214 ANALYSING HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT
to life of a non-functioning emergency service makes industrial action highly
questionable morally. This is so even though fire crews did often respond ad
hoc to serious incidents when officially on strike.
The challenge of terrorism
Emergency services can be victims of their own success, as the case of the UK
fire service shows. Not only has it reduced the number of fires by campaigning
for improved building techniques and by carrying out good inspections; it has
raised consciousness of fire risks and persuaded the public to purchase devices
that give early warning of fire. Bain found that the number of fires in the UK
had fallen markedly after a peak in 1995, albeit with a slow increase at the
end of the 1990s. Internationally, the incidence of dwelling fires in developed
countries from 1996–2000 fell by between about 1 per cent in Britain and
about 11 per cent in the USA and New Zealand, with the incidence of deaths
from such fires falling much faster (Bain 2002: Figure 3.4). This background
of success prompted Bain to conclude not only that the fire service might be
reduced in size, but that it could be reorganized to respond better to places
and times that posed the highest fire risk.
This approach makes sense if the main task of the fire service continues
to be fighting fires, and if the trends described in Bain continue. Matters are
complicated, however, by the fact that the fire service is the emergency service
par excellence, and by the fact that the potential demands on its services may
not be confined in the future to fires. There is an acknowledgement of this
fact in the UK government’s 2003 White Paper on the Fire and Rescue Service.
It explicitly looks to a role for the fire service in which firefighting interven-
tion is increasingly the exception due to a concentration on fire prevention.
But at the same time, it envisages a much bigger role for the fire service in
the management of natural disasters and terrorism (HM Govt. White Paper
2003).
This shift of policy is philosophically interesting, because it suggests a
recognition of a difference between, so to speak, a normal emergency and
an abnormal emergency. A fire in a dwelling or industrial property is a nor-
mal emergency, a commonly encountered and normally manageable one, for
which there are established and effective remedies. It may even be that fires are
coming to be seen by the UK government as largely preventable emergencies,
in contradistinction to extreme weather conditions and terrorism. Terrorism,
especially in the form of chemical or biological attack, is both abnormal
and virtually unpreventable, two things fires are not. Again by contrast with
fires, terrorism is an object of considerable general public fear, and a major
preoccupation for governments in the West.