"Is vulnerability the new black?"

Professional Development

“Is vulnerability the new black?”

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FIRE Correspondent Catherine Levin reports on an event stemming from a venture between the Chief Fire Officers Association and Newcastle University as part of the Festival of Social Science, titled ‘How do we talk to people if they don’t exist?’

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DCFO Neil Odin worked alongside Prof Rob Wilson to create an event with insight from both an FRS and academic perspective

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Reaching Out to the Non-existent The title of the event was ‘How do you talk to people if they don’t exist?’ The proposition was that fire and rescue services have come such a long way in targeting efforts to locate those most vulnerable in communities and have done so increasingly in partnership with other local organisations; but where do they to go from here?

The event provided a new forum for the relatively new organisation, the Centre of Excellence for Information Sharing, to test its ideas with delegates. Nicola Underdown led an interactive session to try to understand the organisational and/or human factors that impede information sharing.

It was Andy Mobbs, Business Intelligence lead for London Fire Brigade, who offered delegates a new take on the Bruce Forsyth TV quiz show, with his ‘Play your vulnerability right’ game.

The question he posed: ‘Is vulnerability the new black?’ lingered throughout the day.

Should the Fire and Rescue Service have an ambition to be able to predict where fires will take place, to know who is most likely to be injured and who is most likely to die in fires?

But perhaps that ambition should be tempered by the fact that regardless of all efforts, there will always be some and that zero is not an option or an aspiration.

One step towards this ambition is Demografire.

This is a new national demographic risk profile for the Fire and Rescue Service developed by Philip 44 | January 2016 | www.fire–magazine.com

Usher from Cheshire Fire and Rescue Service who is leading on this work for CFOA. Philip showed how using MOSAIC at an aggregate level, ie, using many different fire and rescue services and not just one, can reveal some interesting results.

He asked whether fire and rescue services were “selecting easy targets for prevention work; doing the easy thing rather than the right thing”.

However, it is well known that MOSAIC by itself is not enough to track down those most vulnerable; it needs to be used in concert with other data sources. Shantha Dickinson, Knowledge Manager at Hampshire Fire and Rescue Service, asked if “we are placing limits on what we can do with data?” She went on to question whether the Fire and Rescue Service is now at a point where it has accepted that austerity impacts activity and that perhaps there is a lack of imagination about how to do more with less. Stagnation perhaps?

Shantha shared her work with Ordnance Survey, not a partner that fire and rescue services would ordinarily share information with as normal business. She demonstrated how overlaying datasets on top of ordnance survey maps gives a richer view of where risk might exist. This is proof of concept work by Shantha under the auspices of CFOA’s Integrated Data and Research Programme and will be developed further in the coming year.

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t is not often a fashion cliché is hijacked to question work going on in fire and rescue services, but on November 9 this is exactly what happened when over 60 delegates from 23 fire and rescue services gathered at the London Fire Brigade headquarters to puzzle over the contribution that academic approaches to information sharing could make to improve fire safety outcomes.

DCFO Neil Odin, CFOA lead for the Integrated Data and Research Programme and Professor Rob Wilson, Director of the Knowledge, Innovation, Technology and Enterprise research unit at Newcastle University, chaired the event. This is a new venture between CFOA and Newcastle University. The event was held as part of the Economic and Social Research Council’s 13th annual Festival of Social Science.

“The work on the information sharing manifesto will be shared with delegates and others through the Integrated Data and Research Programme”

Academic Approaches So what can academic approaches to information sharing do to assist the Fire and Rescue Service?

Well, this event was all about looking at what the academic world is doing in terms of research and how can it be applied to the Fire and Rescue Service. South Yorkshire Fire and Rescue Service (SYFRS) is working with the School of Management at the University of Sheffield.

