Who's looking to the future? The state of research in the fire and rescue service

Fire Protection

Lt d

Who’s looking to the future?

The state of research in the Fire and Rescue Service FIRE Correspondent Catherine Levin reports on the patchy nature of research in the fire sector and the need for some new strategic direction

an dM ed hin g

lis

FIRE Correrspondent Catherine Levin

nP ub

vil io

Pa

Knowledge Transfer Partnership The response of the fire sector to this change has been varied. Take, for example, the LIFEBID work in Kent. This is a Knowledge Transfer Partnership between the University of Greenwich and Kent Fire and Rescue Service. It is a three-year project funded by some government money in the form of Innovate UK (formerly known as the Technology Strategy Board) and the one of the academic research councils, the EPSRC. The aim of the project is to get a better understanding about how people react to fires in the home and the impact it has on them afterwards. The project funding runs out at the end of April. The project includes 25 fire and rescue services that are conduits to people who have been affected by accidental dwelling fires.

44 | March 2016 | www.fire–magazine.com

The dataset from this work is small, with around 300 records and scratches the surface of the problem it is trying to address.

The project asks interesting questions, sets up a methodology based on academic rigour and after three years will know little more than when it started. It requires long-term commitment and larger take up. This would have benefited from a national steer, from national investment and a national strategy that would have seen all fire and rescue services involved. It is not Kent’s problem, it is the fire and rescue services’ problem and the answers would benefit all of them.

Partnerships with academic institutions are nothing new, but longevity is the key. Where projects are based on temporary sources of funding with no long-term strategy for continuation, there is no prospect for the creation of a longitudinal evidence base to inform policy change.

ia

I

n a ‘can do’ organisation like the Fire and Rescue Service, the quieter, reflective work of researchers and statisticians can seem unexciting and uncontroversial. Yet the impact of evidence-based research, using rigorous academic methodologies can lead to important changes in policy across the increasingly diverse remit of fire and rescue services.

In a time of decreased budgets and long-term retrenchment of government, sector-led research has been encouraged. The result of this policy shift should be a rich body of work emerging from the Fire and Rescue Service and the fire sector more widely. Indeed, there are examples of innovative and interesting research (with some examples provided below), but overall research in the fire sector is patchy and ad hoc. There is a vacuum in leadership in this area and an opportunity now for some new strategic direction.

In years gone by, there was a large team in the Fire and Rescue Directorate of DCLG. It produced long, detailed reports on a wide variety of topics and published them unattributed in bland covers, accompanied by a press notice seeking interest in their contents. Much of the time the research was commissioned from a predictable list of small specialist companies and large international consulting firms.

Sadly, those days are long gone and what remains is the publication of occasional reports and regular statistical bulletins, as well as the annual Fire Statistics Great Britain.

“Overall, research in the fire sector is patchy and ad hoc”

Big Data And then there is data. We are swimming in data; we even have Big Data. But what good is it and what evidence does it give us to improve outcomes? One large dataset is the Exeter Data.

Emerging from a relationship built between CFOA representatives (notably CFOA Ageing Safely lead, Evan Morris) and DWP with some help from the NHS along the way, fire and rescue services in England have all received some large spreadsheets of data that they now have to manage.

It is great that fire and rescue services have access to data on one group of people in the community – those that fit the profile of over 65, registered with a GP. They do not have their names, but they do have their age and their address. The question is what do you do with it? It is the perverse opposite of the LIFEBID problem. No fire and rescue service is going to just go line by line through the dataset and use that for targeting home safety visits.

It is very useful to have datasets from primary sources, ones that allow fire and rescue services to develop sophisticated, targeted fire prevention strategies. However, it needs to be part of a wider strategy and one that provides fire and rescue services with the tools and skills to manipulate the data and align it with all the other sources it may have to hand.

Fire Protection to IRS datasets, but despite an FOI request to DCLG from the Fire Protection Association, this has not so far happened. Dennis is still hopeful of a new model emerging, a modern one that rethinks the costs of fire and with the move to the Home Office he is optimistic about the future.

vil io

Pa

Economic Cost of Fire A third example of research is the economic cost of fire. Last formally updated by government in 2011 based on an estimate from 2008, the economic cost of fire model was a useful way to be able to make sense of all of the elements that are impacted by fire and use it in policy development, particularly in the fire protection field.

