Delivering the Sixth Priority of our Community Risk Management Plan
On Monday, 16 September, RBFRS implemented Priority Six of the Community Risk Management Plan (CRMP). This will ensure efficient and effective management of its resources, which sets out the Authority’s commitment to maintain 19 frontline fire engines, and a baseline service provision of 14 frontline fire engines utilising wholetime (full-time) and on-call staff as effectively as possible, through local management.
The number of fire engines available as part of the Service’s response model remains unchanged from the previous CRMP. The delivery of Priority Six will help better align our resources to risk and helps to improve the resilience and reliability of our emergency response services.
The implementation of Priority Six will improve resilience and reliability of the Service’s baseline number of fire engines available (14 fire engines), by ensuring the Service is less reliant on the voluntary use of overtime. The anticipated savings support a reinvestment in the frontline and will help pay for the 10 additional frontline firefighter roles that have been added this year.
Mark Arkwell, Deputy Chief Fire Officer, explains: “The delivery of Priority Six will help the Service use our resources more effectively and efficiently whilst providing improved resilience and reliability of fire engine availability in the longer-term.
“Our information shows we have more fire engines available at night than during the day, and this simply means we will pay less overtime on some occasions during this period. We are reinvesting this saving into more full-time firefighter posts.
“The anticipated savings (£154k), go some way to sustainably supporting the cost of the 10 additional firefighting posts, introduced earlier this year. These posts should help reduce the occasions our fire engines are unavailable.”
The Service and Fire Authority remains committed to achieving its Response Standard of attending all emergency incidents within 10mins on 75% of occasions. The Service has made additional policy changes that help ensure the impact to the response standard should be negligible, as a result of this change, and that no wholetime (full-time) fire station should be left without at least one fire engine at night as a result of Priority Six.
The Service will be monitoring the impact the implementation of Priority Six is having daily. After a three-month period, the Service will be evaluating the impact Priority Six has had and reporting these findings to the Fire Authority.