Fire and Emergency New Zealand has spent about $90,000 on an outside public relations consultant and a law firm to help it answer questions from a parliamentary select committee about its own fire trucks, and MPs are not impressed.
The spending was revealed at a hearing of Parliament’s Governance and Administration Committee, which has spent four months digging into why so many of the country’s fire appliances are off the road and why a batch of 30 new trucks ordered nearly a decade ago still is not answering callouts. Fire and Emergency chief executive Kerry Gregory and the agency’s newly installed board chair fronted up to the committee, and much of the questioning turned on why an organisation of that size needed to hire consultants to explain its own operations.
National MP Melissa Lee put it bluntly. “The fact that you had to hire outside a PR company and law firm to actually find answers for yourself and paying exorbitant amounts of money actually tells me that you really need to think about how your organisation is actually operating,” she told the hearing, as reported by RNZ.
Gregory defended the decision. He said the agency needed help working out precisely what the committee wanted, and needed outside assistance to pull information out of ageing computer systems and paper records so it could get the facts, in his words, to our fingertips. That answer did little to settle the room, because the state of Fire and Emergency’s record keeping is itself one of the things the inquiry is examining.
The agency conceded a long list of failings during the hearing. It accepted that its procurement systems were not good enough, that its contract management was poor, that maintenance reporting was still being done on paper, and that its document and information technology systems were inadequate. Those are not small admissions from a national emergency service with a fleet spread across every region.
At the centre of the inquiry sit 30 Type 3 appliances, the large pumping trucks that do the heavy lifting at structure fires. They were commissioned back in 2017. They were built in the United Kingdom, shipped to New Zealand, sent back overseas for repair work, and shipped out here again. Nearly nine years on they remain in testing and modification, and they are now out of warranty. Not one of them has entered frontline service. Problems reported during the process have included cracking in the vehicle bodies.
Two of the senior people responsible for the fleet have left in recent weeks. National manager Mike Moran and deputy chief executive Sarah Sinclair have both resigned. Gregory told MPs that Sinclair did not receive an exit package, although the committee pressed for more detail on the circumstances. The board has also changed at the top, with former Watercare executive Raveen Jaduram taking over as chair from Rebecca Keoghan roughly three weeks before the hearing.
The inquiry itself was set up in April after National’s Εtaki MP Tim Costley pushed for it, arguing that the pattern of breakdowns was too widespread to keep treating as a run of bad luck. “I receive daily messages from firefighters about fire trucks breaking down or not being available when needed,” Costley said when the inquiry was announced on 1 April. The committee agreed to look at current faults and serviceability across the fleet, the reasons for the Type 3 delays, the cost of leaving those trucks parked up, and the timeline for either putting every appliance into service or retiring it.
The New Zealand Professional Firefighters Union has been closely involved. National secretary Wattie Watson confirmed in May that “the Parliamentary Governance and Administration Committee is conducting an inquiry into FENZ’s fleet management and related issues,” and the union has urged its members to make submissions. Firefighters have been among the loudest voices arguing that the problem is not confined to the new trucks, pointing to repeated failures of Auckland’s heavy aerial appliances, the big ladder trucks used to reach upper floors, including at a fire in KumeΕ«.
MPs from across the House have taken part in the questioning, including Costley and Lee for National, Mike Davidson for the Greens and committee chair Andy Foster for NZ First. That breadth matters politically. Fire and Emergency is funded largely through a levy on insurance policies, so householders and businesses are paying for the fleet whether or not the trucks are turning up. A cross party committee finding fault with the agency’s governance is harder for anyone to wave away as opposition politics in an election year.
The inquiry has not yet reported back to Parliament. When it does, the committee can recommend changes to how Fire and Emergency buys, maintains and tracks its vehicles, and can direct criticism at the board and at the Department of Internal Affairs, which oversees the agency. Recommendations are not binding, but a select committee report is a public record that ministers and boards find difficult to ignore.
For now the numbers do the talking. Thirty trucks ordered in 2017, none in service, an unknown bill for storing and modifying them, and $90,000 spent on outside help to explain the situation to the MPs who asked. Whether that spending was a sensible way to get accurate answers or a sign of an organisation that has lost track of its own operations is exactly the judgement the committee now has to make.
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What do you make of it? Should Fire and Emergency have been able to answer the committee without hiring consultants, and who should be held responsible for 30 trucks sitting idle for nine years? Leave a comment below and let us know.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job π
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