KEY POINTS:
The Fire Service is a problem that plainly will not go away. The problem, at heart, is that the service is compulsorily financed from a voluntary source. Providers of insurance against fire are levied for its upkeep, but nobody has to buy fire insurance and, considering how rarely buildings catch fire, it can make sense for owners to carry the risk.
It makes even more sense when they know that, should their building catch fire, the brigade will turn up whether they are insured or not. In its ethic, and in public expectation, the Fire Service is a public service and the Insurance Council argues it should be financed from public taxation. This, governments have refused to do and they continue to refuse. Announcing some changes to the financing of the service this week, Internal Affairs Minister Rick Barker left the burden still on the insurance industry. The levy is to be collected on insurance against all forms of building damage or loss rather than fire alone, which better reflects the range of accidents and emergencies the Fire Service attends, but still leaves the problem that many who may need the service can avoid sharing its cost.
According to the Insurance Council, increasing numbers of property owners are not insuring their properties, confident that if any misfortune occurs the service will come to their aid. The council's chief executive, Chris Ryan, says that when communities are hit by climatic events such as floods it is common to find up to 40 per cent of properties uninsured. Even local bodies and government departments, including Housing New Zealand which owns more than 60,000 houses, carried their own risk, he said, and did not pay the levy.
The estimated 20 per cent of the population without property insurance were probably the most likely to need the Fire Service, he believed. They were "free riding" at the expense of the insured and that would not change now that the Government had widened the pool of insurance that must pay for the rescue service.
While the logic of the council's case is compelling, the Government's resistance is understandable. Firefighters do not have consistent, full, workloads. Floods, chemical spills and other hazards reflected in a wider levy occur even less frequently than fire. If firefighters had not taken it upon themselves to attend road accidents and specialise in cutting people out of vehicles, they would be hard pressed to fill their time.
But they are also a strongly unionised corps which has proven itself fearsomely adept at summoning public support against any attempt to reduce the costs of so much machinery and manpower that spends most of its time preparing for rare call-outs. The present Government will remember the pain it helped to inflict on the previous one when an insurance executive, Roger Estall, was put in charge of the Fire Service with a mission to reform it.
Labour in power has soft-pedalled that mission but not abandoned it. The only reason for resisting the logic of tax-funding the Fire Service is the financial discipline that would be lost. While the insurance industry remains lumbered with the cost it will continue to look for more efficient employment of the capital and manpower sitting in fire stations.
The moment the service was put on the Government's supply, even the Government knows what would happen: costs would cease to be watched at operational levels and politicians would not dare question the value provided by popular heroes. It is therefore in the public interest that the service is financed by voluntary insurance and kept alert to work that could increase its value.
