Resilience

When Central London was bombed on 7 July 2005, the spotlight fell once again on the UK's ability to respond to disaster. And terrorism is not the only threat that we, as a nation, have to deal with. Widespread flooding across the country in 2007 stretched our emergency services to the limit.

Our ability to detect, prevent and respond to all kinds of emergency is known as resilience. Communities and Local Government works to ensure that the fire and rescue service is equipped and trained for any disaster and that local organisations are fully prepared.

The destruction of the Twin Towers in New York on September 11 2001 marked a turning point in the threat posed by terrorism. It prompted our Government to review and improve our ability to respond to risk. Communities and Local Government is investing £1bn through its Fire and Resilience Programme to increase resilience, enhance capability and improve efficiency in the Fire and Rescue Service.

New Dimension

Through our New Dimension programme, we have invested over £300m on equipping the fire and rescue service to provide the best possible response to any major incident. This includes mass decontamination, urban search and rescue, flooding and enhanced command and control.

FiReControl

The FiReControl project will develop a network of nine regional control centres across England to replace the existing 46 fire and rescue service control rooms which rely on different technologies and operational procedures. The new network will use a single national operating system, providing all nine regional control centres with access to the same information, latest technology and functionality that is currently only available to a few. This will enhance the service provided to our communities when responding to both routine and major incidents.

The first of these centres are expected to be up and running by Summer 2010. Meanwhile we have given a £1.2m grant to West Yorkshire Fire and Rescue Authority to make interim arrangements for co-ordinating and organising responses to major emergencies.

Firelink

As part of the drive to improve communications the Firelink project will replace individual fire and rescue service's radio systems with a single wide-area digital radio system. Many existing systems are old, outdated and incompatible with other services' equipment. The new system will allow communications between brigades and also with other emergency services.

The new system will have: