The Fire and Rescue Service

Get to know us a little bit

All our fire stations respond to emergencies 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.

Each year, the Service attends a wide variety of incidents including property and countryside fires, road traffic collisions, water rescues, rope rescues, collapsed structures, hazardous materials and animal rescues.

The Service has around 250 Wholetime firefighters and 380 On-Call firefighters, supported by some 20 Fire Control staff and approximately 100 support staff. We also host one of 29 national Urban Search and Rescue specialist units.

We receive nearly 10,000 emergency calls each year requesting assistance at a wide variety of incidents, including property and countryside fires, road traffic collisions, collapsed structures, water rescues, hazardous materials and animal rescues. We attend just over 6,500 incidents each year – more than 125 incidents every week.

2024 sees Hereford & Worcester Fire and Rescue Service turn 50 when the ‘County of Hereford Fire Brigade’ and ‘Worcester City and County Fire Brigade’ joined together.

Situated across Herefordshire and Worcestershire

Our stations are staffed by a mix of ‘Wholetime’ firefighters, operating on a full-time basis and providing an immediate response, and On-Call firefighters, who work and live in their local communities and respond to emergency calls whenever they are needed, usually mobilising within six minutes of receiving a call.

Seven stations are crewed by Wholetime firefighters as well as On-Call colleagues: Hereford, Worcester, Malvern, Evesham, Wyre Forest, Bromsgrove and Redditch. Three of these stations, Malvern, Droitwich and Evesham, are ‘day-crewed’, meaning the firefighters operate Wholetime during the day and On-Call overnight. The remaining 17 stations are all staffed solely by On-Call firefighters.

As well as responding to emergencies, the Service also undertakes preventative activities to ensure that incidents don’t happen in the first place. This includes everything from road safety workshops for young people to home safety checks for vulnerable people in our communities.

How we deliver our services to achieve our core purpose is guided by the Core Code of Ethics for Fire and Rescue Services in England, which has been jointly developed by the National Fire Chiefs Council, the Local Government Association and the Association of Police and Crime Commissioners.