Agenda and minutes

Apologies for absence were received from Cllr Fred Jackson.

Members are asked to consider any pecuniary and non-pecuniary interests they may have to disclose to the meeting in relation to matters under consideration on the agenda.

County Councillor Rigby advised that a member of his family owned the old Odeon site in Preston which had recently had a large fire (as detailed on page 38 of the agenda pack).

CC Hennessy raised a number of questions under matters arising:

·         Page 8, Leadership Development – The Deputy Chief Fire Officer advised that the Service had an ongoing programme of development and was currently looking to go out to tender for the delivery of levels 3, 5 and 7 ILM/CMI courses.

·         Page 11, National Definition of Risk – The Deputy Chief Fire Officer advised that 2005 saw national standards disappear and the development of integrated (now community) risk management plans with each fire and rescue service setting its own performance standards.  In relation to risk, it was fair to say that services could define it differently but at a national level the National Fire Chiefs Council was undertaking some work towards creating a consistent approach.  This was being led by Cleveland Fire Brigade Chief Fire Officer, Ian Hayton and was in progress.

·         Page 12, His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire and Rescue Services (HMICFRS) progress report to Strategy Group – The Assistant Chief Fire Officer advised the action plan had not been taken to the last Strategy Group meeting due given the scale of items already included on the agenda and time constraints for the meeting.  A broad update was within the Planning Committee agenda pack and it was agreed that the action plan could be brought to a future meeting of the Planning Committee.

Resolved: That the Minutes of the last meeting held on 6 February 2023 be confirmed as a correct record and signed by the Chair.

The Deputy Chief Fire Officer presented the report.  The Annual Service Report was produced annually by the Service as part of its accountability to measure progress against the items set out as deliverables as part of the Annual Service Plan.  These actions were derived from the medium-term strategic goals highlighted in the Community Risk Management Plan.

The Deputy Chief Fire Officer advised that the report included a summary table of the Service’s performance:

The Annual Service Report as now considered by Members highlighted a number of key deliverables against the priority areas of: i) people, ii) prevention, iii) protection, iv) response and v) value for money related work streams:

i) Valuing our people so they can focus on making Lancashire safer

·         Embed the Core Code of Ethics alongside our STRIVE values.  These provide guidance on the professional behaviours expected of all our staff to ensure our workplace was one where everyone felt valued, included, and able to reach their full potential;

·         Focused on developing the capability and resilience of leaders to support their staff in achieving their full potential through talent management, promotion pathways, and continuous improvement;

·         Recruiting, training, and developing people who could meet the diverse needs of the residents of Lancashire and bring diversity of thought and talent into our Service was a priority;

·         Delivering firefighter pension changes;

·         Upgrade fire station facilities;

·         A celebration of our people through award ceremonies, Chief Fire Officer personal commendations and from individual and organisational recognition at national level.

ii) Preventing fires and other emergencies from happening

·         Reduce fires and other emergencies in Lancashire’s diverse communities;

·         Improve our Home Fire Safety Check (HFSC) service;

·         Develop prevention services for homes equipped with assistive technology.

iii) Protecting people and property when fires happen

·         Transform fire protection and business safety;

·         Introduce Business Fire Safety Checks;

·         Strengthen our fire safety inspection programme to meet evolving standards;

·         Introduce a new automatic fire alarm attendance policy.

iv) Responding to fires and other emergencies quickly and competently

·         Review emergency cover incorporating the replacement of the day crewing plus duty system;

·         Review special fire appliances and resource provision;

·         Invest in our fleet;

·         Respond to the impacts of climate change;

·         Implement operational learning in response to national events;

·         Optimise emergency cover through improved data including dynamic mobilising software.

v) Delivering value for money in how we use our resources

·         Implement the first stages of our digital strategy;

·         Create digitally enabled fire engines;

·         Install CCTV on fire  ...  view the full minutes text for item 4/23

The Assistant Chief Fire Officer introduced Group Manager Kirsty McCreesh who presented the report which provided Members with an update on progress against the Serious Violence Duty (the Duty). 

The Duty was part of the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act 2022 which came into force on 31 January 2023. This new legislation required a range of specified authorities to work together to share information and allow them to target their interventions. Within the Duty Statutory Guidance it was stated that ideally this should be done through existing partnership structures and these structures should be used to collaborate and plan to prevent and reduce serious violence within their local communities.

