JESCC staff churn "should settle", but new recruits cost £10k

Monday 17 September 2018

The Joint Emergency Services Control Centre is still experiencing high staff turnover, the Chief Secretary for Home Affairs has confirmed.

Adrian Lewis faced questions at a Scrutiny hearing last week, some of which focused on the control centre, how it was performing, and if it was an improvement over the previous set up.

He confirmed that over the hree years since its launched, the service is still not staffed to capacity, and is also still dealing with a revolving door of personnel.

JESCC handles calls and control functions for four emergency services - Police, Fire and Rescue, Ambulance and Coastguard - under one roof, and was set up in 2015. 

Since then, it has faced scrutiny for not delivering as smooth a service as was promised, facing a high staff turnover and costing the States more than was budgeted for.

Pictured: The Joint Emergency Services Control Centre (JESCC) is based at Guernsey Police station 

During the hearing on Thursday, panel member Linda Morris pressed both Mr Lewis and Deputy Mary Lowe, President of Home Affairs, on its staffing.

"We are still working on getting the costings right," Deputy Lowe confirmed, "and while the centre is not fully staffed, it is coping well with support from Law Enforcement. 

"There is a high churn rate of staff, but it is a difficult job - stressful - and it is not for everyone."

Deputy Lowe said in total, it took six months to train a new member of staff at JESCC, and costed the committee £10,000.

Mr Lewis added: "With any new organisation like this you will get people who will try it and find it is not for them, but some will stick with it. So, I predict this will be the case, over the course of time we will have built a strong rump of people who have stayed on, giving us an excellent team."

While Mr Lewis and Deputy Lowe did not have exact figures for the amount of calls taken by JESCC each year, they estimated it would be "thousands and thousands", with the centre being "busy all of the time".

They also said, again without exact figures, that response times had improved.

JESCC itself was a transformational change, made as part of Home Affairs long term plan to amalgamate services to save money and be more efficient. 

Deputy Lowe said in the end, it had been a successful change, but there was an element of "trying to run before we can walk".

"It did go right in the end, JESCC was the right decision, but it wasn't implemented as smoothly as we would have liked," she said, "maybe there wasn't enough training at the start.

"But now we continue to see improvements, with a new structure in place in the last few months. The manager is no longer there and we have a senior member of law enforcement on hand to help and coordinate."