A NEW £110m fire control room in the region will answer 999 calls from across the entire North-East, under a controversial shake-up unveiled yesterday.

The base, at Belmont Business Park, on the outskirts of Durham City, will boast technology allowing the fire service to pinpoint the location of every caller, whether from a landline or a mobile phone.

The Government said better technology and co-ordination would ensure crews could respond to an emergency on the scale of the London terror bombings.

The control centre will be part of a new national network of control centres as part of a bid to modernise the Fire and Rescue Service to equip it for the demands of the 21st Century.

Nine control centres will replace the 46 local fire service control rooms across the country.

The North-East centre will lead to the closure of controls in Durham, Hartlepool, Newcastle and Morpeth.

The North Yorkshire brigade control will be based in Wakefield.

Called the Yorkshire and Humberside control, it will be based at the Paragon Business Park and work is due to start next year.

But the shake-up was condemned by the Fire Brigades Union as wasteful and dangerous, with a warning that the technology was "untested".

It added that the loss of 300 jobs across England would mean fewer staff to deal with a rising number of calls.

The Conservatives also attacked the announcement, accusing Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott of "playing politics with fire safety".

Caroline Spelman, local government spokeswoman, said: "A regional structure will put lives at risk, since 999 operators will have less knowledge of a local area.

"If the regional centre is forced offline by a disaster or attack, the whole emergency response will go down across a massive geographical area."

But John Burke, director of support services at Cleveland Fire Brigade, insisted people in Cleveland had nothing to fear from the loss of their local control room.

He said: "The regional fire control centre is an example of the significant investment being made to modernise and improve the service we provide for our communities."

Jim Fitzpatrick, Mr Prescott's deputy at the office of the deputy prime minister , said: "With new technology, such as caller location for landlines and mobiles, we can pinpoint exactly where a call is coming from.

"While existing control rooms do a good job, they are not designed to deal in a co- ordinated way with major regional or national incidents."

Mr Fitzpatrick, a former firefighter, said that vital local information - such as sporting events and traffic jams - would be piped into the Durham control room, so crews could be kept up-to-date.

At present, 28 staff are employed at the Durham centre, with a further 25 at Hartlepool, 40 at Newcastle and 20 at Morpeth

Very few of those jobs will be lost, because overall staff numbers across the North-East region will be reduced only slightly, from 113 to about 100.