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Sketching out the standards landscape
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FIRE Correspondent Catherine Levin reports on the Professional Standards Body project which in six months’ time will present the Fire Minister with a business case for clarifying and bringing consistency to standards in the Fire and Rescue Service
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heresa May talked about standards when she was Home Secretary. She said during her speech at Reform: “I welcome the Chief Fire Officers Association’s proposals to develop a coherent and comprehensive set of professional standards, building on the work of the National Operational Guidance Programme.” She went on to say: “There are many legitimate reasons why collaboration can fail – competing aims, conflicts of leadership, differing financial positions – but a lack of consistent professional standards is not one of them.” At that point, standards were placed firmly in the context of collaboration and today of course there is a duty to collaborate. Three months later and Brandon Lewis as Minister for Policing and the Fire Service told CFOA at its autumn conference that: “I want [these] reforms to be sector-led. The Home Office will play its full part not least to legislate, where necessary creating the new inspectorate, supporting the development of the new standards body and driving greater transparency.” But by February 2017, the tone changed when the Fire Minister spoke at another event hosted by Reform. “Like everyone in this room, I want all fire personnel, whether full time, on-call or a mixture of both, to be the
best trained and most professional in the world. And to help this, I will be establishing a new professional standards body for everyone in the Fire and Rescue Service which will build a comprehensive professional framework of standards for the Service.” From commending CFOA’s proposal, to the Home Office supporting the work and on to the Minister saying he will establish a standards body, the narrative has changed in the space of eight months. While that may demonstrate its growing importance or could just be an inconsistent speechwriter, it does show that the subject of standards deserves a bit of scrutiny to see exactly what it is all about. So is it time to have national standards? Well, not quite, says Joy Flanagan lately of the Joint Emergency Services Interoperability Programme and now Deputy Senior Responsible Officer for the Professional Standards Body (PSB) project. She is part of this new project that will in just six months present the Fire Minister with a business case for clarifying and bringing consistency to standards in the Fire and Rescue Service in England. With just three others to keep her company, the project team is small – and virtual, they have no offices – and has a big job to do. At the end of April, with the project team in place, the Fire Minister wrote to all chief fire officers and asked for their support for the project. The Home Office is
“There are many legitimate reasons why collaboration can fail – competing aims, conflicts of leadership, differing financial positions – but a lack of consistent professional standards is not one of them” Prime Minister Theresa May 12 | June 2017 | www.fire–magazine.com