What next for fire reform?

Government & Politics

What next for fire reform?

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he Home Secretary spoke to senior representatives of the Fire and Rescue Service at an event held by the think tank Reform on May 24.

Now that fire is in the Home Office it is only natural that the learning from changes to the police will now be applied to the Fire and Rescue Service. The Home Secretary acknowledged the journey the Fire and Rescue Service has been on and gave a clear steer about the direction it will take now that she has the “privilege of overseeing [it] in the Home Office”.

While the national media decided to focus its attention on the bullying and harassment references made later in the speech, the Home Secretary set out the wide successes of the Fire and Rescue Service and areas that are ripe for reform.

Drawing some strong parallels with the reform of the Police Service, the themes of the Home Secretary’s speech were efficiency, collaboration, workforce reform and accountability.

The “relentless focus” on the Fire and Rescue Service will, she said “improve the wide range of services provided to the public and preserve the sustained falls in incidents and deaths we have seen in recent decades”.

It is 15 years since the Home Office last had oversight of the Fire and Rescue Service and during that time the Service has changed substantially; the Home Secretary rightly refers to the large reductions in fires, fire injuries and fatalities. She also refers to changes in buildings that have made them safer; less false alarms and reduced numbers of malicious calls. The Home Secretary argued that it was “achieved not by change imposed from above, but by reform driven from below”.

Some of that change has been as a result of change that was necessarily ‘imposed from above’ through legislation. The 2004 Fire and Rescue Services Act was critical to sort out the 50 odd years of ‘benign neglect’ when fire languished in the Home Office. Primary legislation is as top down as it gets.

The 2004 Act was the catalyst and focus for reform after the period of industrial action in the years immediately before it. Looking further back, changes to building regulations and secondary legislation relating to the fire safety of furniture in the home and fire safety in nondomestic buildings were also major milestones on the journey to safer buildings.

In 2004, the government gave fire and rescue services £25m over four years to kick start the home fire safety visits. The 2004 Act created a duty to carry out fire prevention work and this

Home Secretary Theresa May addressed senior FRS personnel for the first time at the Reform event at One Great George Street, London on May 24

“I intend to work with fire and rescue services to deliver a programme of reform that is as radical and ambitious as I have delivered in policing since 2010”

investment by the government of the day was crucial to ensuring all fire and rescue services could offer this service. Today these are a core part of every single service’s offer and for many have evolved into something much more sophisticated, targeted at the most vulnerable and underpinned by complex data analysis that involves datasets drawn from many nonfire sources.

One of the casualties of the change of government in 2010 was the Fire Kills campaign. The budget for Fire Kills has shrunk to a few hundred thousand pounds from its £3 million watermark and the days of Julie Walters starring in TV adverts featuring burnt out kitchens are long gone.

Fire and rescue services responded by developing their own approaches to fire safety communications and the world of social media created new and exciting opportunities.

Ultimately, however, there is a lot of duplication going on at a local level which the previously centralised approach of Fire Kills has prevented. Sometimes top down can be more efficient.

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© Allstar Picture Library/Alamy Live News

FIRE Correspondent Catherine Levin reports on Home Secretary Theresa May’s address to the Fire and Rescue Service on May 24

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of its membership. It is in your hands to change it, and my challenge to you is to deliver that change or have the courage of your convictions and withdraw.”

The lack of diversity in the Fire and Rescue Service is well known but when it is said out loud in stark numbers – 96 per cent white, 95 per cent male – it is still pretty shocking. Having fire and rescue services that are representative of the communities they serve is a long standing ambition that pre-dates this Conservative government but without regular sustained recruitment – certainly for wholetime roles – this is a hard ambition to realise.

The BBC picked up on these points in its lunchtime news coverage on Radio 4 when they interviewed FBU President, Matt Wrack.

He was pleased with what the Home Secretary had said. “I know this is something the FBU has championed in the past, and I hope we can work together to increase diversity in fire and rescue”.

