A DEAL has been struck to keep on sending five firefighters to blazes in Worcestershire - just one month after it was slashed to four.

Fire authority chiefs say they have drawn up a "comprehensive" set of money-saving proposals to plug an £800,000 gap without having to make the cuts.

Bosses yesterday said they could reduce 12 management posts and employ five new firefighters while saving cash - the first intakes for a decade.

Only last month the fire authority voted to cut standard crew numbers from five to four after a pot of money ran dry, but at the time they instructed service chiefs to come up with new ways of bumping numbers back up 'as soon as possible'.

An elaborate scheme has since been hatched which includes adding 32 part-time staff in a wider shake-up of the workforce.

Area commander Keith Chance, head of operations, said: "This set of proposals is a comprehensive plan that will bring significant benefits to the service, staff and public.

"Not only does it increase resilience and capacity by putting crews of five back on the first wholetime fire engine at each station, it also delivers a whole host of additional benefits.

"It includes increasing support to the 31 fire engines crewed by on-call firefighters, introducing more options for staff to work differently, flexible systems, and removing the need for staff to work additional hours to cover crewing deficiencies."

He added: "These proposals not only increase the number of firefighters, they do so by offering a variety of working patterns that are not currently available."

But the move has already ran into some criticism from the Fire Brigades Union (FBU), which says two parts of the county will be worse off.

Steve Gould, secretary of the FBU in Worcestershire, said: "It is great that we are going back to 'fives', but it's actually to the detriment of two towns in Worcestershire.

"We've got 12 people at Evesham and Malvern and they want to take it down to seven at each by removing 10 firefighters and putting them elsewhere.

"In Evesham and Malvern we've got 35,000-40,000 residents with no guarantee of fire cover, for them it's a downgrading. We're not happy about it.

"The retained crews do a very good job, but it does not guarantee you cover."

A consultation period over the changes started yesterday.