In May 2011 Staffordshire will move to a Regional Control Centre based in Wolverhampton.

Staffordshire is one of five Fire and Rescue Services moving into the West Midlands Regional Control Centre. The other Fire and Rescue Services are: Shropshire, Hereford and Worcester, West Midlands and Warwickshire.

The move to Regional Control is part of a National project called FiRe Control. FiRe Control is part of a £1 billion investment programme by Communities and Local Government (CLG) in the Fire and Rescue Services.

The project will see all 46 control rooms in England move into nine Regional Control Centres. These control centres will handle all emergency calls made to the Fire and Rescue Service using a single National operating system.

All nine Regional centres will be interconnected so they can provide resilience for each other should one area be experiencing a higher than normal volume of calls.

The centres will be fitted with state of the art equipment and technology that will allow control room staff to see exactly where all resources are at any given time. They will also have instant access to local information on roads, buildings and hazards.

The West Midlands Regional Control Centre will be owned and run by Local Authority Controlled Companies (LACCs). This company is jointly controlled by all of the Fire and Rescue Authorities in the West Midlands region.