Hereford & Worcester Fire and Rescue Service is encouraging everyone to have their say on a proposal to update the Attendance Performance Measure.
To gather views on the proposal, there is a consultation document, which is available on the Service website and there’s a short questionnaire, which can be completed online.
The consultation closes on 16 September 2022, and results will be reported to Fire Authority.
An attendance performance measure is simply a measure of how long it takes a fire engine to reach an emergency incident, and it is used to help to assess performance and to look at where improvements might be made.
It doesn’t change the emergency response at all, and the Service will continue to respond to all incidents as quickly and safely as they can with the closest available and most appropriate resources.
The current Attendance Performance Measure dates back to 2009 and is considered no longer meaningful for a number of reasons: it only measures attendance times at fires in buildings rather than the much broader range of incidents the Service attends; it doesn’t take account of where fire stations are or how they are crewed; and it hasn’t kept pace with the changes to road networks and increasing levels of traffic congestion.
The proposed new Measure aims to address these and other issues and give communities a clearer and more realistic picture of the response times they can expect for a wider range of incidents in relation to where they live.
You can read more about the proposal in the Attendance Performance Measure Consultation Document, which is available on the Service website.
To help to gather views, there is a short questionnaire, which can be accessed online, and can be completed in about 10 minutes. You can access the questionnaire here: www.opinionresearch.co.uk/HWFire.
If you have any queries, please email consultation@hwfire.org.uk or Corporate Communications Manager Richard Prime on rprime@hwfire.org.uk