By Steve Schifferes BBC News Online economics reporter

The government's fire services minister, Nick Raynsford, has renewed calls for the Fire Brigades Union to join an independent inquiry into their pay and conditions.

In an exclusive interview with BBC News Online, Mr Raynsford said that the inquiry, headed by Sir George Bain, offered the best hope of resolving the dispute peacefully.

But he refused to rule out the review considering firemen's terms and working conditions as well as pay, and said their 40% pay claim was "way out of line" with offers to other public sector workers.

That is the main reason the Fire Brigades Union has given for rejecting participation in the review.

Strike threat

Instead, the union has called for a ballot of its members for strike action, and results will be announced on 18 October.

It has already rejected as "derisory" a 4% offer from local government employers.

Mr Raynsford "rejected utterly" the claim that he had stopped the employers from making a higher offer.

But he admitted that any strike could be "quite disruptive" and said that the government was taking measures to ensure that the public did not suffer in any dispute.

There have been suggestions that airports, Tubes and trains may be closed during strike action by firemen if workers in those services take action on safety grounds.

Mr Raynsford said he would be disappointed if there was any illegal secondary action for political motives when the government was investing so much in the public sector.

And he denied that the government faced a winter of discontent.

About 55,000 firefighters across the UK will vote over the next few weeks on whether to stage the first national walk-out in the fire service for 25 years.

Earlier, the chairman of the review, Sir George Bain, appealed to the firefighters to trust him.

Sir George, who headed the Low Pay Commission which introduced the minimum wage, will be joined in the inquiry by former TUC president Sir Tony Young and former Birmingham City Council chief executive Sir Michael Lyons.

Sir George has hinted that he might be prepared to recommend an interim offer before the mid-December date by which his review is due to report.

The government is facing industrial action by rail and tube workers, lecturers and support staff, and recently settled an industrial dispute with 1.3m local government workers by agreeing to a generous 7.7% pay offer over two years.

But it is worried that the huge increases in public spending designed to improve public services could be swallowed up in pay settlements if gives in to the firefighters' claim.