“We know there are better connections in the community,” advised Steve Fletcher from SYFRS. He wanted to increase the number of partner referrals for home safety visits, but he needed better data to do this. He has been working with Dr Dermot Breslin and colleagues from the University of Sheffield who use an academic approach called agent-based modelling. This has been employed to analyse household fire risk based on connectivity.

Dr Breslin suggested that “Isolation is the new black”. His work is looking at how to reach

Professional Development

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Manifesto for FRS Information Sharing Taking this input from delegates, Dr Cornford and Professor Wilson undertook to puzzle over it and put together a draft manifesto for information sharing for the Fire and Rescue Service. Dr Cornford has, since the seminar, thought further about the Exeter Data, in particular, and offered the following thoughts.

“I think that the Exeter Data is particularly interesting as it seems to have forced a process of sense-making in the Fire and Rescue Service that includes: • Working out what the Exeter data tells us directly that might be of use.

• Working out what data would actually be of use (and thinking about how that might be acquired or created) • Working out how the Exeter data, coupled with or linked with other data, might be of more use.

The relationship between CFOA and Newcastle University will continue to develop and the work on the information sharing manifesto will be shared with delegates and others through the Integrated Data and Research Programme.

It was a day of stimulation, ideas and discussion around a subject intangible and challenging: how do you talk to people if they don’t exist? Well, it seems the answer may lie in the data but until the data is considered, analysed and applied to support policy development, it is just a bunch of numbers. Left with the question whether vulnerability is the new black? It might just be, but how long before a new focus for attention comes along to replace it?

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“It was a day of and discussion

around a subject intangible and

challenging: how do

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you talk to people if they don’t exist?”

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Understanding Big Data It was inevitable at an event like this that Exeter Data would come up. This is short hand for a dataset from the Department of Work and Pensions that contains the date of birth, gender and address of all over 65s who are registered with a GP. From October 2015, all fire and rescue services started to receive their own dataset for their own local area. The dataset represents 17 per cent of the population. It is huge.

Dr James Cornford from the University of East Anglia was on hand to offer some solutions about how to deal with a large influx of data.

Using the grand term ‘big data’, Dr Cornford talked about datasets that are vastly larger than the Exeter Data, but at the same time recognised that size is relative and that fire and rescue services may need some pointers about what to do with it.

He works at the ESRC Business and Local Government Data Research Centre. This is a new venture that aims to “identify deliverable solutions through data exchange and collaboration, bridging research and practical knowledge helping everyone to harness their data”.

Using his research and ably assisted by event co-host Professor Rob Wilson, they suggested a novel approach to determining what the Fire and Rescue Service should do with its data. The answer? Build a manifesto.

It is possibly the first and probably the only time that Karl Marx is referenced in a seminar focused on how to locate those at risk from fire. However, all embraced this approach and

the tables were quickly covered in colourful post it notes. Delegates were asked to answer the following questions about the data: who to engage with; what is required; how and why the data is acquired; where and when it is received; why do it and what happens next?

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people on the ends of ‘branches’ of connectivity.

He showed a web of connections between people in communities, through school, places of worship, healthcare providers and so on. He focused on those at the end of branches, those with just one connection; or even the dots, the ones with no connections at all.

Into the web, Dr Breslin input social contagion, an ominous phrase but in simple terms it means the impact an individual has on others and vice versa. Offering a solution to improved referrals for SYFRS, the model would see focus placed on those networks where households are considered to be at high risk of fire. Understanding how people are connected can offer real insight into how to get to those who, returning to the focus of the seminar, do not exist.

Dr Kellie Payne from the Campaign for Loneliness offered some insight about those people who may be at the end of those branches. She told delegates that while there is no agreed definition of loneliness, it is not social isolation and therefore not limited to the people identified by Dr Breslin’s approach. She talked about the quality and depth of social networks and how people are connected – someone may have all the connections in the world, but still feel lonely.

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The event aimed to create a manifesto for information sharing in the Fire and Rescue Service

January 2016 | www.fire–magazine.com | 45