FBU general secretary Steve Wright (Photography by Dinendra Haria)

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“We always used to have five firefighters on a fire engine. Now it’s routinely four, and in some dangerous cases it’s three. When we turn up at these incidents, we’re unable to perform the rescues that we want and should be able to deliver. That’s what makes people angry.”

And it is why Steve Wright, general secretary of the Fire Brigades Union (FBU), is today warning that his members could take industrial action – and that national strikes are a real possibility.

“Yes, we’ve got a Labour government. But that doesn’t mean the attacks stop, and they certainly aren’t at the moment. We’ve lost a further 100 firefighters over the last year,” he tells The House. “Having lost 12,000 firefighters under the Conservatives, enough is enough.”

National response times are three-and-a-half minutes longer than in the mid-1990s, which puts firefighters and the public at higher risk, Wright emphasises – and yet eight fire stations and 42 firefighters in Oxfordshire are currently under threat of closure and redundancy.

“I know what it means to walk out of a fire station door and your community is not protected. But when we’ve seen the level of cuts that we have, with no way through that from this government at the moment to say that they will start investing more firefighters in the front line to protect our communities, that will inevitably lead us to take more drastic action. There’s only so many letters you can write.”

Wright, 43, has spent almost his entire life in the shadow of a fire station drill tower.

His first childhood home was a fire service one on the outskirts of Oxford; his playground was the station’s training yard. His second, in Buckinghamshire, was attached to a day-crewed station, for which proximity is even more important: there are fewer firefighters and they’re on-call more.

Didcot, where Wright worked for 14 years before he became a full-time union official, had the same set-up. Tied accommodation allows firefighters like Wright and his father to run over from mere metres away when the bell rings.

It seems Wright was never going to choose a different vocation from his dad, himself an FBU rep who was involved in the fire service’s first ever national strike in 1977-78. Wright would accompany him to union meetings as a child.

“From the age of maybe nine, that’s all I wanted to do,” he says of firefighting. “I was fortunate to join at 18. The average age of people joining the fire service is mid-20s. Everyone told me, ‘You won’t get in’.”

His father died of lung cancer early in retirement, aged 64, after decades of exposure to fire contaminants. Wright hopes to see the presumption introduced that certain diseases are work related, easing the path to compensation.

Even so, his son has followed him into the fire service. Ben quietly progressed through the first stages of selection before letting his dad know of his application. “I really choked up,” says Wright.

It makes the general secretary’s job feel yet more personal: “The burden of making firefighters safe falls heavily on my shoulders, knowing that my son is out there attending incidents in less safe conditions now than when I did the job.”

The Bicester incident last year that killed two firefighters – Jennie Logan and Martyn Sadler; the latter he had known for many years – had the same effect. Wright, on the way to a retirement do nearby, attended it himself.

“Returning back to that fire station, where their cars were parked, where they turned into that incident…” he trails off.

Do firefighters think a lot about the risk of dying on the job?

“It’s always there, in the back of your mind,” he says. “Some people don’t always give it a second thought what firefighters go into: the opening of the door, going into a smoke-filled building, not being able to see what’s in front of you, not knowing what’s there. There is always that risk.”

Visitors to the new FBU offices in Camden are immediately confronted by a staircase covered in the many names of those who have been killed in the line of duty. Wright wanted people to come in and recognise the FBU’s true purpose – advocating not just for better pay, terms and conditions, but for their lives.

After bringing firefighters into Parliament for most Wednesdays over the last year, the union is now looking ahead to the political launch of its ‘cuts kill’ campaign on 24 February. This, Wright hopes, will drive the message home to MPs that the fire service needs investment at a central government level.

“Strike action is not something we take lightly. We’ve done it three times nationally. I’ve been involved in two. My dad was involved in one. But it’s often delivered for workers,” Wright says.

He had only just joined the service when the national strike action of 2002 kicked off – the second of its kind, and so hostile it led to the FBU’s disaffiliation from Labour a couple of years later (until re-affiliation under Jeremy Corbyn). He was picked out as a new rep straight away: “I think because I was gobby.”

Controversially, they were demanding a 40 per cent pay rise. “Was it the right tactic? Possibly. Would they have got less if they’d gone in lower?” Wright wonders. They ended up accepting 16 per cent over three years.

The average pay for a ‘competent’ (fully trained) firefighter today is £38,000. The wait to secure that salary varies – 18 months, two years or four – so he wants consistency across the country, plus national standards for recruitment and everything they do.

Terrorist incidents are another example: “There’s an agreement in Manchester, in London, but not for anywhere else in the country, so firefighters attend them but they don’t have any equipment, protection or specific training to respond.”

