The government says it has appointed Baroness Blake of Leeds as fire minister. More than 1,000 wildfires have been recorded across the country this year\u2026<\/p>\n
Samantha Dixon was previously\u00a0Minister for Building Safety, Fire and Democracy until she lost her job on 22 July this year on Burnham\u2019s ascent to No10. Despite the ridiculous name the ministerial role had wide responsibility:<\/p>\n
Building safety, regulations, Building Safety Regulator and remediation
\nNet Zero and energy efficiency
\nGrenfell Inquiry response
\nGrenfell Community, Tower and Memorial
\nFire policy and operations
\nResilience, recovery, and emergencies
\nElections policy
\nPlanning casework<\/p>\n
Since then it appears that the Burnham government failed to fill the fire brief at all until this afternoon. That is a major f***-up\u2026<\/p>\n
A dedicated fire minister signs off planning, contingency policy and funding rapidly. It\u2019s not a job for the Home Secretary or Housing Secretary\u2026<\/p>\n
That\u2019s another misstep from \u2018political master\u2019 Burnham who is banning BBQs after about five heatwaves have already happened. And now smoke and mirrors with the month-late \u2018appointment\u2019 of a minister\u2026<\/p>\n
UPDATE: Shadow Cabinet Office Minister Mike Wood said:<\/p>\n
\u201cIt is staggering that Burnham seemingly left the fire brief empty while firefighters battled wildfires and the country endured record temperatures. This is extremely negligent and Burnham should explain how it was allowed to happen.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The government says it has appointed Baroness Blake of Leeds as fire minister. More than 1,000 wildfires have…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":103735,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[2],"tags":[13,43567,4832,24848],"class_list":["post-103734","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-britain","tag-britain","tag-fire-minister","tag-heatwave","tag-wildfires"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@UnitedKingdom\/117095816632003959","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103734","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=103734"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/103734\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/103735"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=103734"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=103734"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/britain\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=103734"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}