Knight Review of the Fire and Rescue authorities in England

Written evidence from the West Midlands Fire Service

Executive summary

· West Midlands Fire Service (WMFS) has a number of concerns with the methodology of Sir Ken Knight’s report, including the measures of efficiency and the failure to include the latest round of spending cuts. We echo many of the concerns put forward by the Chief Fire Officers Association.

· The rest of this paper outlines the ways in which WMFS has sought to improve efficiency in the 12 areas within Sir Ken’s terms of reference.

· WMFS has moved to a distributed training model which saves on time and resources, utilising online technology, an extended working day and collaboration with other emergency services to ensure our training is efficient and highly effective.

· We have reduced our senior management team by 25%, and are slimming down our entire management structure significantly.

· Attendance management has been improved from over 10 days per year per employee to only 5.6, thanks to new HR systems and a greater focus on individual responsibility.

· Our response model remains focused on;

o Ensuring resources are aligned to risk.

o Maintaining a risk based five minute attendance time for life-threatening (category 1) incidents

o Applying assertive (or offensive) firefighting tactics whenever possible

· Our Brigade Response Vehicle (BRV) concept is allowing us to maintain this model with fewer firefighters and greater flexibility, coupled with new control technology and better call challenge processes.

· New cluster and dual-crewing models have saved money on administration and allow us to make much more effective use of our reducing firefighter numbers. We have considered a wide range of other staffing options, including retained, but only selected those that make most sense in a WMFS context.

· We remain convinced that Prevention and Protection should be a core part of what the fire service does and are seeking to ensure we improve rather than degrade these functions in austerity.

· We work with colleagues in the public and third sectors to ensure maximum impact from every visit or interaction with the public, and use technology and data to focus our activities on the most vulnerable, where we can have the most impact.

· Linking into the national changes around protection being spearheaded by CFOA, we are working in partnership with local and national businesses to reduce the regulatory burden on them while keeping them and their employees safe.

· We remain committed to closer collaboration to create savings, including projects such as our joint fire control function with Staffordshire FRS.

· We are on target to save over £4.5 million pounds from our drive for an efficient support and back office functions, before considering outsourcing and mergers in some areas.

· Regional procurement frameworks have allowed us to deliver millions in savings while also ensuring our firefighters have the best available equipment and latest technology.

· Operationally, our work with the ambulance service on co-location is a national success story, and we are pushing ahead with similar collaboration with other public sector organisations.

Introduction

West Midlands Fire Service (WMFS) welcomes the opportunity to respond to Sir Ken’s Efficiency Review, and specifically to the Fire Minister’s letter dated 6th August 2013. This response seeks to encompass our views on the report and its methodology, as well as the future of the fire and rescue service and how we believe greater efficiency can be achieved.

Of course, this is our vision for the future of our own fire and rescue service, and while some areas will overlap with our colleagues in other services, not every model is suitable for every service. It is important to emphasise the importance of local influences, which shape the strategy we are employing.

We are committed to an evidence based approach to enhancing the delivery of our response, prevention and protection activity. We seek to be flexible and technologically advanced; we will equip our staff with the most effective systems and equipment to deliver our services to the community in an assertive, safe and effective manner.

Our response is divided between four broad headings, under which we seek to address all of the 12 terms of reference from Sir Ken’s report, while painting a picture of the way we are delivering our service efficiently and effectively:

· People

· Response

· Protection and Prevention

· Collaboration and Partnership

However, we begin by addressing some our specific concerns with the methodology of Sir Ken’s paper.

Issues with specifics of the paper

Sir Ken’s paper is a welcome evaluation of the state of the fire and rescue service, and serves as an opportunity for all services to critique and appraise our efficiency programmes, and to learn from the good practise of others. However, we believe there are a number of issues with the data used within the efficiency review, which are fundamental to some of the conclusions drawn, and would echo the concerns of our colleagues at the Chief Fire Officers Association.

We are particularly concerned about the narrow definition of efficiency, which focuses simply on cost-per-head. This of course does not take account of important factors such as density or deprivation or acknowledge the added value to society particularly from our prevention and protection work. WMFS supports the work CFOA is doing with sector leaders to develop a much more meaningful suite of indicators to measure our overall efficiency.

As is acknowledged by Sir Ken in the report, the figures used do not include the latest year of back-loaded cuts. This is a very substantial, if understandable, omission as the vast majority of the £200 million of proposed savings outlined by Sir Ken will have been met by the cuts in this financial year and the next.

Furthermore, WMFS do not believe that variance in expenditure across FRSs is ‘inexplicable’, as the FRS funding formula, a complex algorithm which takes account of a multitude of factors that impact on community risk, explains much of the variance. We have argued before, alongside our colleagues from the metropolitan fire and rescue services, that this formula is significantly flawed as it required ministerial intervention and floor damping mechanisms to produce outcomes deemed "fair" to all.

