Avon Fire & Rescue Service has avoided frontline cuts despite having to make £800,000 of savings in the coming year.
Photo © Avon Fire & Rescue Service
Councillors on the fire authority agreed the 2026/27 budget, including the maximum council tax rise of £5 for a band D property – an increase of less than 10p a week – taking the fire service element of bills to £95.43, or £1.83 a week.
A £5 hike was the only option presented at the meeting, but 60 per cent of the 560 people who responded to public consultation on the £68.6 million annual spending plans said they actually supported a £10 rise, with 21 per cent willing to pay an additional £5 and 19 per cent opposed to any increase.
A total of 79 per cent agreed or strongly agreed that Avon Fire & Rescue Service provided value for money, with seven per cent disagreeing or strongly disagreeing.
A report to members said the extra income still left the authority facing a £838,000 deficit in the year from April.
It said: “No other [council tax] options are being presented, as even with the maximum increase there is still a requirement for efficiencies to be made in order to balance the budget.
“Any option presenting a lower increase would not be financially viable in order to meet the statutory requirement for the authority to present a balanced budget.”
The report said several options to plug the funding gap were being explored, including challenging officers with spending powers to deliver savings of up to five per cent on their non-pay budgets.
About £600,000 of savings were identified this way in 2025/26, but any proposals must be sustainable and are subject to sign-off by fire chiefs, having assessed the risks and implications.
Another plan is to reduce overtime costs by reviewing crewing and training to help increase the availability of crews, as well as scrutinising whether filling some vacancies offers the best value to the service, and ensuring it has the right staffing structures and resources to be efficient and effective.
Avon chief fire officer Matt Cook told the committee: “We recognise that any increase in local taxation has an impact on people so we are very mindful of that.
“But we feel it is a moderate increase to the maximum of the referendum limit.”
Fire authority vice-chairman and Bath & North East Somerset councillor Paul May (Lib Dem, Publow with Whitchurch) said: “Going through the list of savings, frontline services are in effect protected by what we’re suggesting and we should all feel really proud of that.
“We have worked with the chief fire officer to make sure that happens.”
He said other fire authorities were in a much worse situation.
Councillor May said: “It’s really great that we are having this conversation today and it’s so positive.
“I will be fully supporting the £5 increase because if the government says £5 and then you don’t go to that figure, next year you’re in worse trouble.
“So being practical about it, if you don’t take what’s allowed then you’re at a disadvantage in subsequent years.”
Bristol councillor Richard Eddy (Conservative, Bishopsworth) said: “The admittedly limited consultation feedback is really positive, and clearly people in the greater Avon area do appreciate, as we’ve long known, that the safety of the public and of the fire service is the number one issue.
“Even in the cost-of-living crisis, people seem still willing to dig into their pockets.
“So although I’m not generally in favour of high taxation, the £5 band D escalation has my full support.”
Bristol councillor David Wilcox (Green, Lockleaze) told the meeting on Friday, 13th February: “We have not had to cut our frontline services as a result of the Fair Funding Review and we’ve not had to adjust our crewing rates for appliances.
“I would like an assurance that we have an adequate pipeline of trainee fire personnel to make sure that we don’t have to make crewing cuts as a result of having too many fire people retire and making sure there are enough people to supply the pumps.”
Assistant chief fire officer Richard Welch replied that the main reason behind the crewing training review was that the service had previously organised its training for the year and then arranged its crewing around that.
He said: “The result of that has been that we end up with appliances unavailable, unnecessarily sometimes.
“What we’re doing is reversing that to see how we crew our fire engines to ensure the most amount of fire engines are available at the most amount of time and then fit our training around that.
“As far as the firefighters vacancies from retirements, we’ve got a training course starting in early March of 16 people and we’re planning the same for September, so it will greatly increase our establishment of figures, and with that alongside the training review will mean we will have more fire engines available more of the time.”
The service will raise £43.4 million from local residents’ council tax in 2026/27, with £19.1 million from central government and £6 million from grants and other sources.
By far its biggest expenditure is on staffing costs, totalling £54.3 million, including £34.3 million for full-time firefighters.
Adam Postans, Local Democracy Reporter
