Impact and value: some things never change

Fire Protection

Impact and value: some things never change

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FIRE Correspondent Catherine Levin reports from the Chief Fire Officers Association’s annual Prevention, Protection and Road Safety Conference

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CFOA President Paul Hancock said the prevention agenda has delivered great success

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Financial Sustainability Report Part of this context is not quite so rosy. The previous week saw the publication of the House of Commons Committee of Public Accounts report into the Financial Sustainability of Fire and Rescue Services. This comes after the National Audit Office examined the finances of the Service to see how it was coping with funding reductions.

The Committee met at the end of 2015 and discussed the NAO report with CFO Hancock and others and the report, published on February 17, sets out the Committee of Public Account’s recommendations to government.

There are two clear strands of inquiry in the report that are relevant to PPRS. The first looks at impact and how fire and rescue services are able to evaluate their work in fire prevention and fire protection to determine what difference it makes to levels of fire risk. The second looks at value for money and questions whether all the work that CFO Hancock referred to at the conference is an effective and efficient use of public money.

This term ‘effective and efficient’ crops up

all the time in government publications: at its heart is the concept of value for money. Where fire and rescue services are doing great work locally, carrying out tasks in peoples’ homes so that other agencies do not have to, may well be efficient. However, it does not necessarily mean that it is value for money, particularly if fire and rescue staff are doing the work that others are already being paid to do.

Some fire and rescue services are, like in Humberside, being remunerated by clinical commissioning groups, to carry out tasks they would otherwise pay others to do. Others may not have similar arrangements in place.

The committee expressed a concern about the expansion of firefighter activities beyond their statutory roles. This concern is framed around value for money: should fire and rescue services be working with vulnerable groups at a time when fire and rescue authorities are being asked to ‘transform their services in ways that will reduce their own long-term costs’?

The report goes on to note a tension between the government drive for efficiencies and the vision of the fire and rescue authorities ‘which often focuses primarily on adding value to other sectors by using their capacity more flexibly’.

There is a rather unrealistic recommendation in the report for the Home Office to publish, by the summer, a robust evaluation of the sector’s wider community service projects, ‘setting out best practice and criteria for determining which are effective and an efficient use of public money, and if there is any impact on the financial challenges faced by the fire and rescue sector’.

Delegates at this conference were encouraged

by CFO Hancock to “promote evaluation, to justify what we are doing around public safety”.

He is right to do so, because government will be looking for examples to include in its response to the Committee and there is not much time to do it.

‘Nevertheless, without a sophisticated understanding of the impact of prevention and protection activities on reducing fire risks, we believed there was a danger the department would be over-reliant on outcomes data for its understanding of the impacts of funding reductions, even though such data are necessarily backwards looking. The risk in this case would be that the government would only

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n times of austerity, it is encouraging to see over 140 people representing more than 40 of the 51 UK fire and rescue services attend the CFOA annual Prevention, Protection and Road Safety (PPRS) conference. There is so much change taking place in the Fire and Rescue Service right now that the conference is a timely occasion to consider how some of this will affect PPRS going forward.

CFOA President Paul Hancock offered a detailed and candid view on the political landscape and the backdrop of policy change that currently confronts the whole Fire and Rescue Service. “The prevention agenda has delivered great success”, he said, going on to cite the examples of the smoke alarm regulations for private sector landlords, the provision of Exeter Data about the 65+ cohort and the inroads into working with health partners under the banner of #fireasahealthasset.

CFO Hancock rightly highlighted these successes, but he also put them in context.

He talked about the move to the Home Office, away from DCLG and the home of local government, noting that “we have a lot to offer the Home Office”, urging the Service to “promote what we do and be proud of it”.

“It is likely that the Home Office will be mostly interested in response and governance issues and not quite so interested in prevention and protection”

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“Perhaps one answer for prevention and

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Programme”

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Listen, Learn and Contribute ACO Lewis Ramsay, CFOA PPRS Director and Director of Response and Resilience at the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service, presided over the day. He questioned why fire and rescue services do things over and over again and do not join up. He encouraged delegates to work across borders, to take a forensic approach and to be sure to know who to work with. His helpful mantra of “listen, learn and contribute” was accompanied by his advice “don’t get caught up in the noise of reform”.

That noise of reform, of course, includes the proposed changes to governance for fire and rescue authorities. With the Policing and Crime Bill now in its first stages of parliamentary scrutiny, the duty to collaborate is being formed and the detail of how Police and Crime Commissioners will take on fire and rescue functions is emerging.

It would be easy to push these governance changes to one side and see them as not relevant to PPRS. However, a narrow minded view ignores the potential for the Home Office to revert to type. There have already been warnings from opposition MPs like Kate Hoey, who spoke in the Westminster Hall debate earlier in February. She said “when fire was in the Home Office before, fire got a minimal share of not just resources but a kind of neglect”.

