Firefighters offered 16% rise over three years
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Your support makes all the difference.Leaders of Britain's 50,000 firefighters will decide today whether to accept a 16 per cent pay increase over three years to settle the first national dispute in the service since 1977.
The offer is pitched at a level which will place the Fire Brigades Union in considerable difficulty, having originally demanded a 40 per cent pay increase at the start of a campaign of industrial action.
The proposal from the Deputy Prime Minister, John Prescott, involves a 4 per cent pay increase backdated to last November, a further 7 per cent from this November and 4.2 per cent from July 2004.
The offer is dependent on the executive of the FBU, which meets in an emergency session today, agreeing a range of radical changes to working practices, switching the emphasis from intervention in fires to prevention. If the deal is accepted, it would put experienced firefighters on £25,000 a year by the end of the process.
The Government has agreed to £30m of "transitional funding" to allow the changes to come into force. Ministers have agreed to accept a pay formula which will dictate firefighters' wages for two years after the deal.
It is possible that the union will put the proposals to its members in a ballot. However, militant left-wingers on the FBU's executive will argue that the deal is inferior to proposals accepted by the union last year but vetoed by the Government. Fire authorities had agreed to a 16 per cent increase over two years, but Mr Prescott's department intervened and withdrew the offer.
A report commissioned by the Government from Sir George Bain, which recommended radical measures to enhance the productivity of the service, suggested an 11 per cent pay rise over two years and was rejected by the union. But Andy Gilchrist, general secretary of the FBU, has indicated that the union would be prepared to accept many of the changes proposed in the Bain report in return for a substantial increase in wages.
* Train guards across Britain are understood to have voted for industrial action in a safety dispute likely to bring chaos to the national rail network on a scale not seen since before privatisation.
The biggest rail union, the RMT, is scheduled to announce either today or tomorrow that members have backed strikes at up to 14 train operating companies.
Among the operators that could be hit by 24-hour or 48-hour stoppages are South West Trains, Connex, South Central, Scotrail, Virgin West Coast and Virgin CrossCountry.
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