The Duty identified the Police, Probation Services, Youth Offending Teams, Integrated Care Boards and local authorities in addition to Fire and Rescue Authorities as being specified authorities. (Prison and Education Authorities were known as Relevant Authorities able to co?operate with Specified Authorities as necessary.) 

Specified authorities must identify the types of serious violence that occurred in the area and, so far as was possible to do so, identify the causes of that violence. To do so, specified authorities should undertake an evidence-based analysis of the causes of serious violence and use this analysis to develop a local strategic needs assessment which should inform the local strategy. The strategy, which specified authorities must prepare and implement, should contain bespoke solutions to prevent and reduce serious violence in their area.  The Duty did not specify a lead organisation however the statutory guidance identified the Police and Crime Commissioner as being the lead convener for local partner agencies. It was for the specified authorities to come together to decide on the appropriate lead and structure of collaboration for their area.

At a meeting of the specified authorities on the 5th January 2023 it was agreed that the responsibility for the delivery of the Duty would sit with all Lancashire Community Safety Partnerships.

It was noted that Lancashire was fortunate to have the Lancashire Violence Reduction Network (LVRN), as not all localities throughout the country had a Violence Reduction Unit. Through the LVRN, Lancashire had a Serious Violence Strategic Needs Assessment and Lancashire Serious Violence Strategy. Lancashire Fire and Rescue Service (LFRS) was represented within the LVRN and local district needs assessments produced by the Violence Reduction Network were included within the district planning process to ensure discharge at a local level through targeted risk reduction activities.

It was also noted that the Crest Advisory Board had been commissioned by Home Office to conduct a readiness assessment across the country. LFRS had contributed to the Lancashire return which aimed to identify barriers and areas requiring additional support as well as progress across the country in comparison to other localities.

LFRS had signed a Lancashire Partnership agreement and would be represented at a newly formed Lancashire Serious Violence and Community Safety Board.

Lancashire Fire and Rescue Service

The Duty guidance recognised that Fire and Rescue Services were established in engaging with local communities to  ...  view the full minutes text for item 5/23

The Deputy Chief Fire Officer introduced Area Manager Tom Powell and Acting Area Manager Jonny Ashton.

The Deputy Chief Fire Officer advised that the report updated on progress of the ongoing workstreams that were being progressed under the Blue Light Collaboration Board.  The workstreams were being managed effectively through both the Strategic and Tactical Boards and recently, Lancashire Fire and Rescue Service (LFRS) had introduced a Station Manager role to support and deliver the key workstreams which were: -

i)   Missing Persons (missing from home)

Existing collaboration had continued to be a success.  While the number of requests for attendance had decreased over the past few years LFRS had supported Lancashire Constabulary (LanCon) with a number of high-profile cases; where support had been provided from the initial search on day one up to, and including, the inquest.  

The main objective of the project was now to improve even further the existing collaboration between LFRS and LanCon by providing support where it was most required. The aim was to enhance specialist teams from several ‘on-call’ and specialist crews in Lancashire where the locality was close to ‘hot spots’ where people were known to go missing from home and, where LanCon could often have limited resources thus allowing LFRS specialist search teams to search familiar ground in a reduced timeframe.

The training ensured that specialist teams developed an increased knowledge of what was required by LanCon in the management of a missing from home case and the importance of intelligence gathering, record keeping where an area had been searched, ensuring a crime scene wasn’t contaminated and enhancing the working relationships, at ground level, between the two services.

The Deputy Chief Fire Officer added that over the weekend the Service responded to a missing person incident using the very latest drone technology which featured an underwater sonar device. Thankfully the missing person was found safe and well.

ii)  Estates and Co-location

This was a longer-term work stream with interdependencies as there were several internal projects within Lancashire Constabulary to review current building stock. This included Lancashire Constabulary headquarters, and various police stations.    Property leads from all three agencies had met on 22 June 2023 with a review of existing work and future opportunities discussed. This would now become a bi-monthly meeting to ensure work was progressed. As part of this work North West Ambulance Service (NWAS), LanCon and LFRS had shared information with regards facilities and estates management linked to current and future workstreams to enable a more cohesive approach to future proofing opportunities within the estate’s portfolios. LFRS had also progressed work with the potential to re-negotiate leases and licences at Lytham and St Annes fire stations for the next three years with LanCon. In addition to this, the Service would ensure that all Blue Light partners were included in the scoping work being undertaken in relation to the Preston area review.

iii)          First Responder

A phased approached was agreed in terms of volunteers signing up to the scheme.  ...  view the full minutes text for item 6/23

The Deputy Chief Fire Officer updated Members regarding His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire and Rescue Services (HMICFRS) activity and LFRS planning arrangements.