He responded on the specific point about diversity in the Service “It is interesting, isn’t it, that the first thing the coalition government did on election in 2010 was abolish all the targets that existed on diversity and issue a statement saying they would no longer tell any fire and rescue service how they should recruit people, develop people or promote people. So it does seem to be slightly at odds with what Theresa May is saying now.”

Questioned further by Martha Kearney about the need for targets to achieve diversity, he responded: “Targets are a useful guide to employers as to how they were progressing in some of these areas”.

It is of course hard to diversify a workforce if there is no recruitment because budgets have been reduced over many years. However, the view of the Home Secretary was “in the last ten years” she said “the overall size of the fire workforce has not changed significantly despite the number of incidents attended falling by 42 per cent”.

This is at odds with what Matt Wrack had to say when speaking on the World at One. “I think firefighters listening will be surprised at the claims that Theresa May is making because the Fire Service has been through the worst cuts in history indeed over the past five or six years with 7,000 firefighter jobs already cut.”

Naturally the Home Secretary spoke about the proposed changes to Fire and Rescue Service governance that are contained in the Policing and Crime Bill currently going through parliament. She used this platform to reassert the position that “these proposals are not a police takeover of fire and rescue services or a top-down merger of the role of police officers and firefighters”.

One key part of the reform puzzle that has been missing so far has been the lack of information about a new inspection regime.

The amendments to the Policing and Crime Bill have made brief references to inspection of

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The Home Secretary makes the link between efficiency savings and collaboration. “The development of much closer collaboration between emergency services was one of the great unsung successes of the last parliament.”

Much of this was due to the investment made through the Fire Transformation Funds. But having fire and police in the same building is not collaboration, it is just neighbours sharing a front door.

For the Home Secretary “deeper collaboration” is achieved through the duty to collaborate. That is a pretty top down approach too.

There is a great line in the speech where the Home Secretary says: “I am committed to ending the narcissism of small differences between local fire and rescue services, which makes no sense in principle and which frustrate joint working in practice”.

She was referring to the lack of joining up in terms of collaborating on back office functions and cited examples of other ways of joining up in the delivery of services.

Matt Wrack, speaking to Martha Kearney on Radio 4’s the World at One, immediately after the end of the speech said “Theresa May may be surprised, we welcome some of that. We believe there is too much empire building in the FRS and there could be greater collaboration in the FRS for example in the provision of vehicles and equipment”.

It is ironic though to listen to talk about services joining up to buy things together for efficiency and effectiveness reasons when Firebuy tried and failed. “As we have seen in policing, local services can deliver significant savings just by pooling their purchasing power and buying the same equipment collectively.”

Perhaps Reform could look at this one and suggest new approaches.

Testing products once for the benefit of all; producing national guidance once for the benefit of all, both examples used by the Home Secretary to demonstrate the value of joined up working. These are the right ambitions and entirely laudable but they need leadership, management and money.

Chief fire officers did not escape criticism.

The practice of chiefs retiring on full pension one day and then returning to the same role on different pay and conditions shortly after was picked out by the Home Secretary. She said: “It looks wrong; it erodes public confidence; it undermines the respect of firefighters and staff in their leadership. It must stop”.

The size and shape of the workforce was highlighted. There is nothing new here in the criticism about the workforce and its flexibility to respond to the changing landscape of risk.

Referring to the National Joint Council and recent agreements on co-responding, the Home Secretary set down a challenge. “The NJC is owned by fire and rescue, not by the government, and fire authorities form one half

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If this leads to reforms to the data collected from fire and rescue services and stored in the Incident Recording System that see it opened up potentially in a fire version of data.police. uk this will be a major and very exciting new development.

“By working in partnership with other local services and using data more systematically, fire and rescue services have developed a deep understanding of the needs and the risks of the communities they serve.” She is right and it is good to hear her recognise the incredible achievements in fire prevention. Accessing data from partners, like the Exeter dataset from NHS England, allows fire and rescue services to really hone their targeting and reach the most vulnerable.

