023

Can you update the Assembly on the priorities and challenges facing the London Fire Brigade?

• Question by: Susan Hall
• Meeting date: 09 February 2023

Thank you. Morning, both. Deputy Mayor, there cannot be anybody around this table who was not horrified by the Cultural Review; some of us thought that it would be bad, but some of the things that were reported were absolutely disgraceful. Now, as normal, we ask for the Mayor to attend Plenary meetings because he is ultimately responsible politically. He always refuses, although he has told me once, “Just pick up the phone and I will attend meetings.” The reason he is not here today, he says, is because he has been summonsed by us on three occasions and therefore...

• Question by: Tony Devenish
• Meeting date: 10 February 2022

Tony Devenish AM: At the Regeneration Committee a couple of years ago we talked about estates strategy and, when we asked about the carbon footprint of the strategy, we were met by silence. I do remember the meeting very clearly. Would you say you are leading on carbon matters that have been mentioned by Assembly Member Polanski in terms of the estate and not the appliances of the LFB? To the Deputy Mayor, would you be up to a pilot of possibly merging an LAS and an LFB station and making it a zero-carbon best-in-practice project?

• Question by: Sakina Sheikh
• Meeting date: 10 February 2022

Sakina Sheikh AM: It has been really fantastic to hear your answers to the questions that have come before, Deputy Mayor and Commissioner. Anyone who has done their homework knows that Sadiq [Khan, Mayor of London] has been a fierce advocate for improving building safety in London, pushing developers in the right direction on this particular point. Commissioner, you said in your earlier comments that we need to see integrity, not profit, as a driver for the way that developers integrate building safety in their plans. You are absolutely spot on and that is exactly what the London Plan pushes...

• Question by: Peter Fortune
• Meeting date: 10 February 2022

Peter Fortune AM: Just to say I agree with my colleague about the corporate speak and holistic thought cascades and all that sort of stuff. It does not get us anywhere at all. More seriously and sadly, just reviewing some of the advice from the GTI, there was some pretty brutal advice given from Danny Friedman QC that talked about the Grenfell disaster and some of the response to the fire that was “extreme but foreseeable” and also criticises the service for having “no developed thinking at all”. I know you are a serious man who thinks about this deeply...

• Question by: Nick Rogers
• Meeting date: 10 February 2022

Nick Rogers AM : Thank you, Chair. Just briefly on the subject of the museum, I would highly recommend the little museum that the firefighters at New Malden Station have developed in their mess room. It is quite the collection they have there. To build on some of the points that Assembly Member Hall was making around collocation, Commissioner, you mentioned that you are engaged in regular discussions on this issue. You mentioned Purley and was it Hornchurch? Which was the other one you mentioned, sorry?

• Question by: Lord Bailey of Paddington
• Meeting date: 10 February 2022

Shaun Bailey AM: Good morning to both of our guests. Can I go back to this idea of taking over some of the responsibility for flood risk in London. Do you think, with the level of change that you are currently going through as an organisation, you would be able to do that, you have that capacity and you have enough capacity to pay attention to that very serious job?

• Question by: Anne Clarke
• Meeting date: 10 February 2022

Anne Clarke AM: Fiona, I would like to come back on something Assembly Member Bailey asked about and I just want to enhance his point around flooding. The LFB is responding more to floods. We saw across London this summer floods, some of them very bad. The LFB was at the forefront of that. On one of my visits to Barnet Fire Station, firefighters said that they felt they needed some training with almost social care because they were taking on responsibilities that were beyond what they had been trained for. They were happy to do it. As people, they...

• Question by: Emma Best
• Meeting date: 10 February 2022

Emma Best AM: Thanks, Fiona and Andy, for what has been a very transparent session so far today. My question to you is whether you could explain to me the capacity the fire department has to respond to planning applications and procedurally how that works for you when those applications come in.

• Question by: Len Duvall OBE
• Meeting date: 10 February 2022

Len Duvall AM: If I can just go back over some of the issues, if we set aside some of the challenges in terms of service delivery that you have, we know we have the Government thing and the feds do not really understand us and never really supported some of our services. It does not matter, regardless of political persuasion, there is always that tension. We now have regional politicians and the likes of the Mayor [of London] and Fiona Twycross giving the resources that they can provide to you in terms of the service. In that sense, you...