Direct entry and diversity of thinking

Government & Politics

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Ahead of the Congress on Changing the Face of the Fire and Rescue Service on May 24, FIRE looks at direct entry recruitment, hearing the views of Kent’s Chief Executive, Ann Millington, and East Sussex’s Chief Fire Officer, Dawn Whittaker, to help shape the debate

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Direct entry and diversity of thinking

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f we are going to change, we need to have a diversity of thinking. In reality, it’s an old and tired argument to say ‘we need a woman’ or ‘we need a man’ because you can recruit either one and still end up with homogenised thinking.”

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People Strategy Ann Millington, Chief Executive of Kent Fire and Rescue Service, warms to the theme of direct entry. She is the National Fire Chiefs Council lead for People and responsible for the People Strategy. She wrote the strategy using the support of over 500 responses from the fire sector to the consultation draft. Ann is reassured about the level of interest and willingness of services to engage with its development.

“You want to bring in different thinking and in order to get that you need to bring in people from other sectors, and that of course includes women and men. What you end up with is this fantastic balance of people who have come through the Service, but also non-Fire and Rescue Service people because they were the right people for the job.”

One of the problems with this ambition is that the job descriptions for principal officer roles almost always include a requirement for operational experience.

Ann is one of the exceptions: she is an occupational psychologist by training and has never been a firefighter.

Newly installed Chief of Essex Fire and Rescue Service, Jo Turton, comes from local government and also has no operational experience.

Interestingly, Ann dropped the title Chief Fire Officer the first day she took the job in Kent. “I’m the Chief Executive, I’m not pretending to be the Chief Fire Officer because I will never be making a decision to ‘put that fire out’. That’s never going to happen. I am surrounded by fire experts.”

The key lies with the members of fire and rescue authorities who appoint the chief fire officer. “I think that chairs of fire and rescue authorities, along with colleagues are looking at the skills needed in an increasingly challenging sector,” says Ann. To get that diversity of thinking requires recruitment approaches to move beyond the existing trope where invariably the field is limited, to a

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“If we are going to change, we need to have a diversity of thinking”

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“You want to bring in different thinking and in order to get that you need to bring in people from other sectors, and that, of course, includes women and men”

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Non-operational Recruitment More recently, East Sussex Fire and Rescue Service advertised for two new area manager roles. ‘Whilst both roles are operational uniformed roles, we welcome applicants who do not have an operational fire service background. Full training, development and support will be provided to the successful candidates. It should be noted that our operational roles require working on an on-call rota’.

“I suppose it’s a bit of payback,” says Dawn Whittaker, Chief Fire Officer of East Sussex Fire and Rescue Service. When asked why she has decided

to open up the current round of area manager recruitment to non-operational applicants, she recalled how she came into the operational side of the Fire and Rescue Service as a direct entrant at area manager level back in 2006.

She is candid about the way her 2006 appointment was received and the similar reaction to her promotion to Chief Fire Officer last year. She knows there are sceptics and she, like many women in the Fire and Rescue Service, deals with trolls on social media who do not agree either with a woman being in charge or a woman who has not come through the ranks, or both. “I’ve learnt to live with it and brush it off,” she says with a weariness and acceptance that speaks volumes.

“It’s a demonstration that we’ve still got a lot of work to do here. It’s not a bad thing, because change needs agitation, you’ve just got to be pragmatic about it.”

It is depressing that East Sussex’s recruitment approach is still notable and not normalised. It demonstrates how little has changed when it comes to deciding what leaders in the Fire and Rescue Service look like – and that applies equally to their route to the top, their ethnicity as well as their gender.

“Change takes time, doesn’t it?” says Dawn. “You can’t get impatient with it. You just have to be tenacious.”

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situation where non-operational applicants are considered and where gender is not an issue at all.

Ann offers some of her own experience of bringing in senior staff from outside the Fire and Rescue Service. “I find that people from very different backgrounds have made a great contribution to the expertise we already have and challenge our thinking.”

Asking Ann how she responds to the critics who will ask what would she do if there were a major incident?

She replies: “Well, first of all, I’ve been a Chief Executive for eight years now. These things are pretty rare, but you do the same things that any other chief does. You are talking to members and to the media; looking after your organisation, getting subject matter experts to inform decision making like any other leader would do.”

We now have two chiefs as a benchmark so it is increasingly hard to justify why a principal officer job description should require operational knowledge and experience. Ann is not saying that non-operational chiefs should not do MAGIC or similar type courses related to that gold command role, “but in truth”, she says, “you are making few decisions relating to firefighting”.

“We have fantastic chiefs who have come through the ranks and have great experience, but that does not negate considering applicants who also have fantastic and varied experience. It’s the mix of those people that will allow the continued transformation of fire over the next 20 years.”

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Government & Politics

“Dawn combines her call for tenacity with the need for current leaders in fire and rescue services to be braver and shout a lot louder” because I wasn’t worried about them being a woman and turning out to be the best head of service I could get.”

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Diversity of Thinking Ann is forthright and unfazed. She says: “The great thing I’m finding is that there is less and less fright about having people who are different. I think that is genuine across the sector. There are lots of fantastic chiefs who are increasingly thinking ‘how do I get one of those?’ I think they are live to that debate but how you do it is the issue.”

Looking to the future, Ann wants to see the first nonoperational man appointed directly to a chief’s job. CFO Nick Borrill from Lincolnshire Fire and Rescue Service is part way to achieving Ann’s dream: he has a military background and came into fire as a principal officer.

“Success for me would look like, in five years’ time, having two or three more women chiefs. And one non-operational man wouldn’t half make a difference. It would finally put to bed the idea that we appoint women because we are fulfilling a quota.”

There are now six female chief fire officers in the UK, one female deputy and six female assistant chief officers.

They come from a mixture of backgrounds and they are both role models and leaders of change in the Fire and Rescue Service. They can persuade their members to open up recruitment of principal officers to diversify intake, broaden experience and get the diversity of thinking that is needed. Let us not wait any longer.

See pg 31 for information on our forthcoming Congress: Changing the Face of the Fire and Rescue Service.

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Leadership Gap For Dawn, one of the reasons why so little progress has been made is a lack of corporate ownership. She thinks that the police are much better at this, but since the formation of the National Fire Chiefs Council and development of its People Strategy, recruitment is in a much better place strategically. And given the response to the consultation on that strategy, the signs are looking good in terms of interest. Action now needs to follow.

Dawn combines her call for tenacity with the need for current leaders in fire and rescue services to be braver and shout a lot louder (see pg 34 for FIRE Editor Andrew Lynch’s comment calling for much the same thing). Dawn paid credit to CFO Chris Blacksell from Humberside Fire and Rescue Service for stepping up and leading the NFCC response to the UN Women campaign, HeforShe. She also commends retired CFO Brian Tregunna from Derbyshire for his visible leadership in developing the equalities peer review. Inclusion is a leadership not a gender issue, says Dawn.

Increasing the number of operational women in the Fire and Rescue Service remains a constant ambition, but it is a slow process. Getting more women into senior roles in particular and not just those historically male operational roles needs more work.

“All my heads of service are women because they were the right person for the job,” says Ann. “What they’ve brought to the firm is absolutely amazing. Somebody said to me once, ‘are all these women here because you are a woman?’ And I said, most probably.

Not because I deliberately picked them, but

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