Leaders of the Fire Brigades Union (FBU) today gave fire authorities formal notice of their intention to ballot members on industrial action, after talks to end the long-running firefighters' pay dispute collapsed.
Ballot papers will be sent out next week and the vote is expected to run through the rest of August.
The spectre of strike action follows a confusing end to yesterday's talks, when FBU representatives were left waiting as employers failed to return to the table.
Union chiefs and local authority employers had been scheduled to sign a proposal to pay the final two stages of a deal that ended the bitter strikes of 2002 and 2003.
Firefighters would have received a 3.5% pay rise outstanding since last November and a 4.2% rise from July 1.
The 4.2% pay rise was dependent on the Audit Commission verifying that changes to modernising the force, agreed as part of the overall deal, were being carried out.
The public service watchdog delivered its findings last Friday in a second report on modernisation distributed to stakeholders.
The Audit Commission admitted that the progress report, commissioned by the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, would remain unpublished.
As well as the 4.2% rise, transitional funding worth £30m is at stake, which will only be released subject to employers' confidence in the progress of modernisation to date.
But councils have yet to decide whether the progress report shows satisfactory progress and so have not yet given the green light.
While the FBU lauded the report as showing that "all but a handful of fire brigades in England and Wales" had showed significant progress, fire authority bosses claimed the report's findings required "careful consideration".
A Local Government Association spokesman admitted the report's findings were the "sticking point" over agreeing to the 4.2%. "It is not such a clean bill of health that you can rubber-stamp it," he said. "It needs careful consideration and that is what we are doing urgently", he added.
Confusion reigned surrounding yesterday's talks in central London. Employers claimed the talks had ended after the FBU rejected an offer, while the union said that its members were still waiting to reconvene and discuss the issue.
The FBU accused the government "wrecking" the deal, claiming that previous talks had ended successfully last week and that no hint of a problem had been signalled to the union.
An FBU spokesman said: "The only sticking point - stand down time - had been resolved by both sides last Tuesday. The union had agreed to a form of words, proposed by the employers, which they rejected today. No problems were raised between then and the talks today."
The spokesman claimed the employers had met prior to both sides getting together, and that its members - "packed" with a "wrecking crew" of London Labour party councillors instructed to scupper the deal - had voted 13 to 10 against accepting the agreement.
When the main talks were finally held, the employers walked out during an adjournment and refused to meet for another six weeks.
A spokesman for the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister flatly rejected the claims. "It is nonsense for the FBU to say that government has intervened in any way at all. The government has taken no part in these negotiations.
"We have always made it clear that we are prepared to provide transitional funding to support the agreement that resulted in modernisation. The deal was agreed by the employers and the union in June last year."
The Audit Commission said that a full report on fire service modernisation would be produced in the autumn.
