EXCLUSIVE: The Staffordshire Fire Service Letters

New Revelations Cast Fresh Scrutiny on State of Staffordshire Fire & Rescue Service, Sudden Departure of Previous Chief.

Ever since the start of the series looking into Staffordshire Fire Service (SFRS) and investigating the potential culpability of its past and current senior leadership in covering up the circumstances leading to the death of one of its firefighters Alec Elwell during the worst of the UK’s Covid lockdown period in January 2021, there has been a flood of feedback and fresh information provided to The Narrative Shaper from various individuals with knowledge of what can be only described as a “parlous and scandalous” state of English firefighting.

However, two particular pieces of evidence provided by a crucial whistleblower over the weekend shine brightest out of everything sent in, due to both their critical content nature which further sheds light on the workplace cultural failings endemic at SFRS to the present day, as well as how they may well have tied in directly with real-life consequences already reported in the public domain for which the impetus and motivation has yet to be fully explained by mainstream news or the UK government itself.

Specifically, The Narrative Shaper can now disclose and publish for the first time, two anonymous whistleblower letters sent in to HM Inspector of Constabulary and HM Inspector of Fire & Rescue Services (HMICFRS) raising the alarm and putting forth serious allegations of concern regarding SFRS’s disregard of workplace safety, toxic workplace leadership culture, deliberate suppression of internal dissent, and malicious compliance to Freedom of Information (FOI) Requests on the few occasions that such requests are actually responded to.

These letters cast new light on the circumstances and state of SFRS which Becci Bryant, lauded in 2016 as the first UK female chief to have risen through the ranks to the top position had retired from, raising serious questions about the extent of mismanagement Bryant presided over at SFRS during her tenure. Similar serious questions are also posed against Rob Barber, who had taken over after Bryant’s official retirement as SFRS fire chief in October 2021 mere months shy of 30 years’ service (with Bryant announcing her decision to retire back in March 2021), with the first and second letters having been sent during both individuals’ time in office leading SFRS.

In the first letter dated 19 January 2021, the anonymous whistleblower describes themselves as taking no pleasure in writing a “last-resort” letter to the national independent inspectorate, answerable only to Parliament and responsible for public interest-driven assessing and reporting on the effectiveness and efficiency of police forces and fire & rescue services in England and Wales. However, the whistleblower had finally decided to stay silent no longer after two of his colleagues whom they were good friends with had attempted suicide directly caused by workplace bullying and harassment within SFRS.

The whistleblower then goes on to raise several key accusations of which the main ones are as follows:

1. SFRS conducted a training exercise back in 2020 which not only lacked in the required manpower and equipment needed for its safe conduct, but also neglected to follow safe systems of work. This resulted in a SFRS firefighter (unnamed in the letter but consequently reported in mainstream news as Vincent “Vinny” Hogan”) suffering a head injury with lifelong paralytic consequences.

2. SFRS had in the aftermath of Vinny Hogan’s training accident attempted to head off any potential external independent scrutiny by HMICFRS by commissioning the neighbouring Derbyshire Fire and Rescue Service (DFRS) to conduct an investigation into themselves first. This attempt at “ownself check ownself” was decried by the whistleblower as similar in nature to the previous peer review framework (which had allowed for senior fire officers to assess each other’s performances despite having conflicts of interest due to their interpersonal friendships) that had been abolished and replaced with the Inspectorate framework since July 2017.

3. Internal complaints regarding corruption, bullying and other serious issues have been consistently ignored or refused by senior SFRS leadership for further investigation. The same deliberate ignoring has also been applied to staff mental health issues.

4. FOI requests submitted to SFRS had been complied with misleading or false responses given in return.

5. SFRS senior leaders had maladministered the fire service’s pension scheme, first by ignoring legal advice and later on attempting to buy the silence of complainants with unauthorised payments drawn from its taxpayer-funded budget. Despite SFRS subsequently incurring fines from the UK tax authority (HMRC), not a single SFRS senior leader had been held accountable.

6. Senior SFRS leaders have been spending time at work feathering their own beds by setting up private limited consultancy companies explicitly meant to provide consulting services to the public fire service, instead of focusing on their jobs at hand.

With regards to point 6 above, it would be later publicly established shortly after this first whistleblowing letter was sent to HMICFRS that “Ignis Workplace Solutions” was the brainchild of then-Deputy Chief Fire Officer (DCFO) Rob Barber. According to retrieved Companies House records, Barber had initially set up “Ignis Workplace Solutions” back on 7 October 2020 when he was still Deputy Chief Fire Officer, with himself as the majority shareholder with 85% of the shares.

This was a direct violation of Rule 7 set out in the “Gold Book” issued by the National Joint Council for Brigade Managers of Fire and Rescue Services, to which compliance by senior fire service leadership in England and Wales is mandatory. A digital copy of the “Gold Book” can be downloaded here.

