Performance

Our performance

The Service assesses its performance against each of the Hampshire and Isle of Wight Fire Authority’s Safety Plan priorities through a range of performance metrics, with comparisons made against previous years and to national trends. From 2025/26 onwards, the performance reporting will be restructured around the five 2025-30 Safety Plan objectives.

The Service uses performance reporting and data analysis to assess our effectiveness, efficiency, and financial position; and to inform decisions we make and where we target our resources.

Our performance measures help us find areas for improvement, as well as identify successes and good practice to be shared, where applicable, across public services and the fire sector.

We publish our performance reports every six months (a mid-year report in December, covering the period 1 April to 30 September; and an annual report in June, covering the period 1 April to 31 March).

Annual Performance Report 2024/25

Mid Year Performance Report 2024/25

Annual Performance Report 2023/24

Mid Year Performance Report 2023/24

Annual Performance Report 2022/23

• In 2024/25, the Service had a similar number of incidents to the previous year. Our response times have increased slightly, driven by an increase in the proportion of incidents in on-call (more rural) areas, which take longer to reach. However, the service continues to have faster response times to our areas of highest risk.
• Furthermore, on-call availability improved slightly in 2024/25 and it is also important to note that the latest benchmark data (for 2023/24) shows the service has the highest on-call availability across the South-East of England.
• Regretfully, 2024/25 saw 13 suspected fire fatalities. However, 12 are still currently awaiting Coroner’s investigations to confirm whether the fire was the cause of death so this figure may reduce in future reports. For fire casualties, we have seen a slight increase (by 5%) compared to the previous financial year but is still considerably lower than the 2021/22 peak.
• More widely, there has been a sustained focus on premises risk information, as well as continued increases in Protection interventions (particularly enforcements and prohibitions).Most significantly, it is important to commend Prevention and station-based teams for their efforts in increasing Safe & Well visits – with over 17,000 delivered last year – to help make people in Hampshire and the Isle of Wight safer. This is over 5,000 more visits than was achieved during the 2023/24 year.
• Alongside this, the Service continues to see reductions in staff sickness and the number of health and safety accidents; and further improvements in PDR completion (up 15% to a 95% completion rate).
• We have also seen continued improvement in workforce diversity and disclosure, though recognise we have further to improve.
• Finally, for carbon reduction, HIWFRS reduced emissions by 17% when comparing 2023/24 (the latest available data) to the 2019/20 baseline which is an improved position in comparison to both our previous (business as usual) trajectory and the UK National Target trajectory.

Text summary of our performance

The infographic above displays the following summary from our Annual Performance Report 2024 – 2025:

Our Community

• 62% on call availability
• 09:49 (MM:SS) average critical response time for the service, including call handling
• 17,263 Safe and Well home visits undertaken by the service

Our People

• 208 near miss Health & Safety incidents and 112 where an accident took place
• 11.6 average shifts lost to sickness

Public Value

• Income generation £6.2 million
• Estimated cost per resident £43.50

High Performance

• 5% of our workforce are from ethnic groups other than White British
• 20% of our staff are female
•  9% of our firefighters are female

Learning and Improving

• 100% Site Specific Risk Information (SSRIs) in date as at the end of 2024/25
• 24 ‘areas for improvement’ all now closed