How many Fire & Rescue Services should there be?

Introduction

Over the last week or so, there’s been a lot of discussion about the future shape of policing in England and Wales (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cpwnn10rgk4o), following calls last year from senior police leaders to significantly reduce the number of forces (https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/jul/06/police-chiefs-call-for-cuts-to-number-of-forces-in-england-and-wales). The argument they’re making is fairly clear: fewer organisations could mean quicker decision-making, clearer leadership, and a better platform for investing in the future.

That debate is still at an early stage, and it’s obviously about policing rather than fire. But it does raise an awkward question for the wider emergency services sector. If police forces were to move towards a much smaller number of organisations, and ambulance services already operate at a regional scale, where does that leave fire and rescue?

That’s one of the reasons I wanted to write this piece.

The other reason is that this is a question that comes up surprisingly often in conversations with people working in fire services. Usually not in meetings or formal settings, but in side conversations, and is often framed as “what do you think?” rather than a strong view either way.

I suspect that’s partly because I’ve spent time working across different parts of the emergency services system, including ambulance services and overseas, while still being closely connected to the UK fire sector. That gives me a slightly different vantage point, and sometimes that external-but-informed perspective is useful when thinking about issues that are hard to talk about openly.

Just to be clear, this article isn’t trying to answer the question of how many fire services there should be. I don’t think there’s a single right number, and even if there were, it wouldn’t be sensible for me to suggest one. What I am trying to do is explore some of the implications and trade-offs that sit behind the question, particularly in England, where the structure of the fire sector has stayed largely the same for a long time.

Context

In England, there are currently 44 fire and rescue services. Over the past 20 years, only three mergers have taken place: Devon and Somerset, Dorset and Wiltshire, and most recently Hampshire and the Isle of Wight. Aside from those, most services still broadly reflect historic county or metropolitan boundaries.

Elsewhere, things look different. Scotland moved from eight regional fire services to a single national service in 2013 by far the biggest structural change in the UK fire sector this century. Ambulance services in England went through their own consolidation earlier, moving from around 30 trusts to 11 regional organisations in the mid-2000s. And internationally, there are examples such as New Zealand, which now operates a single national fire and emergency organisation.

None of these examples offer a neat blueprint for England. Each came with its own challenges, compromises and learning curves. But they do show that large-scale structural change can happen, and that it tends to bring both opportunities and problems in fairly equal measure.

Potential Implications of Fewer Fire and Rescue Services

Rather than getting drawn into abstract arguments about mergers, I think it’s more helpful to ask what areas of fire service activity might realistically be affected if there were fewer, larger organisations.

Response and Resilience

At a basic level, fire service operating models across the UK are more similar than they are different. The mix of incidents varies by area, as does overall demand, but the fundamentals of response are pretty consistent everywhere.

Fire services already work across borders, share resources when needed, and increasingly operate regional control arrangements. In that sense, some degree of regionalisation is already part of the landscape.

Larger organisations could, in theory, offer greater resilience (particularly when dealing with major or concurrent incidents) simply because it may be easier to move resources around a wider footprint. But it’s important not to oversell that. Some of the biggest challenges facing response capability, such as on-call availability, are highly local and won’t be solved by redrawing boundaries.

There are also practical complications. Bringing together services with very different crewing models, risk profiles or operational cultures would need careful handling. Scale can create options, but it can also introduce new tensions if it isn’t managed well.

Prevention and Protection

Prevention and protection are, by their nature, local activities. Home fire safety work, Safe and Well visits, and building inspections all rely on local knowledge, local relationships and local delivery.

For that reason, I don’t think having fewer services would dramatically change what happens on the ground day-to-day. Identifying vulnerable people, understanding community risk and working with local partners would still need to happen at a very granular level.

Where scale might make a difference is behind the scenes. Larger organisations may find it easier to sustain specialist capacity, manage workloads and maintain consistency, particularly in protection, where many services struggle to recruit and retain enough qualified staff. But again, any benefit would come from how the organisation is run, not simply from being bigger.

Planning and Governance

Planning is another area that often comes up in these conversations, particularly Community Risk Management Plans.

Every service is required to produce its own CRMP, and while there are important local differences, there are also plenty of similarities between neighbouring services facing broadly comparable risks. That raises a reasonable question about how much variation is genuinely needed at service level, and whether some elements of planning could be tackled more efficiently at a wider scale.

That doesn’t mean local risk disappears, or that everything should be centralised. But it does suggest there’s room to think more carefully about where different decisions are best made (nationally, regionally, service-wide or locally) rather than assuming everything has to sit where it always has.

People, Culture and Leadership

Culture is one of the most important issues facing the fire sector, and also one of the hardest to talk about in the context of structural change.

What seems clear is that cultural problems aren’t simply a function of size. Some large services have faced serious challenges, and so have some small ones. Merging organisations doesn’t automatically improve culture, and it doesn’t inevitably make it worse either.

From what I’ve seen elsewhere, culture still comes down to leadership, behaviours and accountability, regardless of organisational size. Structural change can sometimes create space for things to be done differently, but it doesn’t remove the need to tackle underlying issues directly. That work exists whether services are large or small.

Finance and Investment

Finally, there’s the financial angle. Consolidation is often linked to potential efficiencies, in leadership structures, procurement, systems and support functions, and those benefits can be real. But they’re rarely simple or immediate.

Experience elsewhere suggests that transition costs and integration challenges can be significant, and any financial benefits depend heavily on how savings are used. Scale can open doors, but it doesn’t remove the need for difficult decisions.

Conclusions

I don’t have a view on the “right” number of fire services, and I’m not suggesting that mergers are inevitable or even desirable in the short term. What I do think is that the wider context is shifting.

If policing moves towards a much smaller number of forces, and ambulance services continue to operate at a regional scale, the question of fire service structure is likely to become harder to avoid. When that happens, it would be far better to approach the conversation thoughtfully and with evidence, rather than reactively.

There will be difficult trade-offs, and no option will be risk-free. But there may also be opportunities: to improve resilience, reduce duplication and create organisations that are better equipped for the challenges the sector faces over the next decade.

These are the kinds of questions I spend a lot of time thinking about with fire services: how changes in structure, demand and risk translate into practical implications for response, prevention, protection and planning. From where I sit, they’re conversations that benefit from being explored early, with a bit of distance and perspective.