Values and culture in fire and rescue services

HMICFRS had published a spotlight report on 30 March 2023 which focused on the values and culture of all 44 fire and rescue services in England.  Since the start of inspections in 2018, HMICFRS reported that they repeatedly found evidence of poor values, culture and behaviour, including bullying, harassment and discrimination in many services.  This led to recommendation that the sector should have a code of ethics, which was introduced in 2021.  The spotlight report was the first time HMICFRS looked in such depth at the cumulative issue of values and culture across all services.  They particularly focused on issues that had been seen in more than half (at least 26) of services and which were having a detrimental impact across the sector. These included: i) bullying, harassment, and discrimination; ii) lack of fairness and diversity; and iii) reporting and handling of concerns, including allegations of misconduct.  The report examined what was working well, what needed to change and the barriers to making improvements.  HMICFRS found that while some services had made improvements since their first round of inspections in respect of values and culture, many needed to do more. 

The report contained 35 recommendations, which were aimed at chief fire officers, chief constables, and national bodies and a request to implement the relevant recommendations by stated deadline(s).  Fire and rescue authorities were also asked to note that fire and rescue services were required to update HMICFRS on how the recommendations were being actioned. Lancashire Fire and Rescue Service had provided HMICFRS with an update on the implementation of the recommendations, including a short self-assessment narrative per recommendation.  HMICFRS would be monitoring these recommendations closely.

Positive Practice Portal

The National Fire Chiefs Council’s (NFCC) Positive Practice Portal launched on 10 May 2023.  The Positive Practice Portal would share case studies and examples of positive practice captured by HMICFRS, enabling fire and rescue services to learn from each other and improve their services for the benefit of the public. The Positive Practice Portal provided details about interventions, which had been developed to address a particular need, concern or organisational change and were recognised by HMICFRS as innovative or promising practice.  These practices covered areas such as organisational culture.

HMICFRS Spring Data Collection

In accordance with timescales LFRS submitted the spring data collection in June 2023.

Round 3 Overview

In the next round of inspections, ‘Round 3’, HMICFRS would continue to inspect how effective and efficient Fire and Rescue Services (FRSs) were at carrying out their principal functions of fire safety, firefighting, and responding to road traffic collisions and other emergencies, whilst taking a more in depth, robust, look at certain aspects.  As Members were already aware, HMICFRS had moved away from a tranche system to a more rolling approach. It was anticipated that this would ensure publication of  ...  view the full minutes text for item 7/23

The Assistant Chief Fire Officer presented the report.  He advised that further to scrutiny of key performance indicators (KPI) by Members of the CFA Performance Committee, the Service was asked to reflect upon the ongoing suitability of the current ‘Fire Engine Availability’ KPI’s in particular with reference to the on-call measurement. 

Lancashire Fire and Rescue Service (LFRS) currently had one of the most challenging targets for availability of on-call fire engines of any fire and rescue service in the country and, whilst having a high aspirational target maintained focus on securing on-call fire engine availability, for some time now the Service had fallen short of delivering against this highly ambitious target. 

Work had been undertaken to compare our KPI’s with those used in other Services, with the ambition being to provide Members of the Performance Committee with a suitable KPI which would better reflect holistic fire cover across the county of Lancashire, considering both wholetime and on-call availability.

The Service had 3 KPI measurements pertaining to appliance availability across the entire fleet:

i)       KPI 3.3 for Total Fire Engine Availability (which combined wholetime and on-call and was for information only);

ii)      KPI 3.3.1 for Fire Engine Availability – Wholetime Shift System (which had a target of 99.5%); and

iii)    KPI 3.3.2 for Fire Engine Availability – On-Call Shift System (which had an aspirational target of 95%).