This is a prime example of how the fire sector could have taken ownership of research and updated this well-established model. And yet it did not happen. Dennis Davis, work stream chair for Research and Statistics at the Fire Sector Federation, is frustrated at a lack of progress. “It’s a bit of a trauma,” he says, “it’s gone nowhere.”

One way of updating the model would have been for the sector (through the Fire Sector Federation and its members) to gain direct access

ia

Lt d

Fire Related Research and Developments Event This might seem a bit gloomy, but there is some hope. Dr Anne Eyre heads up the annual research event, held in recent years at the Fire Service College and now in its 20th year. Anne is hugely enthusiastic about the continuing growth in fire-related research. Against a backdrop of reduced budgets in both the Fire and Rescue Service and academia, she says there is still new research coming out of universities and other organisations that continues long-term themes, but also goes in new and exciting directions.

It is encouraging to hear there is new blood in the field: new researchers emerge every year across a wide spectrum of expertise – from the softer area of community safety to the hard edges of fire engineering. The annual conference provides an opportunity for early career researchers as well as those who are more established to share new work, build on emerging themes and develop longer-term ideas [in our support of fire-related research, FIRE magazine, in parternship with Gore, has presented the Research Excellence Awards at the event for the last nine years -Ed].

The research event is a well-established channel for disseminating new ideas, but unless those new ideas are harnessed and channeled into a direction that makes sense for the service overall, it is not actually dealing with the problems highlighted above.

Elsewhere, the Fire Service College has announced the creation of a research and development function. The Research, Development, Technology and Innovation Hub “enabled by the Fire and Rescue Service: driven by the Fire and Rescue Service” sounds promising.

There are currently discussions between the Fire Service College and CFOA that mark the start of a fledgling partnership. This may be the beginning of the ‘systematic, joined up and combined effort’ to research and development in the UK Fire and Rescue Service that CFOA sets out in its IDRP position document.

The academic focus of the work of the IDRP, developed alongside the more operational-focused work of more traditional R&D led by CFO Tom Capeling, offers a fresh approach. The leadership and strategic direction currently missing in the world of the Fire and Rescue Service research could well emerge from this work.

It is early days and this work is well worth closely monitoring to see that it truly is a joined up approach that benefits all fire and rescue services. If it sees an end to local, inward looking projects that rely on small numbers and serve to confirm parochial views, then it has to be a step in the right direction.

an dM ed

“There is a vacuum in leadership in

hin g

this area and an

opportunity now for some new

lis

strategic direction”

nP ub

Demografire In Cheshire, Philip Usher has been quietly developing Demografire, a neologism that might just enter the fire vernacular one day soon. His quandary, along with that of LIFEBID, sums up the problem of research and statistics in fire and rescue services right now: the numbers from a single fire and rescue service working alone are too small to draw any meaningful conclusions locally or otherwise. But if individual fire and rescue services come together and the data is aggregated then maybe something useful will emerge.

For Philip, this comes in the form of MOSAIC profiles. Beloved of many, if not all fire and rescue services, the Experian product is a useful tool to understand segments of communities from a broader perspective than just blunt fire statistics. “My bugbear,” says Philip, “is seeing fire and rescue services all doing it (MOSAIC work) separately.”

CFOA’s Integrated Data and Research Programme is led by DCFO Neil Odin from Hampshire Fire and Rescue Service. Philip leads on the social marketing and analysis strand of this work and has developed Demografire as a way to improve data analysis. The pilot work focuses on kitchen fires. “How different can kitchen fires be?” asks Philip. Quite.

Sending fire statistics off to DCLG (Home Office now, presumably) to be part of the Incident Recording System so that they can be aggregated, analysed and appear in the annual Fire Statistics publication is a long-standing task for fire and rescue services. It would be more useful if the IRS dataset were accessible to others, to download, to manipulate, to feed the likes of Demografire so that instead of Philip corralling 15 fire and rescue services into providing kitchen fire data, he could just do it himself.

One answer may be to make the IRS dataset in its entirety available via the Data Catalogue hosted by the ESRC’s Business and Local Government Data Research Centre. It should all be in one place and searchable; not just pages and pages of links to Excel spreadsheets hidden away on a government website.

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