A million pounds a month is being wasted on maintaining the nine regional control centres which lie unused because of the “almost unmitigated disaster” of the Fire Control project.

BBC Radio 4’s Face the Facts programme, to be broadcast today at 12.30 pm, also reveals that in response to the coalition government abolishing regional layers of government, contractor EADS has suggested that FireControl could be run nationally using only some of the nine regional centres already built.

Fire Control aimed to replace 46 local fire control rooms in England, but has been dogged by difficulties from the start. The original £70m budget now stands at £420m with a completion date now postponed to 2013.

Although the new control rooms are built and furnished, there have been many problems and delays with IT systems to be installed in the control centres, as well as in an estimated 1,400 fire stations and 3,400 fire engines.

In April, a select committee of MPs heavily criticised the project, saying it had been inadequately planned, poorly executed and badly managed and was in a precarious position.

The current chairman of the committee, Labour MP Clive Betts, told the BBC that the project had been "almost an unmitigated disaster throughout the course of its life. But the reality was that, when you consider cancellation costs, it was less costly to continue with it than it was to cancel it.”

The coalition government is in a bind with the project. On the one hand it is cutting regional layers of management in the fire and rescue service so as to return decision-making to a local level. On the other hand, it supports the principle of a national communications network that would increase resilience and deliver efficiencies.

In trying to square this circle, fire minister Bob Neill told delegates at the Fire and Rescue Conference earlier this summer that he wanted the project to continue on condition that it is delivered sooner, that it stops haemorrhaging money, and that it should be generally better than, and at least as good as, existing control systems.

Last month, the minister wrote to the chairman of the select committee saying that CLG, EADS, fire and rescue services and the IT contractor EADS are working to revamp the project, and there are new contractual milestones for EADS to deliver the project by mid-2011.

Listen to the programme here