Fire and Emergency New Zealand (FENZ) spent $90,000 on an external PR consultant and a lawyer to help prepare for a select committee inquiry into the state of its vehicle fleet, CEO Kerry Gregory confirmed at a hearing on 20 July 2026. RNZ

A select committee is a small group of MPs from across Parliament that investigates issues and reports back with findings. This one — the Governance and Administration Committee — opened its inquiry in April 2026 after firetruck breakdowns and frustration over a seven-year buying process that failed to put any of 30 new trucks on the road. The inquiry ran for four months.

National MP Melissa Lee pressed Gregory on why he needed to hire outside help to answer questions about an organisation he leads. Gregory told the committee FENZ needed external assistance to understand what the inquiry was asking for and to pull information out of ageing IT systems. The PR consultant and lawyer helped prepare an 80-page submission that MPs reviewed.

The spending came amid leadership changes at the top of FENZ. Raveen Jaduram, formerly chief executive of Watercare, was installed as the new board chair three weeks before the hearing. National manager Mike Moran and deputy chief executive Sarah Sinclair had both just resigned. Green MP Mike Davidson asked about exit packages for the two departing fleet leaders; Gregory stated Sinclair did not receive one.

FENZ's own submission to the committee admitted to a catalogue of systemic failures: inadequate truck-buying systems, inadequate contract management, maintenance reporting still using paper records, and inadequate IT and document systems. Gregory conceded under questioning from National MP Tim Costley that a new procurement system introduced in 2022 "didn't work." FENZ has since produced a procurement "roadmap" in 2025.

Costley was blunt about the board's grip on the situation. "The board appeared to be tracking nothing," he said of FENZ's oversight. Jaduram, in his first appearance before the committee as chair, warned management about accountability and said the years of problems dragging on were "not acceptable."

Acting Minister of Internal Affairs David Seymour told Parliament in November 2025 that FENZ had inherited a faulty logging and tracking system from 2017, pointing to legacy issues predating the current executive. Gregory repeatedly responded to MPs' questions about what went wrong by saying "We will do better" and describing the problems as having "a long tail" going back years.

The professional firefighters' union offered a sharper assessment. "FENZ's corporate structure is fracturing because they cannot answer for the crisis on the frontline," the union said in a statement.

The broader context here is one of an agency struggling to show it can fix itself. The $90,000 spend on external communications and legal advice is likely to sharpen MPs' focus on what FENZ's in-house capability actually covers, and whether the board under Jaduram can impose the accountability he has already flagged as necessary. With a new procurement roadmap in place but the 2022 system already acknowledged as a failure, the committee's findings, when they land, will test whether parliamentary scrutiny can extract concrete fixes from an agency under sustained operational pressure.