Community Risk Management Plan 2021-2025 – Consultation

This consultation is now closed and the results are being collated.

The consultation ran from 6 July 2020 to 25 September 2020.

Background and Summary

The CRMP is our overall strategy for keeping people, their homes, communities and environment safe from fire and other emergencies with the resources available to us. It looks at the fire and rescue-related risks facing the communities we serve, and sets out our high-level plans for tackling those risks through our prevention, protection and emergency response services.

Over the next four years (2021-2025), the Service’s main focus will be to build on the strong operational and organisational foundations put in place over the last CRMP cycle. The difficult decisions that were taken by the Fire Authority between 2014 and 2020 (in consultation with the public, staff and partners) have meant that the Service can now look forward to sustainably developing the range, resilience and capabilities of the services we deliver to the public – adding more value to local communities in the process.

These foundations have been tested most recently by a significant period of flooding across the two counties throughout February and March 2020, followed immediately afterwards by the Covid-19 pandemic – both of which have been managed effectively and efficiently by the Service within our available resources.

Over the next four year period we will be looking to do more with the resources we have. However, this approach will only be possible if the Service is able to operate within a sustainable financial base over the medium to long term. A number of, as yet unquantified, financial pressures (over which we have no control) have been identified in the draft CRMP, and if any of these have a significant impact on the Service’s finances, there may need to be a rethink of how it is structured and what it can deliver in the future.

The draft CRMP has three main stages:

• Stage 1 – Identifying and Assessing Risk. This sets out what we believe the main risks are, and highlights some of the ways in which we’ve been dealing with them over the last few years.
• Stage 2 – Managing and Reducing Risk. This sets out what we are planning to do over the four-year term of the CRMP to tackle the risks we have identified. It highlights our three main roles – Prevention, Protection and Response – and the main work areas we will be focusing on. It also sets out how we will work with others to maintain resilience, how we intend to deliver value for money for our communities, and how we will continue to support our workforce. It concludes with a number of headline actions we want to deliver over the CRMP term, including plans to review our Attendance (Response-time) Standards.
• Stage 3 – Measuring and Demonstrating Impact. This sets out how we aim to show that our services and activities are having a positive impact on reducing risk over time.

Consultation process

To help to gather views on each of these Stages, we have prepared a short questionnaire, which is included at the end of the draft CRMP document. The questionnaire is also available online and as a paper version. A number of supporting documents have also been prepared to provide further background information on the identification and assessment of risks set out in Stage 1 above.

We will consider every comment carefully, and all feedback will assist us in shaping the final CRMP. To help us to do this effectively, all information will be processed by ORS (an independent specialist social research practice), who will provide an impartial analysis of all responses.

The consultation report and any changes to the CRMP will be reported to the Fire Authority to gain final approval, prior to publication in April 2021.