TRYING TO predict the future is rarely a successful endeavour and yet that is what I have been asked to do. I do not pretend that the ideas and thoughts I am going to put forward are either a comprehensive policy platform or the inside track on government thinking. These are very much my personal thoughts on where the UK fire and rescue service could go over the next few years.
Fire service landscape
My first prediction is that there will be considerably fewer fire brigades. A lot of eyes will be looking north to see how the amalgamation of the Scottish fire brigades plays out. If a single organisation, which covers both high density urban risk and the most rural of rural risk, can work financially and operationally, it will become impossible for England and Wales to maintain the status quo.
Cuts and mergers
Sir Ken Knight’s review provides a clear indication of where government thinking is, even if the government’s response was bland beyond belief. Whatever the outcome of the next General Election, there will still be pressure on the public purse and Labour has made no suggestion that there would be a reversal on spending reductions under Ed Miliband.
Cutting the number of chief fire officers, fire authority members, HQ buildings etc, is significantly more palatable than cutting the number of stations, pumps or firefighters, and the Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG) and the Treasury will have little sympathy for the cries of anguish over funding cuts while there are still 48 discrete fire and rescue services in England and Wales.
Brigade mergers will be neither easy nor painless but I am convinced that, in addition to financial savings, there would be significant operational advantages. As the role of firefighters becomes wider and more sophisticated, the training burden on individual brigades increases. This is problematic for smaller brigades, which have to maintain skills currency in essential, but little-used, capabilities.
Skills base
Maintaining the high skills base of firefighters is not only a challenge in specialist skills – as the number of fires in the UK falls, so does the opportunity for experience to be built up at both the operational and leadership levels.
While the headline statistics for London may not be familiar to everyone, they will be unsurprising to people who keep an eye on the interaction between technology, the built environment and the fire and rescue sector. Over the last ten years there has been a halving in the number of fires attended by London Fire Brigade and over a third fewer incidents as a whole.
Real fire training environments are expensive and as the number of primary fires reduces, their importance will only increase. The ability to create or procure real fire training would be easier and cheaper per unit for a larger brigade.
Role complexity
My next prediction is that the job of a firefighter will continue to diversify and become more sophisticated. You don’t need to wind the clock back very far to find an era where fighting fires was the bulk of a firefighter’s operational work. We now have a situation where building collapse, road traffic collisions, chemical incidents and so forth are all core business, and there are widespread calls for flood response to become a statutory responsibility too.
Public expectations are higher than ever, and with every mobile phone owner capable of becoming an instant ‘citizen journalist’, the operational work and incident leadership have never been under more scrutiny. Fire and rescue services will find increasingly that they need to recruit more academically qualified recruits, invest more in initial and progression training, and work hard to retain staff who will have been heavily invested in. If managed properly, this should mean that the job is interesting and fulfilling, providing opportunities for career progression into leadership roles or technical specialisms.
Leadership matters
So, we are looking at a future where there are fewer but larger brigades, a wide spectrum of functions, a well-educated and technically skilled workforce, and a high level of public expectation. It presents a tough challenge for the leadership functions within the fire and rescue service. We ask our operational leaders to make thousands of decisions in their careers and these are often made in difficult and stressful conditions, with incomplete situational awareness and with people’s lives often at stake. We have a duty to ensure that the people we put into those situations are best equipped to discharge their duties.
Culture and support
There are many great and natural leaders in the UK’s fire services, but there isn’t a culture of leadership. Frankly, I would be happy to see the word ‘manager’ stripped out of the names of operational ranks and replaced with the word ‘leader’ or ‘commander’.
That is what we demand of our people on the incident ground – to lead and take command of the situation. We shouldn’t be afraid to make that explicit.
But this is more than just semantics. As funding cuts continue – and they will – we need to ensure that the balance of expenditure between service delivery and service support does not get out of balance. Trimming the size and scope of HQ functions necessarily means we need to put more responsibility on the leadership ranks in stations. Like so many other organisations, it will be the first two or three leadership ranks that will make or break the success of the service.
