The future of volunteers in the fire and rescue service

Professional Development

The future of volunteers in the Fire and Rescue Service As budget cuts loom, Catherine Levin investigates what fire and rescue services are doing to capture the volunteer ‘workforce’ and evolve community safety work in future

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many feel about the Service. Keeping those volunteers long-term and reaping the rewards of investing time and effort in their training is something all organisations must work through to keep rates of attrition low.

ess money in the budget but you still want to maintain or even expand community fire safety? Then use volunteers. It sounds like the perfect solution to the problem, but is it really that simple? Fire and rescue services have a long history of using volunteers from the community, either individually or via third parties like the Red Cross, so there is plenty of experience to draw on.

Volunteer Resource According to Volunteering England, every year, over 20 million people across England volunteer, donating more than 100 million hours to their communities every week. There are a lot of willing participants. You only have to look back at the experience of the London 2012 Olympics to see how much enthusiasm there was for volunteering. This is fertile ground and with the Localism Act and budget cuts looming in the background, this article explores what fire and rescue services are doing to capture this ‘workforce’ and evolve community safety work in the future.

Convincing fire authority members that volunteers should become part of a fire and rescue service is a precursor to rolling out any programmes. Max Hood, ex-Chief of West Sussex Fire and Rescue Service (FRS), argues: “County council services have members who are more focused on the wider role of the county council and can see other opportunities,” so they tend to get volunteers in and use them across the council’s whole portfolio and not just fire. Members in South Yorkshire, according to ACO Steve Makepeace, were enthused by the opportunities for local people to engage with the Fire and Rescue Service and in particular to offer young people experience and qualifications to help them access the workplace. Others are more conservative and agree to small scale schemes, such as Manchester and London, before making larger commitments.

The motivation for someone to volunteer varies: some may do so to boost their career prospects and some do it for the company and the social side. Whatever the motivation, understanding what drives volunteers to give up their time for no remuneration is central to successful deployment in any organisation. It is obvious what drives people to volunteer for the FRS: the age-old cliché about firefighters may be a large part of this, but undersells the sympathy

“You only have to look back at the experience of the London 2012 Olympics to see how much enthusiasm there was for volunteering”

Volunteer Organisations Red Cross volunteers are probably the most enduring model in the FRS. Northamptonshire FRS has used them for 15 years for post incident support of victims of fire and to provide welfare for their own staff responding to fires. Manchester FRS use the Red Cross but complement this with their own volunteer scheme which sees trained volunteers going into the homes of victims of house fires, mostly in social housing, and making good the worst of the damage to speed up rehoming.

Partnering with a well established organisation, such as the Rotary Club (West Yorkshire) or Neighbourhood Watch (London) is a favoured route by many fire and rescue services, with well trained, highly motivated volunteers who are rewarded by their access to fire stations, wearing branded clothing and representing fire and rescue services as close to the front line as they can get.

The Supporting Inclusion Programme, a grant scheme administered by the Department for Communities and Local Government, is providing funding to fire and rescue services via the Chief Fire Officers Association (CFOA) to increase the number of fire cadet units. One of the drivers for the grant is the government’s desire to see more adult volunteers working with young people. If the recent experience of Manchester, where they recruited 36 adult volunteers from one recruitment day, is anything to go by then there is real enthusiasm from local communities to work with young people at risk in partnership with the FRS. It is early days for the programme but it certainly looks like a promising start for bringing volunteers into contact with the Service.

Managing Volunteers Many fire and rescue services are using volunteers to carry out home fire safety visits and/or generate referrals for them. The home fire safety check and fire prevention grants, given to fire authorities under the last government pump-primed activity in this area has encouraged the use of advocates in specific March 2013 | www.fire–magazine.com | 29

Professional Development communities and investing in others to carry out HFSVs. London invested heavily in the latter to access hard to reach groups.

The grant ran out in 2008 but there are still many fire and rescue services using volunteers to do this work and more. Staffordshire has around 100 volunteers recruited from across the county and asks for a minimum of four hours a month.

Hertfordshire has 150 volunteers committed to doing a minimum of six hours per month each, carrying out HFSVs but expanding their activity into community horse patrols and bike patrols.

Derbyshire and East Sussex FRSs are currently oversubscribed and either not recruiting or operating waiting lists. This is impressive: people really do want to give their time to the Service from all parts of the country.

Managing volunteers should not be underestimated. Mark Cashin, Deputy Chief of Cheshire FRS, is a great supporter of volunteers, with over 350 in his brigade but he did note: “We have learned through often painful experience that using volunteers brings with it risks, complications and work.”

ACO Pete O’Reilly, Director of Prevention and Protection at Greater Manchester FRS, says that you do not need a lot of staff to manage large numbers of volunteers. They have over 400 volunteers and five permanent staff embedded in their community safety teams, managing them using an online database to allow volunteers to select what they want to do and when.

Given what is known about their motivation, getting volunteers to stay committed and available for the long term means investing staff time and effort. Having permanent employees in fire and rescue services to manage volunteers means having a budget, and at a time when budgets are under pressure, the temptation to cut these posts must be very real.

Sue Butler is a full-time volunteer coordinator for South Yorkshire FRS, where they have had a volunteer programme for just over a year and have around 60 volunteers in place. She points out that not only do brigades have to find the cost of permanent employees, but need to cover volunteer expenses, the cost of CRB checks and any branded clothing.