Sir Ken’s proposal to increase on-call firefighter numbers by 10% is simplistic; especially considering the huge differences between fire service composition and risk nationally. We discuss this specific matter later in this submission.

All in all, while we welcome Sir Ken’s report we do believe that deeper research and evidence is required to allow a proper assessment of many of the ideas suggested within his report. Sir Ken himself recognised in the recent Select Committee hearing that these are not firm recommendations but in fact suggestions and ideas, and we would hope that this is recognised with the contents treated as more of a tool box to choose from than a definitive list of proposals to implement.

People

West Midlands Fire Service has undertaken a fundamental shift in the way we manage our people over the last three years. Personal accountability now lies at the heart of everything we do, be it training and development, attendance management or simply the day to day management of staff.

We use a decentralised, individually focused operational training and development model to ensure all operational fire fighters are appropriately skilled in an increasingly complex environment, which offers more freedom and flexibility whilst enhancing the capability of all operational staff. For example, Arrive to Perform, introduced in 2011, replaced centralised training approach, this has led to a reduced requirement to train fire fighters ‘off the run’ whilst enhancing their capability. This has recently been commented on by a commercial training provider as being ‘a very lean system’.

We have invested significant capital into the creation of distributed training facilities which reduce time "off the run" and allow for greater customisation of training regimes to suit local needs. This is supported by a greater use of online training and assessment tools, such as our eCademy and Melio system. We are also making greater use of evenings, nights and weekends for training, meaning firefighters have much less "down time" and are able to keep other times free for vital prevention and protection work.

While we are making our training more efficient, we are also concerned with broadening its scope, giving our firefighters new skills, such as trauma training to allow them to act more effectively when responding to incidents. We also work collaboratively with Ambulance (particularly HART), Police and others to ensure that we are able to work together effectively while also sharing training facilities.

We have sought to slim down our management structures from the very top, including a 25% reduction in our principal officer team to date with further reviews planned to ensure we deliver on our strategic statement on a lean and accountable management structure. We continue to engage with a range of partners to explore opportunities for sharing services that support the delivery of an IRMP.

Not only are our staff training more effectively and managed more efficiently, but they are also spending less time absent through sickness. In 2007/2008 we introduced a more rigorous Attendance Management policy, defining the Service’s management of employee attendance, after which we saw a reduction in absence from over 10 days to 7.4 days per employee.

This has since been further improved to just 5.6 days per employee, with improvements in our Occupational Health & Wellbeing support, return to work policy and HR IT systems ensuring that staff feel supported and are able to return to work as quickly as possible, while managers are better able to assess and challenge their staff.

All in all, by placing more flexibility in the hands of local managers and placing increased emphasis on personal responsibility for staff, we have been able to recognise significant efficiencies while improving the effectiveness and quality of the work that they do.

Response

The response aspect of our work is the most resource intensive and is inevitably going to represent the area where the bulk of savings can be made. Of course, our communities are concerned that we continue to deliver the best possible response in an emergency and as such we had three core objectives when designing our response model;

· Ensuring resources are aligned to risk.

· Maintaining a risk based five minute attendance time for life-threatening (category 1) incidents

· Applying assertive (or offensive) firefighting tactics whenever possible

The foremost means of achieving this has been the introduction of the Brigade Response Vehicle (BRV) concept, which gives us improved flexibility in our fleet meaning, we can operate in a way that helps us match the response to an incident based on the risk.

The BRVs are able to answer any incident, but are staffed with three firefighters rather than four or five. By using a blend of conventional Pump Rescue Ladder (PRL) and BRVs we are able to reorganise our response resources whilst delivering the difficult reduction of 280 firefighter posts during the period 2010/11-2014/15.

This is also vital in helping us to maintain our risk based five minute response time to the most serious incidents. In conjunction with our dynamic mobilisation system, we are now able to better match our resources to incidents and risk; we no longer need to send five-person PRL to a secondary fire, leaving them free to tackle higher-risk incidents.

We have also introduced much stricter call challenging policies and utilised the latest mobilising technology to ensure that our firefighters are best placed to respond to important calls, with less time spent answering false alarms and unwanted fire signals.

Linked closely to this new equipment is our new localised staffing model, which works on a delegated approach that empowers Station Commanders to make local decisions allowing us to better align resource to risk. We have been able to remove our central staffing function as a result, producing savings of circa £250,000 per annum.

We are also currently trialling cluster crewing where a watch is spread across three locations rather than one. This maintains services delivery and sickness/absence cover but also provides a number of staff savings across the three locations. The aim remains to pursue a minimum staff to crewing ratio and we are already in the design stage of a self rostering system which will allow us to reduce the use of overtime and overstaffing due to holidays, training or sickness.

