Poor UK Fire Cover. Should There Be More Openness?

[Messyshaw]

On the back of the thread about the BAE fire and the 78 mile run some resources had to get there, it makes me think again what an outrage it is that the fire cover for the UK is in such a poor state -yet there's no public outcry. Maybe they dont know?. 

I was employed by the LFB who have no RDS staff, but I met a few on the borders. Plus more recently, I had extensive dealings with a rural F&RS (who I am not naming!) in relation to a huge project worth tens of £millions that I was involved with. This essential piece of UK infrastructure was similar to the BAE site in terms of sensitivity and the ramifications if interrupted or lost by fire. As a result, it was necessary to draw up detailed emergency plans.

My involvement in that project shone a light on the poor funding and terms for RDS staff and their employers. I am particularly angered by the lack of openness by some F&RS - almost to the point of lying to those who pay for their service

For example, like many F&RS, Buckinghamshire F&R have profiles of their stations shown on their website. It is reassuring for communities to know this essential service is on their doorstep in case the worst happens. But all is not what it seems. 

Stokenchurch and Chesham fire stations are essential closed (I am not sure if Stokenchurch have attend any calls in recent years) and are covered by High Wycombe and Amersham  respectively. 

Meanwhile Princess Risborough and Marlow's RDS cover is patchy at best - and are regularly bailed out by High Wycombe 

None of this info appears on the Bucks FRS website which one could argue is evasive at best and misleading at worst.

Meanwhile the F&RS involved with providing fire cover for the large infrastructure project I referred to earlier would not provide turnout and availability statistics for the 6 retained stations surrounding this significant risk. It made contingency planning tricky so I had to resort to a FOI request. Even this was held up for a while as hey claimed the work involved in compiling the data was disproportionate. In the end, I had to formally complain via the Home Office to get the information. When I did get access to it, the data showed the nearest RDS station only managed to turn out on 20% of occasions and wholetime crews had to provide cover from 45 mins away - maybe an hour in poor weather. 

I really do wish that all F&RS were obliged to provide turnout and availability cover stats and station profiles on their websites in a uniform and easy to read format. It should be placed within the station profile part of their web pages so the that the community who rely and pay for the service can see what they are getting (or aren't!).

Will it ever happen? I doubt it 

[TandA]

One of the issues with RDS availability is that it can turn in an instant.  Take my station.  Jan to end Sept we were being held up by some managers as exemplar due to our high availability with low crew numbers.  Oct we were frankly crap! The difference?  Our availability is provided by a core of 1 officer, 1 driver and 3 or 4 firefighters.  None of us had taken more than a few days’ leave over the busy summer season and we have all near burned ourselves out doing every standby the service request.  We all took leave in October and we perhaps didn’t coordinate as well as we could, although with good reasons such as having to align with half term, having partners who are allocated leave blocks and having to align with a cruise ship timetable.  Hopefully things will return to previous cover levels soon but when you are trying to provide 24/7 cover with only 7 people, it only takes one to be sick / on leave / really busy in their primary role and it has a massive impact.

The answer is to improve recruitment but how do you do that?  The answer is elusive, we haven’t found it in 40 years of trying.  It lies in some combination of pay / conditions / career opportunities and flexibility but what that combination is is beyond me.

[Matt]

They will never admit how bad things are, the state of things is quite shocking, I believe Stokenchurch only has 2 crew on the books as such but to most public they won't have a clue, there is still a fire station there they think its open.

RDS doesn't work these days, business are not in the station areas or wont release crew for calls, people don't want to join for the poor pay for what you have to give.  It's always the same few keeping stations on the run.

My friend is a WM and some days especially at the weekend crewing changes hourly and can be a battle to keep the station on the run.

[Kinmel]

"as they claimed the work involved in compiling the data was disproportionate. "

Imagine !

Forty years ago when I was Head of Operations etc, the Ramsdaq Mobilising System gave me realtime incident data to my desk and it was easily tabulated. It even included data on availabilty, moment by moment.   Have they gone back to pen and paper ?

Training Dept were even looking to use it to personalise training based on a firefighters's incident history !

[Bgjm21]

There perhaps needs to be an acceptance that the RDS is a system which no longer functions to the modern world.

In Scotland there is a lot of talk that the way forward is likely to be closing 3-4 retained stations and putting one wholetime or day crewed pump in the middle of them.

[JL_Martin]

Hello,

This statement is true elsewhere, in other countries. In mine (France), our volunteers Ffs (same as your RDS Ffs) are les and less available during daytime. Companies don't want to release them for calls during working hours. People are less interesting about to be part of Fire services, etc... 

Lots of our volunteer fire stations are closed in the country side from 7am to 7pm.

It seems there are no solutions for that... 😐

[TandA]

4 hours ago, Bgjm21 said:

…the way forward is likely to be closing 3-4 retained stations and putting one wholetime or day crewed pump in the middle of them.

