United Kingdom - Youngsters at risk of getting into trouble could find themselves being rescued by the Fire Brigade in a few years. Gloucestershire Fire and Rescue Service is planning to build a Life Skills Centre to help people stay on the straight and narrow. The centre, to be built under the Private Finance Initiative, is planned as part of a pounds25million ambitious building programme which will see two new fire stations replace the current Gloucester station in Eastern Avenue and another station built in Uckington, to serve Cheltenham alongside the current town centre station.

The new Gloucester stations will be built in Cheltenham Road East, Churchdown, and Shepherd Road, Tuffley - which will also be the site for the Life Skills Centre.

Project manager Peter Thorp said the educational centre was being built as part of the fire and rescue service's wider role of keeping people safe.

He said: "We now have a statutory duty to prevent fires as well as react to them, and we have long worked on issuing safety advice to residents.

"We are working with our partners, the police and the Primary Care Trust on trying to give people safety advice and keep them safe."

The educational centre will be constructed inside the shell of a former council vehicle depot which is now standing empty.

Mr Thorp said there would be classrooms and open space to teach people about how to avoid problems with drugs and alcohol and provide advice on road safety.

He added: "The centre will have a two-storey house inside it so we can teach people how to deal with a fire in the house."

He explained that the point of helping people avoid problems with drugs and alcohol was all part of their service's safety agenda. "Often people who are having these troubles become our clients, as it were, because they fall asleep with a cigarette burning or with the chip pan on, and we have to respond to that."

Under the PFI process, the brigade is looking at proposals from building companies and expects to shortly narrow it down to a short list of three.

After detailed discussions it will sign a contract with the favoured bidder in 2010. The Life Skills centre is scheduled to go up in early 2012 after a 12 to 15 month building programme.

Mr Thorp said: "Some of the fire stations might be built slightly earlier, but mainly they're two to three years off."

A conference for those involved in the Life Skills project will open at 10.30am at Gloucester Rugby Club tomorrow.

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Written by Aled Thomas