FIREFIGHTERS' and residents' lives could be endangered by proposed changes to fire cover in York and North Yorkshire, a union leader has claimed.

North Yorkshire Fire & Rescue Service yesterday unveiled plans to replace some fire engines with 'tactical response vehicles' (TRVs), manned by only two or three firefighters.

The number of fire engines available to respond to incidents within five minutes of a call-out may also be cut from 46 to 27.

Steve Howley, North Yorkshire brigade secretary of the Fire Brigades Union, claimed the service was mounting its single biggest attack on members' terms and conditions and on levels of fire cover in a drive to cut the number of full-time firefighters, and he alleged that TRVs could endanger the lives of both the public and firefighters in a rural county such as North Yorkshire.

"It will quite frequently turn up first at fires with as few as two firefighters on board," he said.

"They may find people trapped inside the building, with every second counting, but under breathing apparatus regulations, an absolute minimum of four firefighters must be present before crew members can go into a property to carry out a rescue.

"They will have to wait for a fire engine to turn up with reinforcements before they can go in, although they will come under immense moral pressure to go in anyway, putting their own lives at risk."

The claims were dismissed by area manager and head of risk management Owen Hayward, who said TRVs and similar vehicles were already used by a number of fire services to deal with a range of small incidents across the UK.

"The proposal for North Yorkshire is to use them in this capacity (o respond to small incidents as well as to respond, along with a standard fire engine, to incidents such as road traffic collisions and house fires," he said.

"The proposed TRVs, if introduced, are likely to be located at stations which also have standard fire engines, or where there are stations close by, so that when crews respond they are not waiting a long time for reinforcements.

"The significant reduction in incidents over the last 10 years means that we need to look at new ways of delivering a cost effective service appropriate to the risk."

The service said in a report that the TRVs were being proposed because an analysis had shown that standard fire engines crewed by four or five firefighters were not always needed.

The TRVs would carry modern firefighting equipment and technology, and respond on their own to small incidents, such as bin fires, and also attend larger incidents with fire engines.

"It would be able to provide a first attendance at some incidents, and the crew would be able to assess the situation and take initial actions to stop a fire spreading or to provide first aid," said the report.

It said the service currently had 46 standard fire engines which it aimed to have available to respond to incidents within five minutes, but in practice a number of engines were unavailable most days due to retained firefighters not being available to crew them, and not all fire engines were needed immediately.

It proposes a reduction in the number of fire engines required to be available in five minutes from 46 to a minimum of 27, with a minimum of 13 available within 15 minutes when the pump would otherwise be unavailable.

This would make fire engines currently unavailable become available, as retained firefighters whose full time employment may have taken them further away from their fire station could respond to incidents if they had a longer period of time to do so.

Other proposed changes include the introduction of 12 hour shifts for firefighters, of fire engines with a standard mix of whole-time firefighters and retained part-timers and of district watch managers on-call, along with greater use of volunteers.