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The Service
Hampshire Fire and Rescue Service Plan...
We have kept the title of each objective the same as in previous documents.
We have made major progress in improving practices and systems to develop our knowledge and understanding of community risk. This is helping us to make decisions about using our resources and activities. We need to improve how we use information that staff receive from working within communities, and work is ongoing to achieve this in the coming year.
We have a well-established project to manage the ongoing development of response vehicles and make sure we have the latest vehicle and equipment technology. This means that our firefighters have the best available equipment and appliances to deal with a wide range of emergency situations as effectively as possible.
We now have a new, improved small-fires vehicle (SFV) this is a small vehicle (smaller than a standard fire vehicle) that responds to small fires (rubbish, bins, grass and so on) based at Redbridge fire station in Southampton and plan to introduce more SFVs in Portsmouth and Basingstoke. We have also invested in a new type of rescue pump which is far more flexible and adaptable and means that we no longer need to maintain two different types of fire appliance to deal with the wide range of incidents we are called out to. This rescue pump’s compressed-air firefighting foam systems allow us to put out fires more quickly.
Also, we have just introduced an animal rescue vehicle, the first of its kind in the country, which we will use for animal rescues across the county. We continue to develop new improved special-equipment units and multi-role vehicles to improve our fleet of vehicles even further. Developing response vehicles is now a normal function for the Community Response team at our headquarters, so we have successfully achieved this objective.
The Efficient and Flexible Crewing (EFC) project has been extremely effective at releasing our staff from fire stations to get involved in a wide variety of other important activities, as well as maintaining our fire engines so that they are ready when we need them. The EFC project continues to play a vital role in making sure we manage our front-line staff (those who are watch-based at fire stations), which is our most expensive and valuable resource, in an efficient way to meet future financial challenges. (Watch-based staff are staff who work a shift system which means they work for two days and two nights then have four days off.)
The final part of the EFC project is to allow watch-based staff to be more flexible. The trials of a new working pattern are scheduled to start at Fareham and Gosport fire stations in 2011. These trials will maintain the current duty system, but will allow staff to be more flexible.
A full review of our current methods for training firefighters identified a number of areas for improvement. The feedback from our operational staff led us to develop an action plan, agreed with the Service Management Team, focused on improving how we train staff and assess whether they have gained the ‘core’ skills needed in their role.
Working with staff at the four stations, we passed their new ideas and suggestions for improvements to the Service Management Team to consider. We have developed several of the suggestions to improve the levels of service we provide for our communities. Some of these ideas are included as new objectives in the current service plan.
From 2011, within our group plans we are considering helping communities to help themselves in major emergencies. We are including business-continuity management advice to businesses during our fire-safety audit programme and developing the idea of ‘parish total safety’ (where everyone in a community looks after themselves and others). So far we have made limited progress on this objective as we are waiting for national guidance from the Civil Contingencies Secretariat (CCS). This guidance is due early in 2011 and we will develop our strategy for meeting this aim during 2011 to 2013.
We introduced the new risk-based response categories in April 2010. We developed these new standards to help us to send the appropriate level of resources more quickly to incidents that are life-threatening or could cause damage to property. We are continuing to change the way we respond to incidents in order to continually improve and reach our target of arriving at the scene of 80% of life-threatening incidents in eight minutes by 2013. We continue to aim to arrive at non-critical incidents across the county in less than 15 minutes. This risk-based approach will allow us to continue to develop the use of small-fires vehicles and look at alternative response options so that our larger fire engines are always available to respond to life-threatening emergencies.
We introduced our plan to put up to three fire engines and their crews on second-line availability (we remove fire appliances from responding to incidents to give their crews more time for training and community-safety initiatives) in April 2010. This means the firefighters who were on these fire engines received extra training in a number of areas that are essential for the safety of our staff and the public. We have also been able to deliver extra community-safety initiatives using these firefighters.
These fire engines and the firefighters on them can be available within one hour if we need them to support our front-line staff. Careful planning has meant that we have only had to recall one fire engine on only one occasion.
Building on the success of the first-response vehicle, we introduced a small-fires vehicle (SFV) in Southampton in December 2010. This vehicle responds from Redbridge fire station to small fires that are not within buildings (usually burning grass or rubbish) in the areas covered by Redbridge and St. Mary’s fire stations. As well as dealing with small fires, the focus of the team and the vehicle is preventing fires from starting in the first place. The Community Safety Liaison Officer (CSLO), who has an in-depth knowledge of work to prevent fires and arson, is part of this vehicle’s crew. After assessing the use of the SFV, SFVs will be introduced in Basingstoke and Portsmouth in 2011.
In November 2010, we introduced a Fire Investigation team (FI). The team is made up of two serving specially trained members of staff and two on-call staff. This team now deal with most fire investigations that are carried out within our organisation. To widen the idea of a dedicated FI team across the region, we are currently working with a number of other fire and rescue services.
We introduced our first mobile community contact point (MCCP) in Portsmouth in June 2010. The crew on the vehicle includes community fire-safety specialists supported by serving firefighters. The MCCP has been very busy in and around Portsmouth since we introduced it, reducing community risk by providing advice to the public and businesses.
We have set up a Financial Challenge Programme Board, chaired by the Chief Officer, to oversee the financial challenge we face after the Government’s Comprehensive Spending Review in October 2010. This board oversees the staff-efficiency projects, and makes sure there is consistency between them. The programme board has set a 15% efficiency target (to reduce our staff salary budget) for these projects to be achieved by March 2014. In meeting these targets we will make sure we maintain the appropriate level of fire cover across Hampshire.
