15 SURREY FIRE AND RESCUE SERVICE IMPLEMENTATION OF MAKING SURREY SAFER - OUR PLAN 2020 - 2023 PDF 472 KB
Purpose of report:
For the Select Committee to
receive an update on the following areas:
·
Implementation of Phase 1 and Phase 2 of the changes
included within Our Plan
·
The outcomes of the Covid-19 Inspection by
HMICFRS
·
The continuing response to Covid-19 and Recovery
Plan
·
SFRS Priorities
For the Select Committee to receive a summary of the activity of
the working group to monitor the implementation of the
‘Making Surrey Safer’ Plan and its
conclusions.
Additional documents:
Minutes:
Witnesses:
Denise Turner-Stewart, Cabinet
Member for Community Protection
Steve Owen-Hughes, Director
– Community Protection Group
Sarah Kershaw, Chief of
Staff
Key points raised during the
discussion:
- The
witnesses were asked by the Select Committee to comment on the
industrial dispute with the Fire Brigades Union (FBU); this was
ongoing albeit some items were resolved. Regular meetings were held
with FBU representatives and every effort was being made to resolve
all issues raised. The FBU suspended their Action Short of Strike
in March 2020. The Chief Fire Officer stated Surrey Fire and Rescue
Service’s (SFRS) desire to have good industrial relations
with all unions, and it was encouraging more unions to recruit
members from SFRS for wider representation of the
workforce.
- A Member
asked whether officers could provide trend data on SFRS’s
establishment data to show how it changed over the previous
five-year period. The Chief Fire Officer explained that the
workforce was divided into four categories: control staff, support
staff, wholetime firefighters, and on call firefighters, and the
Service was now 100% across all those areas apart from on call ,
which was 83.3% and subject to an ongoing recruitment drive. Prior
to 2019, there was no fixed establishment and from 2016-2018 SFRS
depended on overtime to provide the required staffing
levels.
- The Chief
Fire Officer went onto say that there was an organisation
development department whose job it was to forecast the
Service’s leaver profile. This was being monitored and the
Service encouraged retiring frontline staff to transfer to other
service departments, such as fire safety, to retain experience
Establishment figures were now fixed, and the risk of relying on
overtime significantly reduced. In 2016, the Service was funded to
a headcount of 646 on call and wholetime firefighters but, having
undertaken data and risk analysis, the Service now knew that it
needed 595 firefighters.
- SFRS was
still able to meet its statutory requirements during the Covid-19
pandemic despite deploying staff into different service areas.
Fulltime firefighters who delivered statutory response functions
were deployed less frequently than parttime and volunteer service fire fighters. Most
of the community resilience activities (i.e. prevention and
protection measures) were impacted by the pandemic. Face to face
Safe and Well visits to businesses and residents’ homes and
school visits ceased temporarily at the beginning of the pandemic
except for those safe and well visits for high risk vulnerable
persons which continued. The Youth Cadet Scheme was delayed until
September 2021 and community events and the Youth Engagement
Programmes were reduced or delayed. Community engagement and staff
engagement was also impacted by the pandemic and the Service
undertook a recovery review starting in June 2020 to understand all
areas impacted by the pandemic and develop a return to normal plan
for catch up in those areas.
- The
Chairman asked whether some ways of working had fundamentally
changed due to Covid-19. The Chief Fire Officer responded that SFRS
had learned over the last year that there were effective ways of
doing things differently. Engagement with business ...
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