Fire and Emergency New Zealand chief executive Kerry Gregory has resigned with immediate effect, five weeks after Internal Affairs Minister Brooke van Velden said publicly that she had lost confidence in him. The board announced his departure late on Friday afternoon, 23 October, as the country headed into Labour Weekend.
Board chair Raveen Jaduram said in a statement that Gregory “has today advised us that he has resigned, effective immediately, from his role as Chief Executive of Fire and Emergency”. He said Gregory had told the board that “in the light of the Minister of Internal Affairs’ recent public statement that she did not have confidence in him, it has become untenable for him to remain in his role”.
“The Board wishes to acknowledge and thank Mr Gregory for his 36 years of dedicated service, including a very lengthy period as an operational firefighter, and wishes him well for the future,” Jaduram said. Darry Purdy stays on as acting chief executive and Megan Stiffler as national commander, the roles both have filled since Gregory went on leave in September.
The resignation ends a stand-off that had left the country’s fire service without a permanent leader for more than a month. Van Velden withdrew her confidence in Gregory on 17 September, telling 1News that he had “withheld information from me for a full year on a matter of a seriously significant incident”. She called it “a serious breach of trust” and said the matter was “of a nature that is so significant that I no longer have confidence in the chief executive”. Gregory was overseas at the World Fire Congress at the time, on what Fire and Emergency described as long-planned leave.
The information at issue concerns how Fire and Emergency administered the levy that funds it. The organisation gets most of its money from a levy on insurance policies covering property and vehicles. Fire and Emergency has confirmed that a “historical” matter relating to the administration of that levy scheme has been referred to the Serious Fraud Office. Van Velden told RNZ the following day that the organisation had been “breaching their own law in regards to levy collections”, though she declined to give detail while the office was considering the matter. “It’s completely unacceptable, and it points to a lack of accountability across the public service,” she said, according to the Otago Daily Times.
A timeline released through written parliamentary answers, and published by the New Zealand Professional Firefighters Union on 9 October, shows the matter predates Gregory’s time in the top job. The minister was advised that the earliest estimated date of the conduct under review was 2011, that it occurred before early 2021, and that an internal investigation ran from April 2022, the month Gregory became chief executive, until May 2026. The board directed a referral to the Serious Fraud Office at a meeting on 30 July this year and the referral was made on 10 August. Van Velden was formally advised by a briefing note from the chief executive on 4 September. The Serious Fraud Office has said only that it received the referral and is assessing the information, and it has not said whether it will open an investigation. No findings of any kind have been made.
The minister’s complaint was never that Gregory was responsible for the levy problem itself. It was that he knew about it and did not tell her. In the same written answers she said her lack of confidence related to the chief executive, but added that “I do however have concerns relating to the capability of other senior leaders within FENZ”.
The resignation also comes a month after a parliamentary select committee delivered a scathing report on the organisation’s handling of its fire truck fleet. As NEWS WIRE reported on 17 September, Parliament’s Governance and Administration Committee found that 30 new fire trucks bought in 2019 were still not in service and told the Government to consider changing the board and whether Fire and Emergency should be trusted to buy its own trucks. The committee had earlier criticised the organisation for spending on public relations advisers and lawyers to answer its questions. A separate Government review of how Fire and Emergency is funded was ordered in June.
For five weeks after the minister’s intervention, the question of what would happen to Gregory went unanswered. The union’s release said his annual leave had been extended to 19 October. On the morning of his resignation, RNZ reported that he remained on extended leave, that Fire and Emergency would not say whether the leave was paid, and that the board was still talking to him. “The board is working diligently to address these matters and remains focused on reaching an appropriate resolution,” a spokesperson told RNZ. “We are conscious of the impact this is having on our people.” Van Velden said that morning she had not changed her position and that “I expect the board to keep me informed of the steps being taken”. By the evening Gregory had gone.
Responding to the resignation, van Velden kept her comment brief. “I expect the Board to manage the leadership transition appropriately,” she said in a statement reported by RNZ.
The firefighters’ union, which has been in a long-running pay dispute with Fire and Emergency and had called for a clean-out of the board and senior leadership team, welcomed the departure but questioned why it had taken so long. National secretary Wattie Watson told RNZ the resignation should be the catalyst for “massive and sweeping change” at the organisation. “This is incredible it took more than a month to happen quite frankly,” he said, describing Fire and Emergency as being in a “dire situation”. In a statement on the union’s website, Watson said the board should now review the merits of the restructuring carried out under Gregory and scrutinise those who enabled it, and he asked for a meeting with the board to discuss turning the organisation around.
Gregory joined the fire service as a firefighter and worked his way up through the ranks over more than three decades before taking the chief executive role in April 2022. The board’s statement did not say whether he would receive any payment on departure, and it has not said when it will begin recruiting a permanent replacement. His exit leaves Fire and Emergency facing a Serious Fraud Office assessment, an unresolved pay dispute with career firefighters, a fleet inquiry whose recommendations the Government has yet to act on, and an election on 7 November that could change the minister it answers to.
Gregory’s resignation was the second departure of a senior public service chief in a single day. Chief of Defence Force Air Marshal Tony Davies also resigned on Friday, over an undisclosed relationship.
Do you think the board should follow the chief executive out the door, or has Fire and Emergency now had the change it needs? Have your say in the comments below.
This article was written by AI, briefed to report the facts, hopefully without some of the bias people bring to the job 🙂
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