THE Wiltshire Emergency Services Communications Centre in Devizes, opened last month by HRH The Duchess of Gloucester, has been highlighted as an example of good practice in the annual report by Her Majesty's Chief Inspector of Constabulary.

Under the heading, Integrated Services: the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, Her Majesty's Chief Inspector of Constabulary, Sir Keith Povey, said: "A feature of this ground-breaking project is a newly installed command-and-control system and a shared integrated database.

"I see this as offering potential advantages such as improved inter-service operability, more efficient call handling and despatching of resource, the development of improved emergency response overall, and the more effective sharing of information."

Operators from the county police and ambulance services are already working from the £7m new building at county police headquarters in London Road and fire service operators are due to move into the state-of-the-art emergency communications centre after Christmas, after receiving assurances that working in the same room with other services would not prejudice their life-saving effectiveness.

While police and ambulance controllers were happy to move into the centre, the Fire Brigades Union had serious concerns that the new computer system that all three services would be sharing was unlikely to be as good as the one they were working with at fire control in Potterne.

Eventually, senior fire officers managed to assure the union that they would be consulted at every stage of the process and they agreed in principle to moving into the joint control room, screened off from their opposite numbers on the police and ambulance desks by a huge glass wall.