Making sure that budgets include enough to cover all of this is an integral part of managing any volunteer service.

Investing in Volunteers For those senior managers juggling finite budgets, there has to be a compelling argument to keep these permanent posts and with that comes proof of success. One marker of success can be completion of Investing in Volunteers, the UK quality standard for all organisations which involve volunteers in their work. The standard is focused on the management of volunteers so will not say much if anything about value for money, but it is an indicator nonetheless. Only Cheshire has 30 | March 2013 | www.fire–magazine.com

“Getting a model for volunteers in this area to apply across all fire and rescue services would stop everyone reinventing the wheel”

achieved this so far but it may be something worth considering for others looking for quality standards to convince members about retaining volunteer schemes.

There is a consistent theme coming from fire and rescue services when asked about their own motivation for running volunteer schemes: this is not about replacement, it is about enhancement and adding value. Advertising for volunteers, South Yorkshire FRS state quite clearly that: “All the roles are new and none of them will replace existing or former paid roles.

Volunteering is a long-term development of ours and in no way connected to future reductions in our funding. It is about enhancing the services we already provide.” No other fire and rescue service makes such a blunt public statement.

Fire and rescue services need to exercise caution so that they do not end up facing legal action, with volunteers arguing that they are doing the job of a permanent employee and seeking compensation through the courts.

Paul Jacques from Royal Berkshire FRS says he has been “very careful to consider the issue of job substitution when considering a new volunteering role.” He promotes Volunteering England and their guidance on this issue.

Future Direction So where do fire and rescue services go from here? Do they continue recruiting groups of local enthusiasts to carry out HFSVs, attend local events and assist the community safety teams, or can fire and rescue services be smarter about their use of volunteers?

One option is to outsource the activity and establish a fire brigade charity. This has already been achieved by Merseyside in 2001,

by Cleveland in 2007 and this year London’s members are looking at doing the same. The charity, sitting outside of the strictures of the fire authority, can set out its own charitable purposes, determine the public good it wishes to serve and go well beyond what its ‘parent’ may have done in the community safety sphere.

Linda Mitchell, long serving CEO of the Fire Support Network – Merseyside FRS’s charitable arm – argues that “the greatest advantage we have as a charity is the opportunity to be creative with what we deliver and how it is delivered.” She also notes another advantage for charities that comes from them being able to access external funding to complement their activity. For Linda, it is all about flexibility and responsiveness. Perhaps more fire and rescue services should consider this route for their volunteer activities.

Fire authorities around the country are consulting on their proposals on how to deal with budget reductions and making hard choices about priorities. It is a time when community safety comes under the spotlight and the pressure to cut back and work in more cost effective ways is very real. This is a prime time for fire and rescue services to take a long hard look at what they are doing with

Professional Development

volunteers to promote their community safety agenda and embed them in service delivery.

Currently Sir Ken Knight is leading the efficiency review of the services delivered by fire and rescue authorities in England. The classic civil servant phrase ‘effective and efficient’ gets rolled out in the press release and an examination of volunteers, particularly in the community safety area is certainly going to be looked at, according to sources in DCLG. The outcome of his review is eagerly anticipated and, as the press release reminds us all, fire deaths and incidents are at an all-time low, so getting smarter with using volunteers to keep that community fire safety message out there has to be one of its recommendations.

Getting a model for volunteers in this area to apply across all fire and rescue services would stop everyone reinventing the wheel, share good practice, and if it can be combined with true grass roots commitment from communities, align nicely with the Localism Act. CFOA will be running an innovation event later in the year bringing the experience of volunteering from the third sector together with that in the Service.

This is a good opportunity to share ideas and come up with adaptable approaches to integrate volunteers in all types of fire and rescue services.

As budget cuts loom, volunteering will grow in importance, argues the author, allowing services to provide effective operational response Photo by Sean Vatcher: www.firephotos.co.uk

“People really do want to give their time to the Service from all parts of the country”

Keeping community safety at the forefront of priorities and tapping into the enthusiasm of volunteers from local communities is a compelling proposition for all fire authorities.

Next year marks the ten-year anniversary of the Fire and Rescue Services Act. Let us hope it does not coincide with a reduction in community fire safety activity and a reversal of that downward trend in fires, injuries and deaths, which fire and rescue services have worked so hard to achieve.

About the Author: Catherine Levin oversaw the volunteers pilot project at London Fire Brigade as Deputy Head of Community Safety up to November 2012.

The author would like to thank: ex-CFO Max Hood, West Sussex FRS; ACO Mark Ainge, Northamptonshire FRS; ACO Peter O’Reilly, Greater Manchester FRS; CFO Steve McGuirk, Greater Manchester FRS; ACO Steve Makepeace, South Yorkshire FRS; Sue Butler, South Yorkshire FRS; DCO Olaf Baars, Royal Berkshire FRS; Paul Jacques, Royal Berkshire FRS; DCO Mark Cashin, Cheshire FRS; Mike Larking, DCLG; DCO Neil Gibbins, Devon and Somerset FRS; ACO Neil Odin, Hampshire FRS; CFO Roy Wilsher, Hertfordshire FRS; DCO Phil Loach, West Midlands FRS. March 2013 | www.fire–magazine.com | 31