New fire plans

Work is already underway at Kite's Croft at Fareham in Hampshire on construction of a centre which will handle fire calls from across the South East, including those from Bexhill.

The cash is part of an additional funding initiative for all the Fire and Rescue Authorities in England to enable them to play their part in the creation of nine networked regional fire control centres.

The South East region's 1,781,639 is for the years 2006-2007 and 2007-2008.

The Government says the additional funding is part of its commitment - both regionally and nationally - to ensuring that fire and rescue authorities have arrangements in place to deliver the Regional Control Centre programme.

"This will create a resilient state of the art network that will help to save more lives."

Fire and rescue authorities had already been advised that they were to share nearly 7.5million in total for the two years. This announcement brings the total to nearly 17.5million for the two years 06/07 and 07/08.

Fire Minister Angela Smith said: "Despite the excellent work of control staff, existing fire control rooms are not purpose-built to respond to large scale natural disasters, industrial accidents and terrorist attacks.

"That is why regional control centres are at the heart of the Government's drive to create a resilient network and enable the Fire and Rescue Service to respond to incidents more effectively and save more lives."