Attendance Performance Measure Consultation 2022

The public consultation on our proposal to update the Attendance Performance Measure is now closed.

The current Attendance Performance Measure dates back to 2009 and is no longer deemed fit for purpose. Nor does it provide useful performance data for the organisation and the public.

Among the reasons why it needs to be updated are:

• we attend a much broader range of incidents that are not included in the current measure, as it only measures attendance times at fires in buildings,
• it doesn’t take account of where our 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 Attendance Performance Measure has been designed to 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. Changes include:

• measuring attendance performance for a broader range of incidents across three travel time zones: 10, 15 and 20 minutes from each fire station from the time the first appliance is mobilized, rather than the current blanket measure of 10 minutes,
• measuring attendance times from the time the fire station is alerted by Fire Control to the time the fire engine arrives at the incident. This takes the ‘call handling time’ out of the calculation and is in line with current national guidance, and
• removing the current arbitrary target of attending primary fires with the first fire engine within 10 minutes on 75% of occasions. Instead we will carry out a travel-time analysis of a much wider range of incidents that do not align with expected times in order to identify any areas for improvement, or to better understand the reasons why we did not get to an incident in the time we would reasonably expect.

It should be stressed that the proposed new Attendance Performance Measure is simply a way of measuring and assessing our performance and looking at where improvements might be made. We will provide the same emergency response as before, and will continue to respond to all incidents as quickly and safely as we can with the closest available and most appropriate resources.

For more information about why we consider the current Measure is no longer meaningful and details about our proposed new Measure, please read the supporting Consultation Document.

To help to gather a wide range of views, we’ve engaged an independent research company, Opinion Research Services (ORS) to carry out the consultation for us. They have prepared a separate questionnaire document, which you can contribute to here: www.opinionresearch.co.uk/HWFire.

Once the consultation is complete, the results and recommendations will be reported back to the Fire Authority with an aim to implement the new Measure, if approved, in December 2022.