On 16 July, Oliver Lee, the interim boss of the West Midlands Fire Service (WMFS), summoned the press to the organisation’s HQ in Birmingham. He wanted to give them a stern telling off. Lee, a former military man with a headmasterly demeanor who commands huge respect among WMFS’s 1900 employees, objected to a report in The Sun newspaper describing his organisation as “scandal-ridden”. The report followed the latest in a string of suicides in the service, but Lee was insistent the phrase was unfair. “I don't accept that it's 'scandal-ridden',” he said. “And nor will it be during my tenure here.”
A couple of months before his impromptu press conference, Lee spoke to The Dispatch about allegations against his predecessor: Wayne Brown. Brown, the UK’s first black fire chief, had been accused of faking an MBA qualification to get the position at the top of WMFS, but Lee told us he was a “trailblazing inspiration to many”. Brown had been under investigation over the MBA issue in January 2024, but before the full story could come out, he committed suicide. Upon his death, Brown was held up as a hero; members of the London Fire Brigade sang “Amazing Grace” at his funeral. But among the rank and file of WMFS, his veneration didn’t sit too comfortably.
Five months later, another employee of the fire service died by suicide. The Dispatch understands the man in question killed himself at a fire service facility in Oldbury. A friend of his, speaking to The Dispatch, recalls the “total despair” among his team when the news broke. It cast a devastating pall over the service, especially since firefighters at WMFS have now lost five colleagues to suicide in as many years. The friend describes the effect on morale as “crushing”. This latest death wasn’t considered as suspicious, nor indeed was Brown’s, but it marked a clear crisis point for the service: why had so many members been pushed to the brink, and how much, if at all, did the workplace’s culture have to do with all this death?
Despite yet another tragic loss — this one particularly haunting since it occurred onsite, making it the second suicide in five years to take place at a WMFS facility — Lee remained steadfast in his defence of the service.
Then something changed. In a remarkable and unexpected LinkedIn post on 15th September, Lee described the organisation he had led for less than a year as ungovernable, saying he would not be seeking the permanent post. “The governance of the organisation is wholly impossible, lacking as it does courage, transparency, care and honesty,” he wrote.
Lee served in Iraq and Afghanistan, and is highly decorated, but these days he seems to conduct his manoeuvres mostly on LinkedIn. Two weeks later, he was back on the site, this time with an even bigger bombshell. On Thursday this week, after a day of visiting four fire stations and listening to staff concerns, he announced he was bringing a vote of no confidence in the Fire Authority, saying it was “wholly unable and incapable of looking after and presiding over its 1900 people”. The news immediately reverberated around WhatsApp groups of firefighters in the region. In one, a serving firefighter wrote: “The mutiny has begun”.
West Midlands Fire Service is the second largest in the country. It has 38 stations and serves just shy of 3 million people. The Fire Authority is a board consisting mostly of Labour councillors from the West Midlands and chaired by Greg Brackenridge (whose wife, Sureena Brackenridge, is the MP for Wolverhampton North East). After Lee’s LinkedIn post went live, Brackenridge reached out to tell him he was “disappointed” at his comments. Brackenridge also summoned Lee to an urgent meeting in the morning. So Lee took to LinkedIn once again. “Do not threaten me Greg Brackenridge,” he wrote. “You don’t look after 1900 people, I do. So, be careful, and do not bully me”.
A spokesperson for the West Midlands Fire and Rescue Authority said: “We are of course aware of Mr. Lee's comments but will not be responding to them publicly as we are focused on addressing these issues.”
To most of the dozen WMFS employees and ex-employees who have spoken to The Dispatch for this story, Lee’s leadership had been a breath of fresh air. “He’s a do-er, he got things done, [he] wasn’t frightened of ripping up red tape. [He was the] first leader who I’ve felt a bit of pride in,” one current firefighter told us. Others speak in an almost evangelical tone. One firefighter said when he heard Lee was quitting it was like a “period of mourning”.
Deaths in the service weren’t the only problem Lee had had to deal with. Alongside the allegations against Brown (which, behind the scenes, were more extensive and concerning than the MBA issue) there was also the fact Brown’s deputy Joanne Bowcock had been found to have wrongly claimed she had a certain qualification: a law degree. Then there was the sacking of five officers the previous December at Dudley station for the “bullying and harassment” of a woman after a probe into the men’s WhatsApp messages. The Dispatch has now learnt of further allegations that the bullying has continued at the woman’s new station, Tipton, including the word “slag” being scrawled into her locker with a key.
Indeed, such is the extent and breadth of the chaos at WMFS, it’s hard to pin down what ultimately caused Lee’s change of heart. But theories abound. Some believe he became frustrated by the lack of management experience among the organisation’s higher-ranking members and felt that his attempts to enact change were being frustrated. He’d clashed with senior officials, not least Brackenridge, who — according to multiple sources — Lee felt had been promoted beyond their ability. He also allegedly came to suspect information was being leaked in meetings. But worse still was when he uncovered a major financial blunder from his predecessor’s tenure.
“It has come to my attention that the year-end position for the last financial year (23/24) differs dramatically from what we previously understood,” he wrote in a dramatic internal note sent to all staff in July. “Following a thorough review and independent verification, there is now a reported underspend of c£6m from last year. In addition to this, our capital expenditure also shows a significant underspend of another c£6m”. In essence, the organisation had underspent by £12 million without realising it.
According to one source, the new fire chief was “genuinely stunned” at the error. The openness of his approach was something many firefighters felt had been missing for some time. “There’s no shock anymore. It’s been such an ill-run brigade for so long that nothing shocks anyone,” the source says. Many believe that Lee’s circular may have marked a turning point.
The result of the underspend led to Brown and the service attempting to make cuts, which involved cutting the crewing levels for some fires. In layman’s terms, according to several firefighters at the service, this meant trucks were being sent out with insufficient numbers of staff (often three instead of five) to attend fires, which one firefighter describes as “obviously extremely dangerous”. Lee reversed the cuts when he took on the post. In response to questions about these previously unsafe missions, a representative for WMFS said: “A number of legacy decisions have been changed during the tenure of Oliver Lee. This is one such example. It is difficult to make a retrospective link to the financial decision made.”
The other thing that might have changed Lee’s mind about his ability to turn the service around was the issue of Brown himself. Without question, the contested nature of Brown’s legacy — reported on extensively by The Dispatch in April — is the greatest cloud hanging over WFMS. Upon taking the role in January, Lee sent an internal note to staff hitting back at supposedly ill-founded allegations being made online about WMFS, saying that while accountability was important, “false accusations and vexatious complaints” wouldn’t be investigated. It was very clear to all who read the note what Lee was referring to.
A former training instructor called Ben Walker had been at the centre of a long-running campaign to expose Brown as a fraud. Walker had been arrested at Birmingham Airport in March 2023 after Brown complained he was harassing him (alleging Walker was behind an anonymous email address sending him accusatory messages), following which Walker doubled down on his personal investigations into Brown. His complaints were multifarious. They included workplace affairs, bullying, and even an alleged £15,000 “fraudulent expenses claim” by a separate senior West Mids fire officer — something we put to WFMS in April, at which time they told us it had been investigated and found to be untrue. But the one that stuck was the MBA.