Getting so many chief fire officers and elected members of fire authorities into one room to hear the Home Secretary speak about the Fire and Rescue Service was a major feat. It was a well-orchestrated event that brought attention to the Fire and Rescue Service in way that does not happen very often.

Inevitably in a 4,000 word speech, media outlets will take the most newsworthy elements and major on them, all audience will remember is that the Fire and Rescue Service is a place where people are bullied and harassed. The findings from the report commissioned by Essex Fire and Rescue Authority into the culture of its service and confirmation that the long awaited Thomas Review into workforce conditions will be published are important but they should not be the headlines.

Focusing on the positives clearly is not going to lead the lunchtime news. The Home Secretary said: “Today, prevention work in communities is second nature to every firefighter and core business in every local fire and rescue service”.

This is the headline. This is the story. This is the successful result of years of hard work and a combination of top down change and reform driven from below.

The Home Secretary’s reform agenda is made up of accountability, workforce reform, efficiency, effectiveness and achieving value for money for the taxpayer. New models of governance, a more diverse workforce, new approaches to collaboration and a new inspection regime will be the tangible products that emerge.

However, if the reforms are to be truly successful they must also result in fire and rescue authorities being able to recruit to improve diversity and truly reflect the communities they serve; it must encourage new ways of working based on open data and strong relationships with all local services, not just the other emergency services.

After years of being in DCLG, let us hope the move to the Home Office and this renewed interest in the Fire and Rescue Service leads to some great change and opportunities. Putting all the irony and déjà vu to one side, it is exciting so let us embrace it.

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fire and rescue services for some time but have contained no detail. This speech is the first time that the Home Secretary has confirmed that an inspectorate will be created.

She said: “I intend to bring forward proposals to establish a rigorous and independent inspection regime for fire and rescue in England. I will shortly table amendments to the Policing and Crime Bill to strengthen the inspection powers in the Fire and Rescue Services Act 2004 to put beyond doubt the powers of fire inspectors to enter premises and access information and to ensure the government has the power to commission inspections of particular issues or fire and rescue services”.

We used to live in a world of assessment.

There were targets for fire (albeit not many) in the National Indicator Set; there was a system of assessment in CPA (then CAA) and a long standing inspection regime in HMFSI which was abolished with some of its functions moved to the Audit Commission. All of this was swept away in the frenzy of sector led improvement. The term ‘fire sector’ was created to include everyone in the world of fire except the government. And now, we hear the Home Secretary criticising the lack of scrutiny.

“It is currently almost impossible to scrutinise your local fire and rescue service. There’s no independent inspectorate; no regular audit of performance; and only limited data on performance over time or between areas.”

The irony of this position is almost painful.

There is, however, agreement between the government and the FBU on this issue.

“We have been calling for an independent inspectorate for some time, as the current system has led to huge imbalances on the standards imposed on services across the country. We support any move that will mean all fire and rescue services are inspected, validated and held accountable in a standardised fashion.”

Whether the LGA Peer Review process will survive is not known and it is certainly not favoured by the Home Secretary who echoed the words of the Police and Fire Minister Mike Penning who, in parliament, referred to it as a form of “marking your own homework”.

It is fair to say that an independent inspectorate and the LGA approach are not the same, but in the absence of anything else, it filled a void and has been liked by many in the Fire and Rescue Service as an improvement tool.

One of the benefits of moving from DCLG to the Home Office is a change in attitude to data and a distinctly more positive view on open data. It is all wrapped up in the mantra of greater accountability (a strong theme in the speech). “I will publish transparent fire and rescue information so that ordinary members of the public can compare fire and rescue services on performance, value for money and diversity, monitor that performance over time, and access useful fire safety information and advice”.

time or between areas”

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