However, we do not believe every model is suitable. Experience has taught us that the on call model is unsuitable for our densely populated urban area. Our last on-call station was closed in 2008 as it was underused and neighbouring full time resources were better placed to respond on nearly all occasions.

In reality it would be more efficient to review our estates and consider the closure or merger of a station – as we have done already in the Cradley Heath and Halesowen area – than to reintroduce on-call provision. We have an asset strategy and degradation plan in place that will allow us to put forward proposals on a risk basis that will recommend the closure or merger of stations to the authority in future should that be required.

Fundamentally, we want to ensure that we have the right resource in the right place at the right time.

Prevention and Protection

While emergency response is clearly vital part of what we do, we strongly believe that prevention and protection have an equally important part to play, and are therefore working hard to ensure we can maintain or even improve our provision where possible, despite austerity. The long-term savings of a preventative approach far outweigh the savings that could be gained by allowing these roles to degrade.

Sir Ken’s review reflected that the proportion of the population with a working smoke alarm has increased from just eight per cent in 1987 to 86 per cent in 2010. Given this massive improvement across the general population, it is right that fire and rescue services target their limited resources at the "most vulnerable".

The 2010 Marmot Review recognised that to bring about positive improvements in life expectancy, people need to take responsibility for their health and change their lifestyles. WMFS have adopted the "Marmot" approach alongside the NHS’s "Making Every Contact Count" (MECC) to reduce vulnerability of communities. Following the MECC principle, we are working with other agencies such as the Social Care sector to train their staff to carry out HSCs when they have contact with vulnerable people. 

 

WMFS is working towards "Marmot Partner" status in recognition of our commitment to this agenda & increase confidence for partners.  This process revealed both the wide range of work the Service does to meet this agenda, and that this is generally unrecognised. It is increasingly important to work alongside social care to ensure that Service resources are targeted at the vulnerable. WMFS have moved away from a quantity approach to Home Safety Checks (HSCs) to targeted, qualitative approach focusing on risk and geographical area. This allows us to spend more time delivering prevention to the most vulnerable, increasing the impact and effectiveness of each HSC.

 

Often the individuals we are seeking to influence are known to other agencies in both the public and third sectors (such as the NHS, Police or Mental Health charities); so we work closely with them to help identify individuals at risk that would have gone under the radar. We have even restructured local command teams to focus on health partnerships. The ability to share data has proved challenging but WMFS has been instrumental in establishing data sharing in Local Authority areas, and our projects are now being shared across the West Midlands.

Sir Ken also points out that "In the case of fire prevention, it is appropriate to utilise Green Book staff, at an equivalent level to those doing similar audit roles in other parts of the public sector, providing there remains strong links with the operational staff to ensure that the firefighting context is taken into account." WMFS already utilise green book staff as Vulnerable Persons Officers, Fire Safety Tutors and Educators working independently in the community and alongside operational staff to deliver prevention activities. WMFS has a pool of 150+ volunteers who deliver education and prevention activities both in the community and at fire service. These staff and volunteers are "in uniform", benefiting from the uniquely positive public image the service enjoys.

Into the future, we will continue to utilise operational resources efficiently to ensure firefighters are able to undertake prevention work. However, we recognise that reduced capacity will require wider use of partnerships, alongside wider use of green book staff and volunteers.  WMFS protection and fire safety has already realised efficiencies (through staff reductions, closure of fire safety centres and changes to working practices) that have yielded efficiency savings in excess of £2m per year.

WMFS is at the forefront of CFOA work to review the audit process associated with Protection activity. The current system is cumbersome to administer and draining on the time and resources of the business. Under the current system, premises are not considered to have been audited unless every part of the associated form has been completed. This has resulted in what may be termed as a ‘tick-box’ audit process. CFOA is currently moving to a method of audit which is risk based, proportionate and focused on the spirit of fire safety law; to keep people safe in case of fire.

We also continue to work closely with our formal business partners (Marks and Spencer and Nationwide Building Society). We represent the single point of contact for other FRAs in relation to our partners and work with our partners to identify and implement best practice for legislative fire safety matters. WMFS is actively pursuing other partnerships (with Jaguar Land Rover, Wilkinson, Marie Curie Cancer Trust, E.ON, and the Arcadia Group among others). We believe in a true partnership approach to these arrangements whereby we consider and care for the whole estate of the business and they, in turn assist us to deliver improved safety for the West Midlands. Our partnership with M&S has resulted in their sponsorship of our hydro-carbon detecting dog and handler, and our partnership with NBS has resulted in the sponsorship of our SafeSide interactive community engagement and education facility.