Multi-agency competence
It is essential to recognise that leadership is a discrete function and not just something picked up by osmosis after a few decades riding a pump. Front line experience is important for credible leadership, but
on its own won’t provide the qualities that brigades will need in their leaders. A robust and credible leadership development programme that is recognised across UK brigades will need to be created and, in order to facilitate a truly flexible fire service sector, brigades should feel confident that a watch manager (watch leader) in Bethnal Green has the same level of professional competence as his or her Gretna Green counterpart.
Another reason that leadership development is so important is the increasing demand for emergency service interoperability. The Joint Emergency Service Interoperability Programme (JESIP) is the start of a move towards much closer work between the blue light services. Leadership in a single agency environment is tough enough, but the challenges of multi-agency operations are tougher still.
How we will work
Currently the UK’s emergency services are a technological generation out of date. At the moment we demand that requests for emergency assistance are made by voice calls over a telephone. For anyone under the age of 20, the idea that critical information cannot be sent by data is comic. To use a phone that can take high-resolution photographs and deliver GPS tagged streaming video to make a call describing what’s happening is massively underutilising the potential of the technology.
Alerts and mobilisation
Soon we will need to embrace new ways for people to alert us to incidents. The role of our mobilising teams would need to be expanded and enhanced, as some of the operational decisions made currently by the first crews at the incident could be made at the mobilising stage with the ability to assess the scale of the incident and, if necessary, call for additional resources before the first pump has even arrived and thus save vital seconds at the incident. Floor-plans, inspection reports, notes and alerts from other public services could and should be accessible from the cab of the fire appliance.
Sharing resources
This ability to push so much information directly to the vehicles or even directly to the firefighters themselves puts a huge question mark over the future of fire stations in their current form.
The pattern of fixed points on the ground from which firefighters deploy in response to calls is dictated by the technological limitations of our Victorian forebears. We have messing facilities, offices, training towers and vehicle maintenance facilities at each station only because the point of deployment needs to be there anyway.
Speed of attendance is rightly a huge priority for brigades and having a spread of deployable resources across the brigade area is one of the key elements in maintaining that speed. But technology will mean that the crew and vehicles can be deployed from wherever they happen to be, not just from a fire brigade station. This opens up massive opportunities to share real estate.
If training, administrative and maintenance functions can be consolidated into a small number of larger sites, and the points of deployments were from a network of multi-agency sites, our ability to respond quickly could be maintained but at a much lower cost.
Industrial relations
Not everything discussed will happen and even if it does, change in public services tends to happen slowly; but I can give a cast iron guarantee that things will not stay the same. As with any change programme, it is essential that everyone in the organisation is engaged, and in the fire service that means proper and effective engagement with the representative bodies.
As I write, the Fire Brigades Union is still in a protracted period of dispute with the government over changes to firefighter pensions. Thankfully fire strikes are uncommon, but as the fire service becomes more deeply interwoven in the delivery of national security capability, major incident response and delivery of inter-agency, preventative public protection work, I foresee a diminishing appetite for these to be put at risk by strike action.
I don’t believe there is any desire to impose a strike ban on the unions within the fire service, but I can see a situation where individuals in key functions contract themselves out of strike action in order to give certainty over the delivery of critical capabilities.
The face of change
The only constant is change; there will not be a significant easing of the financial situation for brigades so they will need to find ways of doing more with less. The job will be more complicated at every level: from new firefighters through to chief fire officers and the political leadership in the fire authorities, everyone will need to upskill and be adaptable.
Technology could be a liberator, but it will require courage to embrace the operational and financial improvements it could bring. But technology cannot, will not and must not replace a professional and well-motivated workforce, so an improvement in the relationship between the leadership and the representative bodies is essential. That will have to be a two-way process, but the rewards to all will be worth it.
Ultimately, I feel positive about the future. The fire service doesn’t like change, but has shown itself to be adaptable and resilient through times more testing than these and I have no doubt it will prove to be so again.
James Cleverly is a member of the London Assembly and chairman of the London Fire and Emergency Planning Authority.