Meeting to be held on 17 July 2023
Contact for further information – ACFO Jon Charters
Tel: 01772 866802
Executive Summary
During 2022 the Service began rollout of training to operational crews on BFSC delivery. During the first year, crews began delivering the service as and when they had completed their training and as such, the Service completed over 2,500 BFSC’s in the first part-year.
Training rollout has since been completed across all wholetime stations and local targets have now been applied within each district, based upon risks identified within the district’s local risk management plan.
The Service now proposes to include a new Key Performance Indicator (KPI) into the quarterly performance report ‘Measuring Progress’ to ensure that Elected Members and public are suitably appraised of our outputs and outcomes in this respect.
Recommendation(s)
Members are asked to note the content of the paper and agree the recommendation to implement the new KPI.
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Business Fire Safety Checks (BFSC) are inspections of lower risk commercial buildings, undertaken by operational firefighters. They typically result in lower level interventions, however where deficiencies identified are more significant they may be followed up with a subsequent visit by a Business Safety Adviser (mid level intervention) or a higher level intervention, such as enforcement under the Fire Safety Order, by a Fire Safety Inspector.
In the post-Grenfell era, it is essential that we continue to develop our front-facing teams in building their knowledge and understanding of the built environment, whilst in parallel the Fire Safety Inspectors (Fire Protection) see their roles becoming increasingly competency-based under the revised regulatory framework.
The training to conduct BFSC’s is complemented by additional training input around risks and controls found in buildings to support the continued development of our teams in recognising risks in the built environment and being able to respond to them appropriately.
We presently have 65,000+ commercial buildings in Lancashire, a large proportion of those are lower risk buildings which would therefore have been unlikely to make the inspection programme for our Fire Safety Inspectors and by delivering these valuable BFSC’s we are effectively addressing the built environment risk more broadly across Lancashire whilst improving our operational crews’ knowledge of building construction and how buildings should behave when involved in fire.
Low – BFSCs are being delivered the risk pertains to visibility of the work being undertaken by the Service to reduce built environment risk in the post-Grenfell era.
No issues around sustainability or environmental impacts identified.
None.
Data Protection (GDPR)
None
None
None
Paper:
Date:
Contact:
Reason for inclusion in Part 2 if appropriate: N/a