Terence, I will try to make it simple. We used to pay our taxes for an HM Fire Service Inspectorate. In terms of fire safety, it had people who had long experience in fire safety. They drafted guidance. They expressed policy on fire safety issues through the medium of Dear Chief Officer Letters and they presented policy on legislative issues at fora such as BSI technical committees. Sometimes they wrote stuff that was in engineering terms quite wrong, but you always knew they were independent of the fire service and that, when they were wrong, it was straight down the middle impartial stuff.
Now the "centre" has abdicated responsibility for this. The not very good guides CLG produced were farmed out for others to write, and then knocked around, sometimes by fire service personnel, whose job is to enforce the legislation, not tell the world how it should be interpreted. And now in the light of government localization policies, we will probably never again see even guidance like that.
The void has been filled by CFOA, who the "centre" used to support financially to do the job that the Inspectorate once did. I thought the point I was making was that, if I want to know how the Road Traffic Act should be interpreted I might only have passing interest in how PC Plod the traffic cop interprets it. I might on the other hand be much more interested in the views of an expert on the legislation at the Ministry of Justice (assuming they employed any) because , although he is a civil servant (because he cant find a proper job) he will not be telling me how the police want to interpret it.
For further avoidance of doubt, ask yourself how determinations are done under building regulations or under the Fire (Scotland) Act and then compare and contrast with the FSO in not more than 1000 words.
Returning to CFOA, they dont have funding to do the job properly, and I am very uncomfortable that they tell us how to interpret legisation that they then enforce. In an case, in England, they are in disarray, and as for Retty.s forlorn hope that they can catalyse consistency, I have only one thing to say: Unwanted alarms policy!!!!!
