Regular readers will be aware that grave concerns have been raised over plans to change the way 999 calls to the fire service are dealt with.

As part of the Government’s national FireControl project, local control centres at Bradford, Humberside, North Yorkshire and South Yorkshire would be closed and all calls routed through a new super-centre at Wakefield.

A number of local MPs and the Fire Brigades Union in Yorkshire fear that would remove vital local knowledge from the system – knowledge that could be the difference between saving someone’s life or a tragedy occurring.

The programme is over budget and has been dogged by technical problems in developing the IT system which has seen its implementation date put back from October 2011 to July 2012.

Now a House of Commons committee has joined the debate and its comments are both damning and disturbing in equal measure.

Committee chairman Dr Phyllis Starkey describes the project as “yet another catalogue of poor judgement and mismanagement”.

The committee wants the Government to draw up and consult on contingency plans for any further failures in the programme to ensure ongoing safe and effective fire and rescue services across the country whether or not the move eventually takes place.

That seems sensible as far as it goes but the bottom line is that we are dealing in matters of life and death here.

Given the project’s history of problems and growing concerns about it, unless the Government can guarantee FireControl will work and work better than the present system, there should be no talk of it being introduced.