New Zealand's firefighters union and Fire and Emergency New Zealand (FENZ) are resuming collective bargaining this week after a seven-month standstill. The pay dispute is real, but it is not the story that should concern insurance brokers.
What matters is what has been happening operationally inside FENZ: proposed crewing reductions, narrowed callback arrangements for regional centres, a fleet that Parliament has found to be deteriorating, and a leadership structure now under ministerial scrutiny, with a related matter referred to the Serious Fraud Office (SFO). Each of these bears directly on fire response times, and response times determine how much of a building survives and what a claim costs.
The New Zealand Professional Firefighters Union (NZPFU) confirmed this week that it is calling off strikes scheduled for Wednesday and Friday as a goodwill gesture ahead of facilitated bargaining. Members have carried out 65 one-hour strikes since talks stalled and have not received a wage increase since July 2023. In July this year, FENZ awarded non-union staff a 2.4% pay rise, including managers earning more than $200,000 a year, without extending it to NZPFU members.
Pay, though, sits alongside more serious operational concerns.
The NZPFU says FENZ has walked back an agreement, reached through a joint working party under the 2022 collective agreement, to increase firefighter-to-appliance ratios. The union also alleges that Deputy National Commander Megan Stiffler is moving to dismantle a relief roster in Auckland designed to keep stations covered when appliances go offline, while reducing the total number of firefighters across the region.
According to the union, a draft policy attributed to Stiffler would further narrow callback arrangements, the mechanism by which off-duty firefighters return to station when on-duty crews are already committed to an incident. The union says callbacks are critical in regional centres including Taupō, Gisborne, Masterton, New Plymouth and Whanganui, where they are the primary means of maintaining career firefighter coverage. Remove them, it argues, and response delays follow.
FENZ's 2024/25 annual report shows career crews arrived at urban structure fires within the eight-minute target in only 76.9% of cases, below the 80% benchmark and unchanged from the year before. Volunteer crews fared worse, meeting the 11-minute standard in 78% of urban structure fire incidents against an 85% target. That figure has fallen for four consecutive years.
Only 61.6% of structure fires were contained to the room of origin where suppression was required, against a target of 80%.
FENZ attended 88,805 incidents in 2024/25, up 2,476 on the prior year. It attributes response time shortfalls to traffic conditions, urban growth and drive-time constraints. Those factors will not improve if station staffing falls alongside them.
For property underwriters, these are not abstract numbers. Fire that spreads beyond the room of origin raises material damage costs and the likelihood of total losses, and lengthens business interruption periods.
Those response time figures compound the findings of the Governance and Administration Select Committee's inquiry into FENZ's fleet management.
The committee found that more than 52% of FENZ's appliances were beyond their target age as of May 2026, up from 23% when FENZ was established in 2017. It also found that none of 30 MAN fire appliances purchased in 2019 were in operational service nearly seven years later.
The committee rejected FENZ's claim that appliances were available and departed stations 99.72% of the time, saying the figure "appears intentionally misleading." It noted that the metric fails to capture situations where an appliance is unavailable or cannot leave the station at all.
All of this is unfolding with FENZ's senior leadership under significant external pressure.
Minister for Internal Affairs Brooke van Velden has publicly described chief executive Kerry Gregory's conduct as "despicable" and said she has no confidence in him. The issue relates to Gregory reportedly not informing her of a matter concerning the fire service levy, dating to around 2021, that has since been referred to the SFO. Gregory is currently overseas, and the FENZ board has made no public statement on his future.
With leadership in question, it is harder to assess whether current operational decisions on staffing, callbacks and rosters will hold, be reversed or get worse.
Every broker placing fire or property cover in New Zealand is already part of this story through the levy.
Levies on property and vehicle insurance supplied 95% of FENZ's $838 million total revenue in 2024/25, according to the parliamentary annual review. The levy is collected through insurance premiums, with insurers, and in some cases brokers, handling collection on FENZ's behalf without compensation.
Insurance Brokers Association of New Zealand (IBANZ) chief executive Katherine Wilson has said the arrangement is inequitable: "Access to FENZ services is quite rightly available to all New Zealanders, but those who pay insurance premiums are unfairly burdened with funding them."
FENZ's levy revenue came in $29.8 million, or 3.6%, below budget in 2024/25. Because the levy is collected through insurance, any fall in the number of insured properties or in sums insured narrows the base that funds the service.
The New Zealand property insurance market has softened through 2025 and into 2026. According to Gallagher's May 2026 Corporate Market Update, IAG's intermediated New Zealand business fell 10.4% in gross written premium, while Suncorp's New Zealand operations declined 5.6%.
That creates a mismatch. Soft market pricing reflects capacity and competition, not the operational capability of the fire service, so deteriorating response is not being priced in. For brokers holding property and business interruption accounts in regional New Zealand, where a callback arrangement may be the only thing between a client and no career fire response at all, that gap is material.
The practical response sits at renewal. Brokers can check that business interruption indemnity periods would cover the rebuild time after a total loss rather than a partial one, and that sums insured reflect full reinstatement costs. They can also confirm that clients' monitored alarms and sprinkler systems are recorded with insurers, and encourage clients who depend on regional stations to review their own fire protection and emergency plans.
The NZPFU expects FENZ to arrive at this week's sessions with a settlement offer. Whether that offer addresses crewing and operational concerns, not only pay, will determine whether the underlying risk picture shifts.