Does this solve the issue? You end up with a similar amount of appliances as now by virtue of having only 25% of the stations and in the world of unintended consequences you then risk a sudden decrease in RDS staff at any remaining RDS stations as they lose calls to the new day crewed machines, lose earnings and decide the commitment required is no longer worth the financial reward.  The RDS system is broken but I am not convinced that is the fix.

[TrainHardFightEasy]

Bucks FRS had 8% availability last year overall for the RDS looking at the fire authority meetings available on the website. 
 

[Messyshaw]

43 minutes ago, TrainHardFightEasy said:

Bucks FRS had 8% availability last year overall for the RDS looking at the fire authority meetings available on the website. 
 

What ? 8% availability?

Does that mean RDS were not available an average of 92%? 😳😳😳

[Kinmel]

11 hours ago, TandA said:

Does this solve the issue? You end up with a similar amount of appliances as now by virtue of having only 25% of the stations and in the world of unintended consequences you then risk a sudden decrease in RDS staff at any remaining RDS stations as they lose calls to the new day crewed machines, lose earnings and decide the commitment required is no longer worth the financial reward.  The RDS system is broken but I am not convinced that is the fix.

Cheshire and North Wales are not closing RDS stations, but converting them to day crewing, W/T 8am-6pm and RDS overnight. There is also likely to be "roving" W/T personnel to provide short-crewed RDS stations with an OiC or driver as necessary.

At last something is happening, at present it is experimental small steps to find what works, where.

The changeover is going to be expensive, we will see many existing W/T stations dropping to Day manning, or Crewing.    Hence things like the new norm of "One pump within 20 minutes"

[Br9mp81]

RDS is broken, it runs more on good will than anything in some areas, i know 1 county that has a reserve system where someone can get paid to sit on a rds stn all day or walk about the town/village as long as they can run drive back.

is it right that that person is on hundreads of pounds and the rest of the crew on pennies per hour running life/work round the pager.

at the end of the day they what full time commitment for part time wages

[TrainHardFightEasy]

6 hours ago, Messyshaw said:

What ? 8% availability?

Does that mean RDS were not available an average of 92%? 😳😳😳

Yes that’s correct 92% unavailable. 

[Bgjm21]

On 05/11/2024 at 23:35, TandA said:

Does this solve the issue? You end up with a similar amount of appliances as now by virtue of having only 25% of the stations and in the world of unintended consequences you then risk a sudden decrease in RDS staff at any remaining RDS stations as they lose calls to the new day crewed machines, lose earnings and decide the commitment required is no longer worth the financial reward.  The RDS system is broken but I am not convinced that is the fix.

Yes, I think it does solve the issue to an extent. Currently you are hoping for one pump to be on the run in a cluster of stations but a significant % of the time there is no pump at all on the run so a wholetime machine gets sent standby.

In this scenario in the future you can guarantee that one pump will be available in that area, that is a 100% improvement to fire cover on the significant number of days the stations are currently closed. 

There simply are not enough people who desire to provide retained cover in most places in Scotland. I’m not sure of the statistics but I would put money that majority of RDS FF’s certainly in west central Scotland are dual contractor W/T ff’s.

Moving away from the central belt there is currently no guaranteed fire cover on the islands nor for a several hundred mile patch of northern Scotland which has previously been left with no cover at all due. The way things are simply can’t go on. The world has changed and the RDS duty system despite many attempts to change and modernise it, simply no longer works. I don’t think it’s going to vanish entirely yet but in 10-20 years I feel like the problem will only have worsened and the direction of travel in Scotland seems to have been set.

My guess is that the upcoming Strategic Service Review in SFRS will have winners and losers. There are RDS stations just now that will close, RDS stations that will be upgraded and currently W/T and RDS stations that will likely drop to day crewing. It’s really difficult to make an argument against some of this “rebalancing” too, when you consider certain Wholetime/on call stations doing 300 calls per year.

I’ll caveat this by saying this is my experience north of the wall and that my opinions are based on that.

[TandA]

8 hours ago, Kinmel said:

Cheshire and North Wales are not closing RDS stations, but converting them to day crewing, W/T 8am-6pm and RDS overnight. There is also likely to be "roving" W/T personnel to provide short-crewed RDS stations with an OiC or driver as necessary.

At last something is happening, at present it is experimental small steps to find what works, where.

The changeover is going to be expensive, we will see many existing W/T stations dropping to Day manning, or Crewing.    Hence things like the new norm of "One pump within 20 minutes"

My suspicion (something similar happened here on a very small scale some years ago) is that this will be a spiral that sees a drop in RDS numbers that then needs to be further plugged.  This may be mitigated if the day crew provide RDS cover over night.

10 hours ago, Messyshaw said:

What ? 8% availability?

Does that mean RDS were not available an average of 92%? 😳😳😳

Blimey if that is correct then when I said up thread that my station’s October figures ‘were frankly crap’, I obviously didn’t know what the competition was.