Petersfield residents are being urged to make their views known on proposals to axe firefighters and fire engines in Petersfield.

Hampshire Fire Authority oversees the county fire service and supports the proposals, which come as the service loses £12.m of government funding.

Authority chief officer Dave Curry said: “The way we are funded is changing.

“While addressing our financial challenges, we want to provide a smarter, more relevant and more efficient service to Hampshire residents.”

The station in Swan Street was opened in 1957, and at present there are two fire tenders and 20 on-call firefighters based there.

But it is being suggested that one fire tender crewed by up to six firefighters is replaced by a smaller, first response vehicle, with just four firefighters.

Alongside this change it is being proposed the number of on-call firefighters is cut from 20 to 14.

And the average time firefighters take to get to an incident needs to be reduced from 10 minutes nine seconds to eight minutes 44 seconds, recommends the proposal document.

In the area covered by Petersfield firefighters, there are 25,270 residents, and last year they responded to 81 critical incidents, and 124 non-critical ones.

There were also 102 false and hoax calls.

Many of the critical call outs involve incidents on the busy A3 and the A272 roads, and London to Portsmouth rail line.

The independently overseen consultation can be filled in by visiting the website www.hantsfire.gov.uk/a-safer-hampshire

It was launched on Monday and runs until Friday, December 4.