Disaster plan branded 'inadequate'

The New Dimensions programme was launched after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in America in 2001 to ensure the 46 fire and rescue services in England had the specialist vehicles and equipment they needed to cope with a similar incident.

It includes mass decontamination equipment for dealing with chemical, biological, radiological or nuclear incidents, urban search and rescue equipment for building collapses, and high-volume pumps for tackling floods and large fires.

However the National Audit Office (NAO) warned that the project had been beset by delays and cost overruns and was still not capable of meeting the Government's full national planning scenarios.

While New Dimensions was used successfully to tackle the summer floods of 2007, the NAO said that it could have been overwhelmed if the floods in Yorkshire and the West of England had occurred at the same time rather than a month apart.

In order to deal with such large-scale flooding, some 76 high-volume water pumps would have been needed - more than half as many again as the 50 which were actually available.

The NAO quoted the Government's Chief Fire and Rescue Adviser, Sir Ken Knight, who found that, in the view of those involved in dealing with the floods, "the current capability of the fire and rescue service was inadequate to meet either national planning scenarios or events on the scale of summer 2007".

Within the fire and rescue services, the NAO said there was "confusion" over who was actually authorised to deploy New Dimension equipment, while emergency planning - particularly at the regional level - was said to be "underdeveloped". Of the 37 fire and rescue services which responded to a NAO census, all but one expressed concern about the arrangements for training crews to use the new equipment.

The NAO was also highly critical of the procurement process, which meant that most of the equipment was not available until 2005 - two years later than originally planned. Between £3 million and £8 million was wasted on the acquisition of the trucks used to transport the equipment to the scene of a disaster due to "over-ordering and poor record-keeping and contracting".

In an effort to bring the programme under control, the Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG) spent £12 million on consultants, many charging more than £1,000-a-day. However a management accountant working on the programme still defrauded it of almost £900,000 in a false payments scam which went undetected for nine months.