The creation of the Joint Emergency Services Interoperability Programme can help build a national policy from “towers of excellence across the services” according to Fiona Barton QC.
Speaking at the JESIP launch summit taking place as part of the Emergency Services Show[21-22 Nov] the ES lawyer told delegates, “just because they [all Services] aren’t broken doesn’t mean they can’t be upgraded” suggesting that the new interoperability programme was key to achieving this.
In a frank challenge to all emergency service leaders, Barton said she sought to “raise issues for room for improvement across all services”.
She continued: “The problem we have at the moment is that the Civil Contingencies Act needs to be applied on national level not just locally … localisation is leading to huge pitfalls on national co-ordination and a key goal for JESIP is to overcome this.