MPs Slam FENZ Over Fleet Failures

Fire and Emergency New Zealand spent $90,000 on a PR firm and lawyer to help prepare an 80-page submission for a parliamentary inquiry into why its own vehicle fleet has been in crisis for years.

MPs were not impressed.

"The fact that you had to hire outside a PR company and law firm to actually find answers for yourself and paying exorbitant amounts of money actually tells me that you really need to think about how your organisation is actually operating," National MP Melissa Lee told chief executive Kerry Gregory at the latest hearing of a four-month select subcommittee inquiry.

Gregory defended the spending, saying FENZ needed outside help to understand what the committee wanted and to retrieve information from old IT systems "to our fingertips". He also said he did not know how much more they might spend this way. "The thing is making sure that we had a good understanding of what the committee was after and being able to understand what the committee was looking for as far as the breadth of the review into fleet."

The inquiry was triggered by firetruck breakdowns and MPs' mounting frustration over convoluted answers about a seven-year procurement process that has so far failed to put any of 30 new trucks on the road. Thirty Type 3 trucks were first commissioned in 2017, manufactured in the UK, shipped to New Zealand, sent back for fixes, returned again, and are still being tested and modified — now out of warranty.

Gregory repeatedly said "we will do better" while attributing the problems to a "long tail" of decisions made before his watch. MPs were not satisfied with that framing.

"The board appeared to be tracking nothing," said National MP Tim Costley, who also pressed Gregory on a procurement system introduced in 2022 that has since been abandoned. "Am I right in reading from your submission, it didn't work?" He was told that was correct. "It feels like another example of sort of reactionary decision making," Costley said.

The admitted shortcomings by the end of the hearing were substantial: inadequate procurement systems, inadequate contract management, maintenance records kept on paper that often did not even note whether a problem had been fixed, and inadequate IT systems throughout.

The committee also heard that the two most senior people responsible for the fleet — national manager Mike Moran and deputy chief executive Sarah Sinclair — had both just resigned. When Green MP Mike Davidson asked whether they received exit packages, Gregory was unclear but said Sinclair did not.

New board chair Raveen Jaduram, the former Watercare head installed just three weeks ago, struck a different tone to management. "It's not acceptable," he told the committee. "It's disappointing." He said he would demand stronger contract management, clearer risk oversight and better reporting to the board — but acknowledged he was too new to know whether the board had been doing its job.

Costley asked Jaduram directly: "Not to mention the other things that we've just covered now, like what more would it take for every other board member to resign? Or where would the point come that you would not have confidence in the board that you are leading?"

Jaduram called those "profound questions".

"The public see the firefighters and the fire engines. The firefighters, they see whether the organisation behind them actually works, the engine works. And as chair, it's my job to make sure they both work. It seems that the organisation has let that down."

The professional firefighters' union was blunter on its website: "FENZ's corporate structure is fracturing because they cannot answer for the crisis on the frontline."