Good nice to see someone telling the PCC's to but out of things that they do not understand. Where is the need for the fire brigades to be controlled by failed MP's and the rest of the useless PCC collective. Mission creep writ large.

Police priorities - MFH, murder, ASB, theft, burglary, assaults, drugs, cyber, CSE, domestic abuse, traffic to name but a few, all of which the public want to know about. Fire service priorities - fire prevention, putting fires out and rescue. If my local force and fire service are anything to go by the most police forces are also about 10 times the size of the fire service. Basically I can't see the justification for public intervention or management of local fire services although I can see why PCCs would like to expand their remits and sense of importance.

Good to see some fightback from other 'locally elected representatives' The Conservative party lit the slow burn on the fuse for PCC's in 2012,but as this article suggests if their tentacles start to stray into conservative council area remits there will be a fight back. No reason for collaboration/oversight. As below Fire brigade are Fires out/Fire prevention/and on call rescue/major incident. Police, pretty much everything ( including scooping up what our alleged partner agencies cant deal with past 5pm ) PCC's were sniffing around Probation in another recent PO article, shameless.

Police operate under completely different legislation to Fire & Rescue services (esp wrt personal data - DPA 2018 Part 3 is Police/CJS specific). As a result any suggestion of pooling of resources should be viewed with scepticism (at least). In particular thosee headline grabbing single cross-service deployments of Fire + Police in a single platform vehicle are problematic - scratch the surface and we'd find a lot of issues that cannot be reconciled between the services. About the only thing they DO have in common is a blue flashing light - and that's not a good enough basis to justify this.

Some of these PCC have failed for example Lead for Schools and the schools amongst the worst in the country, most have a history of failure eg Bankrupt Baker A and S. Even the educated ones like Vera Baird QC fails to keep in check unlawful reviews on police pensions by Northumbria who have lost many injury pension cases. Despite former cops who lost careers as victims of crimes Baird fails them and then goes onto to become a victims commissioner.

Power Grab and will want more ££££ for the responsibility……shameless

The Fire Services in the UK are staffed by thousands of very professional firefighters and the collaboration on the ground between the police and the fire service has always been excellent. in one of my last command postings we always found it very useful in serious operations which involved emergency service attendance, particularly over long period to have a fire officer in the police control room and vice versa to ensure that all resources were properly deployed and the exchange of information was valuable. OPCC 's are not equipped to deal with Fire and Rescue Services in addition to the police service, and it is nothing more than a grab for power.