Firefighters in West Yorkshire will have to save £300,000 in the next year - because they are too good at their job.

The Government has restricted the cash the county's Fire and Civil Defence Authority will receive next year - and even more cuts are looming for 2002.

The Government's grant support has been reduced because the Authority has cut the number of fires it goes to and the amount of malicious hoax calls it receives, according to Chief Fire Officer Phil Toase.

"Because of the perversity of the funding mechanism, the more calls you have, the more grant you get through the Government's Standard Spending Assessment,'' he said.

"So a fire authority like ours which actively seeks to reduce the number of fires it has to attend and the number of malicious false alarms is penalised."

The authority will be asked at its meeting on Friday to consider a proposed budget of £67.6 million for the next year and a £300,000 package of cuts.

Mr Toase says the Authority faces an estimated £1.2 million of savings in 2001/2002 and the same amount again the following year unless - as the Government has indicated - the funding formula is changed. "The savings we are proposing this year involve two per cent efficiency savings in all departments, cuts in repairs and non-essential building maintenance and a 20 per cent reduction in training carried out at the national Fire Service College in Gloucestershire," he said.

"A lot of these will be one-off savings but if the savings continue you can only let things get to a certain point, then you can't go any further.''

He said the savings this year would not affect the 'front line' firefighting services.

Councillor Lawrence Conlon, the Authority chairman, said it was "patent nonsense" that the cash formula ignored the fire prevention and community fire safety work in West Yorkshire.

"I am hopeful the formula will be changed in the medium term, but our immediate budget challenge is how to protect essential emergency services while not raiding local Council Tax payers' pockets unnecessarily."

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.