“It’s all operational questions,” Lee said.

“And the fact that you had to hire outside a PR company and law firm to actually find answers for yourself and paying exorbitant amounts of money actually tells me that you really need to think about how your organisation is actually operating.”

National MP Melissa Lee. Photo / RNZ, Angus Dreaver

Gregory responded that Fire and Emergency NZ needed outside help to understand what the inquiry wanted and to get information out of old IT systems “to our fingertips”. He said he did not know how much more they might spend this way.

“The thing is making sure that we had a good understanding of what the committee was after and being able to understand what the committee was looking for as far as the breadth of the review into fleet.”

MPs repeatedly pushed Gregory on what had gone wrong since Fire and Emergency was set up nine years ago.

He repeatedly said: “We will do better”, while saying the problems went back years.

“A long tail,” he repeatedly called it.

The four-month-long select subcommittee inquiry was triggered by firetruck breakdowns. Photo / RNZ, Marika Khabazi

National MP Tim Costley widened the blame.

“The board appeared to be tracking nothing,” he said.

Ex-Watercare head Raveen Jaduram – the new board chair installed just three weeks ago – sounded a warning note to management about accountability, adding he also expected the board to do their job.

But he added that he was too new in the position to know if they had been.

“It’s not acceptable,” Jaduram told the committee about the years of problems dragging on.

“It’s disappointing.”

The MPs heard the top two people in charge of the fleet – national manager Mike Moran and deputy chief executive Sarah Sinclair – had both just resigned.

Asked by Green MP Mike Davidson if they got any exit package, Gregory was not clear, but said Sinclair did not.

The professional firefighters’ union on its website said: “FENZ’s corporate structure is fracturing because they cannot answer for the crisis on the frontline.”

As the long hearing went on, with MPs poring over an 80-page submission from Fire and Emergency NZ that the PR person and lawyer had helped with, the list of admitted shortcomings grew:

• Inadequate truck-buying (procurement) systems.
• Inadequate contract management so that they could not hold suppliers to account.
• Inadequate maintenance reporting systems using paper records of breakdowns that often did not even say if a problem had been fixed.
• Inadequate IT and document systems.

The agency introduced a whole new procurement system in 2022, then a procurement “roadmap” in 2025.

Gregory admitted to “some inconsistency” in procurement, but added: “We’ve been on a procurement improvement roadmap that we’ve been applying over a number of years now, so making some good steps forward through there.”

“Am I right in reading from your submission, it didn’t work?” asked Costley. He was told that was correct.

“You implemented the solution at the start of it before you had the roadmap and knew what it looked like,” said Costley. “And now we’ve effectively got rid of that new model and we’ve gone back to business units?

“It feels like another example of sort of reactionary decision-making.”

He added there was no evidence the board had looked into the thorniest fleet issues, despite two years of questions.

Asked how the board and management talked about fleet defects, Gregory said: “It’s been fragmented to have a look at the national level around what those things mean.”

Davidson asked about the basics – whether 1.8% was enough to spend on the fleet out of revenue over nine years of $6.3 billion, and whether 10 large-ladder (aerial) trucks were enough for the whole country when the population had grown so much since 2017.

NZ First MP Andy Foster wanted to know why 10 new trucks were not being added each year as old ones retired, and instead it had taken nine years to get 10.

Gregory, his No 2 commander Megan Stiffler and corporate head Darryl Purdy defended this by citing the Future Operating Capability plan – underway since 2024 – or deflected questions by saying they would have to get more information.

The lightning rod issue – 30 so-called Type 3 quite large trucks first commissioned in 2017 – made in the UK, shipped over here, then shipped back for fixes, then back here – and still now being tested and modified, although out of warranty, was the one Gregory kept going back to.

NZ First MP Andy Foster. Photo / Mark Mitchell

It was the exception, a process that had lacked “rigour”, but the agency had done well with other parts, such as replacing its many smaller Type 1 and 2 vehicles.

They were now stabilising the core fleet and the key going forward was not to buy trucks they had to customise to New Zealand conditions, but standard trucks, the chief executive said.

Foster said it looked like they were “going backwards at great rate of knots”.

Jaduram said he would be demanding better decisions from now on, with stronger contracts and clear risk management, better visibility and reporting back to the board.

Costley said the committee had been misinformed if not misled and asked the new chair – who replaced Rebecca Keoghan when she was not reappointed by the minister Brooke van Velden: “Not to mention the other things that we’ve just covered now, like what more would it take for every other board member to resign?”

“Or where would the point come that you would not have confidence in the board that you are leading?”

Ex-Watercare head Raveen Jaduram was recently installed as new board chair. Photo / RNZ, Dan Cook

Jaduram said those were “profound questions”.

“The public see the firefighters and the fire engines.

“The firefighters, they see whether the organisation behind them actually works, the engine works.

“And as chair, it’s my job to make sure they both work.

“It seems that the organisation has let that down.”