Staff at the Fulwood control room cannot automatically locate their vehicles and lack technology which helps pinpoint the location of mobile phone callers and identify serial hoaxers.

Ministers have published a report which they say proves why Preston's fire control centre should close and all emergency calls shifted to Warrington.

The government is streamlining England's existing 46 local control rooms into a regionalised network of nine centres.

The blueprint will see a "super centre" in Great Sankey, Warrington, handling emergencies across Lancashire, Cheshire, Cumbria, Greater Manchester and Merseyside.

Fire Minister Parmjit Dhanda said on Tuesday: "The regional benefits case published today shows that, although the current control rooms in England have served their local communities well and are operated by highly professional and committed staff, the existing disparate systems do not provide an adequate response to the threats, risks and uncertainty the public and firefighters now face in today's world."

The report states that the new centre will be able to deliver eight "key capabilities". The Preston centre currently can only deliver four of these tasks.

Unlike neighbouring Merseyside Fire Service, the Lancashire brigade does not currently have an Automatic Vehicle Location System (AVLS), the report reveals.

AVLS uses a Global Positioning System (GPS) transmitter to show 999 call staff exactly where each fire engine is, helping them to deploy the nearest crew to an incident.

Preston's centre also lacks technology provided by either British Telecom or Cable and Wireless which shows the billing address of any landline phone used to make an emergency call.

The technology can also be used to locate the whereabouts of a mobile phone caller by identifying the network cell from which they are calling.

This particularly helps to locate callers who are reporting incidents on the road network but do not know exactly where they are.

County Coun Bob Wilkinson, chairman of the county's fire authority, said: "This new system will give more information to crews than we have at present.

"This new software will also be able to know where each appliance is so people will get a faster response.

"It is possible this will save lives."

But Steve Harman, Lancashire branch secretary of the Fire Brigades Union said: "Any IT equipment they can put in a control room in Warrington we can put in Preston.

"Closing the centre in Fulwood is totally unacceptable."

Ministers fear the current control rooms are unable to back up each other easily in times of high numbers of calls or major failure.
They currently experience "overload" - where calls have to be farmed out to other control centres - on a monthly basis.

Under the new system "overflow" calls would automatically be transferred to the least busy control centre, with 999 staff all over the country having access to the same information.

However, the cost and effectiveness of the plans have previously been criticised.

Tory leader David Cameron last year told the Lancashire Evening Post he thought the shake-up is an "extremely bad idea".

The nine regional control centres are due to go live between 2009 and 2011 in a scheme due to cost £1bn.

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