ABSTRACT

Before turning to the wider issues of the management of local government, we need to discuss a further group of services which raise particular problems for councillors and officers in local authorities: the uniformed emergency services. Although the police and the fire brigade are responsible, along with other service departments, for the provision of services for citizens, the nature of the services they provide and the ways in which they are organised present distinctive problems for local government. The police are distinctive in particular because they are involved in the enforcement of the law and regulations in the public’s collective interest but this brings them into conflict, sometimes involving violence, with individual citizens in a wide variety of ways. The fire service also enforces regulations which bring its members into disputes with members of the public, especially entrepreneurs whose premises are found to be in breach of the fire regulations.