Wright is still relatively new to the general secretary role, having won it a year ago. The defeated incumbent, Matt Wrack, had been head of the union for 20 years, and the race was acrimonious. So much so that, in Wright’s telling, there was no handover – the door was still swinging when he came in.

Although Wrack fought for much of the same agenda Wright now does, his critics had argued that the FBU needed to focus more on bread-and-butter issues and less on politics, especially international causes such as Palestine.

Brexiteer commentator and firefighter Paul Embery, with whom Wrack had a long-running feud, also ran a blog alleging the FBU leadership was inappropriately using non-disclosure agreements (NDAs) with departing employees and officers.

“The union went through some troubling times,” Wright acknowledges. “I think we’ve moved through a lot of that.” He says he is running the union with more transparency and it’s “not a dictatorship”. Asked whether Embery will be welcomed back into the fold, surprisingly the general secretary says he barely knows him and has only dealt with him by email.

Would Wright commit to not using NDAs? “Our union is probably more than aware of what damage NDAs can cause, so we would take advice from the TUC on those and follow their guidance,” he replies, though also highlights – as Wrack did – that there is a difference between NDAs and settlement agreements (though the latter can include confidentiality clauses).

FBU sources have more recently complained about an FBU staff restructuring process which they expect will see some of them sacked. It is claimed Wright has refused to meet with their GMB reps and there could be strike action. What does the general secretary say?

“Well, I certainly haven’t been told all that,” he says. “I’ve not refused to meet with GMB reps. I have a staffing officer and head of HR who deals with those meetings and reports back.”

Confirming that he has commissioned an independent review of internal structures, he adds: “It’s not necessarily just to get rid of people… This is just another part of the process of leaving no stone unturned, making sure that we’re financially viable.”

Wright believes he has “reset” the FBU’s relationship with the Labour Party over the last year – “and I think it was important to do that”. While his and Wrack’s politics are not miles apart, both being on the left, his predecessor was ex-Militant and was once expelled by Labour.

“I think you need to be flexible in your approach to politics,” says Wright, who tells The House he has never been a member of any other party. He has followed the FBU’s trajectory: a Labour member as a young adult until the 2002 strikes, when he left, rejoining only under Corbyn.

“I want to see this Labour government deliver. I don’t really care who does it, I’ll be honest”

Wright believes firmly in affiliation to Labour. “I’m not going to be driven out by anyone that doesn’t want me. I think there maybe are some elements of the Labour Party that do not want trade unions,” he says. “I fought off, at our conference last year, a call to disaffiliate. I’m still of the view that we are best placed within the Labour Party.”

If another proposal to break ties with the party emerges at FBU’s conference this year, he pledges to fight it again. He even wants to see all 48 unions under the TUC umbrella formally linked, enlarging the Labour unions group known as ‘Tulo’: “I think we’d have far more of a say in the Labour Party.”

He praises deputy leader Lucy Powell highly, commending her for receiving criticism well, engaging closely with the FBU and helping them to build new relationships. Although the general secretary comes across not unlike Keir Starmer – serious, matter of fact, not the larger-than-life presence union leaders often project – he has fewer compliments for the Prime Minister.

This is Starmer’s “last chance”, he says, highlighting the government has scored “a lot of own goals”. Asked whether all 11 of the affiliated unions could come together and tell Starmer it is time for him to go if the May elections are as painful for the party as predicted, Wright is candid: “I think so.”

After our interview, as the scandal around Peter Mandelson’s appointment as US ambassador grows, Wright decides firmly that a leadership change is needer sooner and calls on Starmer to resign.

For Wright, the key priority is the party being able to take the fight to Reform UK. “I think Nigel Farage is a racist, and I’ll say that quite openly and quite loudly,” he declares. (Farage has denied ever “directly racially abusing anybody” when responding to allegations he made racist comments during his school days, adding: “I would never, ever do it in a hurtful or insulting way.“)

While Wright admits many of his own members will be Reform voters, he claims many of them are “starting to realise what Reform stand for”.

“The links with Farage and Trump, and what’s happening in America at the moment, in Minneapolis and that racist regime – ultimately – out on the streets, murdering people… Our members are starting to see the chaos that follows Reform and what they really stand for,” he adds, referring to the party’s performance in Kent, where it won control of the county council and had direct oversight of the fire authority.

Describing Reform as “the real threat”, he says: “I want to see Labour in a position to fight that off. And I’m not sure who’s best to do that at the moment.”

Would he, like other unions, be happy if Angela Rayner were leader? “Yeah, Angela’s always been quite good. Lots of MPs have been good for us. I want to see this Labour government deliver. I don’t really care who does it, I’ll be honest.”