Lyn Brown MP, Shadow Minister for Fire, went further saying that “fire will become a Cinderella service”.

It is likely that the Home Office will be mostly interested in response and governance issues and not quite so interested in prevention and protection. It is early days, of course, to be too pessimistic, but the recommendations from the Committee detailed above may actually prove incredibly helpful here. Getting fire and rescue services prevention work to be evidence-led and driven by outcomes (that are not just the fire statistics), as Lewis Ramsay argued at the conference, may well be the best piece of advice from this conference.

Act Nationally, Think Locally Phil Garrigan, CFOA Lead for Children and Young People and Deputy Chief Fire Officer for Merseyside Fire and Rescue Service, built on Lewis Ramsay’s message about joining up, but put his own spin on it. “Act nationally, think locally,” he urged. He too complained about fire and rescue services doing things 46 50 | April 2016 | www.fire–magazine.com

times (in England). He argued for a national, joined approach to fire prevention work (he was focused on children and young people here) that is consistent.

Perhaps one answer for prevention and protection is to adopt the model of the National Operational Guidance Programme. A nationally developed, best practice approach that is then seen through a local lens; integrated into local policies and procedures it goes a long way to meet DCFO Garrigan’s ambition. It may be time for a title change for this programme?

And then there is the brand. This was a constant theme throughout the conference.

The Fire Kills team talked about brand awareness in marketing terms; DCFO Garrigan said the brand gets fire and rescue staff across the threshold of people’s homes; and CFO Hancock talked about the ‘unique brand and reputation’ which made the Fire and Rescue Service the ‘partner of choice’.

This is all very well, but what does it mean?

One delegate questioned whether the Fire and Rescue Service even has a brand. If the Fire and Rescue Service has a brand, something that distinguishes it from others, what is that? That answer is likely to change depending on which bit of the Fire and Rescue Service is under the microscope.

It is nothing new to talk about the brand of the Fire and Rescue Service and how it helps get firefighters into homes to convey the fire safety message. It is what they do once they get in the home that is now subject to scrutiny.

ACO Geoff Harris, Vice Chair, Strategic Health Group and Director of Prevention and Protection at Greater Manchester Fire and Rescue Service, recommended everyone to read the NHS 5 Year Forward View. This report argues for a ‘radical upgrade in prevention and public health’. It sets out the gaps that need to be filled, one of which is a health and wellbeing gap, and goes on to say: ‘If the nation fails to get serious about prevention, then recent progress in healthy life expectancies will stall, health inequalities will widen, and our ability to fund beneficial new treatments will be crowded-out by the need to spend billions of pounds on wholly avoidable illness’. (p7) Working in partnership with fire and rescue services is one solution to helping the NHS – which acknowledges in this report that it cannot do everything that is needed by itself. While the NHS retains the leadership, it sets out a range of new approaches to improving health and wellbeing. It is the blueprint to underpin the evolution of the home fire safety visit into the ‘safe and well visit’.

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become aware of service failings once they had occurred’. (para 10, p10) Looking only to outcomes data to justify the success of the totality of fire safety work by fire and rescue services is a blunt measure. This excerpt from the PAC report is a timely reminder that putting in place robust evaluation criteria at the start of any fire safety initiative is vital to ensure it meets the ‘effective and efficient’ test, but also to ensure its own longevity when further cuts come to pass, as they inevitably will.

Safe and Well Visits Not all fire and rescue services have moved over to safe and well visits. Manchester, Cheshire and Hampshire are certainly at the forefront of adopting this approach and many more services are developing their own ideas about how these can work. ACO Harris described the nine-day

Fire Protection

“Safe and well visits are the future: person defined and co-designed with partners�

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person centric but

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FIRE Correspondent Catherine Levin

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are ahead of the game, doing things that are efficient and effective, evidence based and pass the government test of value for money, can share with others. If the proposed new duty to collaborate is framed around the relationships between fire and the other emergency services, perhaps the focus should be turned inwards, to create greater collaboration between fire and rescue services. Act nationally, think locally.

Sounds good.

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training package for his staff, which will be out of reach for many smaller services.

ACO Ramsay said that safe and well visits are the future: person defined and person centric but co-designed with partners. Working out what is the best approach from the start of any new partnerships, working out how far to go with sign posting, with light touch risk assessments and balancing out mitigation measures that address those risks immediately with those that are longer term.

It is unsurprising that the evolution of safe and well visits has been an organic process, locally driven and taken forward by some services, but not all. It is another example of working things out 46 or 51 times over. The call at this conference for acting nationally and thinking locally is not working here. Perhaps it should.

This conference came at a good time to think about the direction that PPRS work should now go in. There are many new challenges as the policy landscape is changing, but there is no reason why those involved in PPRS cannot influence the direction of travel so that this work does not get sidelined or dropped.

Joining up a bit more will certainly help and it would be useful if those services that

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