AN Oxfordshire councillor saved taxpayers in the South East a £25m bill when he refused to sign the lease on a huge fire control centre during a disastrous Government project.

A House of Commons’ select committee reported on Tuesday how former Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott’s plans to create nine regional fire control centres across England ended up costing £423m without delivering any of its aims.

FiReControl was described as one of the worst public sector projects ever.

The Public Accounts Committee described the idea as “flawed from the outset,” based on “hugely unrealistic forecast costs and savings” and “naive over-optimism of the deliverability of the IT solution and under-appreciation or mitigation of the risks”.

Now Oxfordshire county councillor Rodney Rose has been praised for vetoing a lease on a £25m PFI-funded building in Fareham, Hampshire, which would have been the South East control room.

All nine fire authorities in the region were asked to sign up to the lease in 2009, taking on £1.4m-a-year payments for 25 years.

But when Mr Rose refused to sign without the new software being put in place, the deal to fund the centre fell through, and he was ostracised by other fire authorities.

The software later proved to be inadequate to the task and FiReControl was scrapped last year.

Other areas of the country are still paying for the empty buildings.

Mr Rose said: “The nine PFI buildings worth £25m each would almost withstand nuclear attack, they were so well-built.

“All the rest of the nine members of the South East wanted the brand new building as a toy to play with, and when I did not agree, I was not spoken to for two months afterwards.”

He added: “It was done in a typically bad central Government way: £25m for a building which was probably 10 times the size we needed, the size of three tennis courts for 40 control room staff, and a huge screen that would have filled one side of a warehouse.

“I do take a certain amount of pride in what I did.

“I got big pats on the back when eventually the project failed.”

Mr Rose was praised by county council leader Keith Mitchell at a cabinet meeting on Tuesday.

And deputy chief fire officer Colin Thomas told councllors Oxfordshire had ended up a “net beneficiary” of the fiasco by securing new state-of-the-art technology up front.

Unlike other areas in the country, all of Oxfordshire’s fire engines were upgraded with mobile data terminals, and new equipment was installed at all 24 fire stations.

The collapse of FiReControl has left the county needing to upgrade its fire control room.

Fire officers are now investigating merging Oxfordshire’s control room with those of Buckinghamshire and Berkshire to create a single centre.