Rob Barber’s side business first came to light back in February 2021, when Private Eye ran a story aptly titled “Barber Shop” detailing both Barber’s setting up of Ignis Workplace Solutions, as well as the resultant shock and surprise of being kept so long in the dark from Matthew Ellis who was in his final months of office as Staffordshire Police, Fire and Crime Commissioner. By right, senior fire service leaders must inform their regional fire authority in writing as soon as practicable once they become aware of any potential personal financial (pecuniary) interest which could pose conflicts of interest from any contract be it direct or otherwise being proposed by their fire service and local fire authority to a private external business.

According to SFRS insiders with knowledge of the resultant fallout, Barber had his bacon quite literally saved by his direct superior, Chief Fire Officer Becci Bryant attempting in equal parts to assuage and distract Ellis from taking direct action against Barber by claiming to have given him six-months’ temporary permission to set up the company in October 2020 under an “Outside Work Policy”. This was also alluded to in a follow-up Private Eye article in March 2021. In reality, Bryant had no such authority as both she and Rob Barber being senior leaders meant that they are subjected to the rules and regulations set out in the “Gold Book”, not the “Outside Work Policy” which is meant for rank-and-file personnel.

It was merely their good fortune that Ellis didn’t even know what the Gold Book was let alone its various rules governing the conduct of senior fire service leaders, that let Bryant’s bare-faced lie get through unchallenged. In any case, Rob Barber would figuratively soil his pants at being so directly scrutinised in the media for his bed-feathering actions that he would hastily transfer all of his shares in his own company to go under his wife’s name before ultimately having “Ignis Workplace Solutions” struck off in June 2021.

The second whistleblowing letter sent in August 2023 to HMICFRS was done so in an attempt to alert the inspectorate to the reality on the ground in SFRS which the whistleblower believed SFRS senior leadership under Barber would not have been forthcoming with such information.

Many of the points are rehashes of the January 2021 letter, though some new points raised are as follows:

1. Since SFRS was last inspected in mid-2021 as a direct result of the contents within the first whistleblowing letter triggering HMICFRS to bring forward its inspection of the fire service, more than 80% of the Human Resource Team and 30% of the Occupational Health Team have exited SFRS citing their inability to continue working under its toxic leadership.

2. SFRS had spent close to half a million pounds not just on legal services to defend itself against employment litigation claims, but more seriously on buying the silence of individuals who had been driven to seek out legal recourse against SFRS as a last-ditch option with payouts attached with strings to non-disclosure agreements (NDAs). The abuse of NDAs has since been recognised by the current Labour government, with talk of banning them from being used to silence workplace misconduct complainants.

3. SFRS senior leadership under CFO Rob Barber has continued their financial mismanagement of the fire service, which was already mentioned in the first whistleblowing letter 2 years prior. These included the continuing maladministration of the pension scheme despite advice given by the local pension board, the misusing of public funds by CFO Barber for refurbishing his personal home, and most concerningly a million-pound fraud case involving the disposal of retired fire service vehicles through a Stoke workshop at the heart of Staffordshire’s Joint Emergency Transport Services (JETS) scheme.
   
   It is understood that the JETS fraud case is soon to be officially charged in court in the near future, and that the Stoke workshop in question has since been taken over in direct operations and run by Staffordshire Police.

4. In response to longstanding crewing shortages, SFRS CFO Rob Barber had proposed a new response policy for only 3 firefighters instead of 4 to respond to any incidents such as building fires and road traffic collisions. This was allegedly being rammed through by Barber with no regard for due consultation or even risk assessment process, as well as no training nor assessment provided to operational commanders on the ground with even the training department stating that they had no faith in the new response policy. Meanwhile the already-undermanned existing firefighter force is increasingly fatigued from working 70 to 80-hour weeks, made possible only by SFRS senior leadership deliberately turning a blind eye towards ensuring compliance with working time legislation which are safety-critical for well-rested individuals in high-stress jobs that require operating heavy machinery.
   

   As of January 2025, the aforementioned point of concern has since become moot with the new 3-firefighter response policy confirmed as permanent on the back of what SFRS claimed to be an “80 percent” approval rate gleaned from its public consultation period between August and November 2024. SFRS also claimed a reduction in response time as a direct result of the new policy, in some cases by over 9 minutes.

It is unknown just how much of the accusations and points of concern within these two whistleblower letters against SFRS sent in to HMICFRS hit home in a meaningful manner, given the ongoing parlous and scandalous state of SFRS, its leadership and workplace culture as demonstrated by the ongoing cover-up of its internal report on Alec Elwell’s death being reported on here at The Narrative Shaper.

However, eagle-eyed readers will notice that within a mere two months from the first whistleblower letter being sent in to HMICFRS, Becci Bryant would announce her decision to retire as Staffordshire fire chief after 29 years’ service. Numbers always mean something, be it in suggesting circumstantial linkage between two seemingly unrelated events or raising questions about why one might depart from a senior leadership position in a public service organisation falling just a hair’s breath short of a nice rounded number of 30 years in service.

And that is the topic for another time in the upcoming brand new entry to the SFRS/Alec Elwell series. As with the case for so many investigative journalism work, pulling on a single strand often ends up unravelling much more than meets the eye.