Asked by: Rushanara Ali (Labour - Bethnal Green and Bow)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, how many firefighters were available for duty in (a) Cumbria, (b) West Yorkshire, (c) Lancashire, (d) Greater Manchester and (e) London in 2015; and how many such firefighters are available in each of those areas in 2020.
Answered by James Brokenshire
The Home Office publishes annual workforce figures for fire and rescue services (FRSs) in England. Figures for 2020 will be published in Autumn 2020.
The full published data are available here:
The Home Office does not hold data on how many of these firefighters are available for duty.
Asked by: Rushanara Ali (Labour - Bethnal Green and Bow)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, how much funding from the public purse has been allocated to Fire and Rescue Services in (a) West Yorkshire, (b) Cumbria, (c) Lancashire, (d) Greater Manchester and (e) London in each year since 2010.
Answered by James Brokenshire
Spending power for West Yorkshire and Lancashire Fire and Rescue Services can be found at the following link.
https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/local-authority-revenue-expenditure-and-financing#history
Fire and Rescue in Cumbria, Manchester and London are part of an overall parent authority which sets the budget for the fire and rescue services in their area from their overall un-ringfenced funding. The spending power for these parent authorities can also be found in the MHCLG tables published in the link above.
Asked by: Rushanara Ali (Labour - Bethnal Green and Bow)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what additional resources from the public purse have been allocated to Fire and Rescue Services to respond to the effects of recent storms and flooding in 2020.
Answered by James Brokenshire
Overall fire and rescue authorities will receive around £2.3 billion in 2019/20. Single purpose fire and rescue authorities will see an increase in core spending power of 2.3% in cash terms in 2019/20 and an overall increase of 0.3% from 2015/16 to 2019/20, in addition to Home Office funding for High-Volume Pumps and training for their use as part of the New Dimensions Grant to Fire and Rescue Authorities which, together with other National Resilience capabilities, totals approximately £18m.
Fire and Rescue Authorities are funded to respond to incidents, including flooding, demonstrated by the fantastic response of Fire and Rescue Services to the 2020 storms and a range of incidents in 2019 including the Wainfleet and Yorkshire floods and the Toddbrook Reservoir incident.
The Home Office provides a further £9m funding to Merseyside Fire and Rescue Service, the Lead Authority for National Resilience, in support of the maintenance and assurance of National Resilience Capabilities, including High Volume Pumps. Local Authorities responding to flooding in England also can make an application under the Bellwin Scheme for eligible additional costs.
Asked by: Rushanara Ali (Labour - Bethnal Green and Bow)
Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, how many people who were stopped during the recent public automated facial recognition technology trials by the Metropolitan Police were wrongly identified.
Answered by Kit Malthouse
The Metropolitan Police Service publish data about their use of live facial recognition on their website - https://www.met.police.uk/SysSiteAssets/media/downloads/central/advice/met/facial-recognition/latest-past-deployment-data.pdf.