Firefighter cuts about 'aligning resources'

A council's chief fire officer has admitted a town's fire response times will suffer as it reallocates firefighters elsewhere to improve overall services across the county.

Under the plans, Gloucestershire County Council would end night-time cover at Cheltenham West station and reallocate crews to Cinderford in the Forest of Dean.

Chief fire officer Mark Preece said the move would improve county-wide responses, especially in the Forest of Dean, where residents are currently waiting around 13 minutes for crews to attend compared to seven in Cheltenham:

"These proposals are about aligning our resources to risk and modelling tells us that we can remove resources from Cheltenham West," he said.

"I accept it will have an impact on response times in Cheltenham West, but overall it will improve fire cover, particularly in the Forest of Dean where there is a substantial difference in attendance times," he added.

Gloucestershire Fire and Rescue's overall aim is for an average response time of nine minutes.

Earlier this month, serving firefighter and Fire Brigade Union chair for Gloucestershire, Kate Yhnell, said that the service was already "paper thin," and that "there is nothing left to cut from operational fire cover".

She added that the "service and crews are stretched to the limits every day", and that further cuts were "gambling with public safety".

Responding to Yhnell's comments, Preece said that gambling with safety was "the last thing we would ever do".

"These proposals are very much about ensuring that we continue to maintain public safety across the whole of the county," he added.

"[They will also] make sure we have our resources in the right place at the right time to meet a changing risk profile."

The union initially backed the move to Cinderford under the condition that it came with 14 new firefighter posts.

Due to funding restrictions, these new posts have been withdrawn and will instead come from Cheltenham West.

Yhnell said that additional resilience "can't come at the expense of operational provision elsewhere," and pointed out that Cheltenham West responded to 351 night-time mobilisations in 2025 and had attended 229 by July of this year.

Preece says that the decision to make the move is based on modelling and what can be done within the service's financial constraints.

He reassured people that two thirds of incidents occur during the day and that both Cheltenham stations would be fully staffed during these hours.

Cheltenham East will also be covered full time and will remain home to an on-call crew.

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