Fire Sector Summit


Programming Office (FCPO). This workshop aimed to see if the benefits of this approach to operational matters could be applied to other areas of fire business to improve fire safety outcomes. Following the death in 2013 of firefighter


Stephen Alan Hunt (the last UK firefighter to die), in REGULATION 28: REPORT TO PREVENT FUTURE DEATHS (June 2016), the senior coroner for Manchester City suggested that ‘consideration is given to being able to mobilise a national and consistent approach to sharing the learning and testing so that it can be shown to be received, understood, actioned and embedded’. In response, the UK FRS and LFB worked with the British Research Establishment (BRE) to update guidance and build a sustainable guidance structure, incorporating fire protection information for firefighters. Good practice guidance will hopefully foster learning and a culture that encourages reporting. State guidance was poor, with about 8,000 pieces that were often contradictory and contained gaps. As a result, operational guidance was often written locally, creating layers on the same subject and leading to confusion. LFB offered to fund the first three years’ work to radically sort this out and reduce the guidance to about 22 pieces, which was completed in March 2017 with UK FRS and the fire sector. All fire services agreed to contribute funding and the government and devolved administrations matched this to total £1.5m. Over the past five years, the NOG programme


has delivered on time and on budget, facilitating collaboration with organisations inside and outside the fire service (eg the Fire Brigades Union and sector representatives including the FPA). It has established a robust governance structure and developed a blueprint for the future, also producing knowledge sheets with BRE on building construction. ‘We think we could adapt this process to anything else you would like delivering,’ she added. National Operational Learning ensures that


guidance remains current and accurate, moving from reactive to proactive change with a new website that is easily updated and searched. Learning outcomes are reviewed and shared to improve performance and increase firefighter safety. Under the scrutiny of the National Fire Chiefs Council (NFCC), the FCPO supports this work by providing good practice guidance, and projects around fire prevention and fire protection. Ms Ellison-Bunce commented: ‘FRSs are good at identifying incidents of significance and lessons learned; we provide the system to process the learning. This replaces a culture that’s reluctant to share with one that encourages reporting.’ The aim is to anonymise risk information that is


shared, eg looking at a failure rather than who did what. She explained that if a piece of learning


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about active fire protection (eg when an installer has not understood the purpose of the product), an external company is employed through the Institute of Fire Engineers to do horizon scanning outside of the country and fire service to increase sample size. Learning outcomes are reviewed and shared to improve performance. The NFCC has approved a strategy which sets


out a programme of work to help deliver it in five key areas (and in which the fire sector starts to play a key role). Overall aims are for better collaboration, efficient use of resources, standardised delivery, greater interoperability and added value. She continued that the next steps are in


prevention and protection, one of the strands being the risk analysis process. If the fire service provides a response to risk, it needs to fully understand it. One piece of work being scoped is assessing community risk, and links will be forged between strategic commitments of assessing community risk (eg fire prevention and protection), firefighter workforce reform, efficiency and collaboration, governance and digitalisation ‘across the piece’. In turn, the chair of the NFCC Roy Wilsher stated


that the changes needed in the wake of the Grenfell Tower fire will demand wide engagement with the fire sector. An early area of focus for the FCPO will be integrated risk management plans (IRMPs). Mr Holliday emphasised that fire service response will always differ in different areas (a fact reflected in RISCAuthority’s Informer data tool). A discussion ensued around the wider sharing of


fire service learning and greater sector involvement, noting that it is not easy to get people to ‘buy into’ national operational learning. Part of operational effectiveness is gap analysis that results in local guidance. Every fire service has paid into this work. NFCC cannot mandate to anyone, he highlighted.


FOCUS


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