We note with some concern that some FRS’s have determined that they will not undertake proactive enforcement activity, relying entirely on a reactive service. WMFS believes that the community is poorly served by such a narrow view and that proactive work prevents (or minimises) the impacts of a fire before it occurs. If community safety initiatives deliver safety and wellbeing in the home and on the roads, legislative fire safety delivers safety at work and in publicly accessible places then people will be safe and the requirements placed on our response function will be minimised.

Partnership and collaboration

WMFS has long believed that partnerships and collaboration are vital to the effective running of a service, austerity or not. We are pleased such emphasis is placed upon these expected areas by Sir Ken, and are working even harder to explore new areas, partners and ideas. Nonetheless, there remain a number of areas where the government could support fire services to make this process easier and more effective.

Our Shared Fire Control scheme with Staffordshire Fire and Rescue Service is to save at least 25 posts and is at a very advanced stage. We also share services regionally with police and other fire and rescue services, such as our Fire Investigation Team and scientific advisors who operate across five counties, and our Detection, Identification and Monitoring team, who frequently offer support to police colleagues for incidents such as the recent attacks on mosques in the region.

We recognise that a key area of focus for shared services is through support services and back office technology. While we do share some limited support services with local authorities, such as legal services with the Metropolitan Borough of Sandwell, we recognise that there is more we can do. However, we are currently delivering on-going efficiencies internally in this area, with a view to ensuring that our current provision is efficient as possible whilst considering outsourcing or sharing services with others. Without taking this important step first, we risk simply outsourcing the existing inefficiencies. Savings as of December 2012 stood at £3.6 million, with a further £1 million of projected savings in this financial year from our ongoing administration review.

WMFS are particularly proud of our collaboration with local colleagues in the ambulance service, and currently have the most extensive co-location scheme in the country. Of the 38 fire stations in the West Midlands conurbation, 35 currently host an ambulance crew, which produces significant savings for the ambulance service and allows our crews to benefit from closer contact with emergency service colleagues.

We are assessing the appropriateness and value of developing closer operational ties, in particular the wider use of fire-fighters to respond to the most urgent incidents. This is more difficult to achieve culturally and organisationally, but we are hoping the flexibilities offered by our BRV system will see this made a reality in the near future.

We have an on-going programme of contacts and initiatives that continually explore opportunities for collaboration in its many forms. Our Deputy Chief Fire Officer is a governor on the West Midlands Ambulance Service Foundation trust board; we have a formalised link to the West Midlands Police and Crime Commissioner via the Chief Executive as two key examples where we continue to explore opportunities to collaborate between blue light services.

Sharing and merging back office technology as part of a shared service approach is high on our agenda. We have achieved some success in this area and continue to explore opportunities.

We have recognised that significant savings can be found in the region of £12 million per annum that we spend procuring goods and services. For this reason it is obvious to see the attraction of collaborative procurement in order to achieve savings through economies of scale and the reduction in the duplication of effort when commissioning and evaluating products.

Over a number of years WMFS has utilised a variety of National and Regional Framework Contracts for both Fire and non-fire specific goods and services. Examples of such collaboration include the use of Birmingham City Council contracts for Office Supplies and Postal Services and the Government Procurement Service for Gas, Electricity, Mobile Telephones and ICT Hardware. As at January 2013 circa £9.9m of WMFS annual expenditure on goods and services was spent via 35 different Framework Contracts.

WMFS has also collaborated with its West Midlands Regional Partners on areas such as Respiratory Protective Equipment and PPE and with Sandwell Metropolitan Borough Council for the provision of Finance, Audit and Legal Services.

Whilst WMFS has taken some initial steps to collaborate and can demonstrate the benefits of its actions there is still much more that can be done. As is highlighted in the Facing the Future report there are a number of barriers that need to be overcome across all Fire and Rescue Services in order to reap even greater efficiencies. A reluctance to standardise on product and service specifications, duplication of effort in the design, commissioning and evaluation stages of procurement, a diminishing procurement resource, a lack of appetite in some Services to collaborate and the reduction in the availability of Fire Specific Framework Contracts are issues that all need to be addressed.

On a positive note steps are already being taken to address these barriers and the CFOA National Procurement Group is working closely with CFOA and DCLG to agree a future National Procurement Strategy and prioritised work programme. West Midlands Fire Service is also one of 15 services taking part in DCLG Research Project and Spend Analysis exercise that is already underway.

In lieu of a decision regarding the future of Fire Sector Procurement, WMFS has been actively involved in the renewal of a national smoke alarms framework contract with the Yorkshire Purchasing Organisation. Following the award of this contract in April 2013 a collaborative mini-competition exercise was also undertaken by WMFS on behalf of fifteen fire authorities. It is hoped that this exercise demonstrates the willingness of some fire authorities to collaborate on well planned, well co-ordinated and well executed projects which bodes well for the future.

July 2013