Fire Brigades Union suspicious of inertia as other rescue teams from across the country rushed to York to help with emergency work

Neither of York’s rescue boats was launched at any point during the city’s worst flooding in years, despite thousands of residents needing to be evacuated from their homes, it has emerged.

The two vessels were never called upon by their control centre and they and their specialist crews of firefighters sat idle at their bases, while other teams from across the country were rushed to York to help with the emergency rescue work.

Their inertia led the Fire Brigades Union (FBU) to speculate that the city’s flood defences were being deliberately underused in order to lay the foundations to argue that they should be cut back in future.

“What we have seen at this station, which is a little bit difficult to get our heads round, is the fact that we are a specialist water rescue team [but] ... since the initial calls that came in on Boxing Day night, the crews and the two boats have not got wet,” said Steve Howley, a crewmember and the local FBU organiser.

While he said he and his colleagues apreciated the help and recognised that it was necessary to call in other resources, he said it was “really frustrating for firefighters who think a lot about this community” to not be called upon, “where we see teams from all over the country going out there, helping our communities”.

He said: “A lot of people live in York and have got family in York and they get questioned: ‘Oh, you must be really busy?’ It’s really embarrassing to say: ‘We’ve not got wet.’”

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The approach, he said, was unlikely to have saved money because many of the unused firefighters were on double time.

Howley spoke to reporters as the Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, visited his fire station during a tour of York. Speaking earlier in the day, Corbyn called for better funding of Britain’s flood defences amid criticism of the government’s provision.

The firefighter said he believed his crews had been left idle either because of political pressure to demonstrate that the city could survive a major incident without its rescue boats, or because the area lacked the resources to handle such incidents without holding its own crews back as reserves.

But the second in command of York’s emergency response, Carl Boasman, insisted there had been no conscious decision to hold the city’s boats and crews back and that the city had been adequately resourced after it called in help from across the country.

He confirmed that neither of York’s boats was deployed, while those called in under national response protocols were used to tackle the flooding. The locally based vessels, he said, were held in reserve and would have been deployed if they were needed.

Howley warned that, should cuts be imposed that meant the loss of the city’s boats, it would put lives at risk.

“Due to the scale of the incident, we have implemented a national response procedure, which is in line with the protocols. We have brought in 10 powered boats to be used for the work we needed them to do.

“We have had sufficient resource. If the boats at York were required for an emergency call, it would have been deployed under normal mobilisation procedures.

“The national resources have been used because they were the most suitable ... and because we had them available.”