The On-Call appliance availability target was a demanding 95% and whilst having such a high aspirational target maintained on-call availability as a continuing Service priority, setting unrealistic targets could have a negative impact on performance and could fail to recognise the improvements that some stations were making to availability, as overall they continued to fall short of the objective.

Members noted that 32 of the 58 LFRS pumps were crewed by on-call firefighters.  Many of these appliances provided fire cover in lower-risk, rural areas, whilst others provide a secondary layer of response to that provided by wholetime crews in urban areas of the county.  The Service presently measured the availability of on-call appliances against the same 95% aspirational target across the county, irrespective of demand, risk levels or a wholetime resource being within that station area.

Nationally, on-call availability continued to be a challenge as highlighted by the National Fire Chiefs Council and His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire and Rescue Services and extensive work was ongoing both locally and nationally to address some of the key issues.  Within the Service, a significant volume of work was ongoing which aimed to improve recruitment, training and development, retention, and broadening the utilisation of on-call staff; all balanced against realistic role expectations given the limitations on available training hours each week.

Having considered a number of options, a proposal for Service KPI change was presented which would provide the right balance of oversight and ambition for fire engines crewed by both wholetime and on-call firefighters, supplemented by further internal KPI’s for use by local managers to drive contractual performance and ensure value for money.

The  ...  view the full minutes text for item 8/23

The Assistant Chief Fire Officer presented the report.  He advised that Lancashire Fire and Rescue Service (LFRS) currently set itself one of the most challenging targets for critical incident response times in the country.

Having a high aspirational target reflected the priority and importance of responding to incidents in a suitable time, and whilst LFRS response times remained exceptionally fast in comparison to many other Fire and Rescue Services, the standard was not presently achieved.  As such, Members of the Performance Committee had requested that the Service consider the ongoing suitability of this KPI.

Members were aware that UK Fire and Rescue Services set their own response standards in line with their Community Risk Management Plan and were then held to account against those standards.  It was noted that there were different methods of measuring the response, primarily from time of call or from time of mobilisation, through to the time that the appliances booked as being ‘in attendance’ at the incident. 

The two key methods used by fire services in the UK were “Crew Response Time” and “Total Response Time”.  It was also noted that LFRS previously used the “Crew Response Time” standard (which measured from the point of mobilisation). However, in 2015/16 (and to present a more accurate position) this was reviewed and updated to a “Total Response Time” method whereby 60 seconds were added to each risk level to account for call handling time by North West Fire Control (NWFC). 

LFRS used a median average of call handling time and the data used for this analysis showed the median call times within Lancashire for critical incidents varied between 1 minute 2 seconds and 1 minute 23 seconds and that the median was 73 seconds.  Therefore, when considering that the updated response time factored in only 60 seconds for call handling time, the figures represented a tightening of the standard of between 2 – 23 seconds from 2015/16 onwards.

Also, when comparing LFRS with other Fire and Rescue Services (FRS), the 90% target and the reaction times set by LFRS were amongst the most challenging set by any UK FRS, particularly those within the Family Grouping (considered by Members at appendix 1).  The other FRS’ within the ‘predominantly urban’ category had response standards which were slower than those of LFRS even when call handling was often not factored into the overall response times.

LFRS was currently categorised as ‘predominantly urban’ though it had a diverse demographic with both highly urbanised and remote rural areas.  Comparing LFRS with other ‘predominantly urban’ services (considered by Members at appendix 2) it was evident that Lancashire was significantly larger geographically than the majority of the services in the category (but with a relatively low average population density / km²).  It was not surprising therefore that when comparing average attendance times of ‘predominantly urban’ services for primary fires (considered by Members at appendix 3) Lancashire was slower than the national average for this category.  However, LFRS was performing better than  ...  view the full minutes text for item 9/23

The Assistant Chief Fire Officer presented the report.  He advised that Business Fire Safety Checks (BFSC) were inspections of lower risk commercial buildings undertaken by operational firefighters.  They typically resulted in low level interventions, however where deficiencies identified were more significant, they could 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.

Lancashire presently had over 65,000 commercial buildings.  A large proportion of those were lower risk buildings which would have been unlikely to make the inspection programme for Fire Safety Inspectors thereby delivering BFSC’s the Service was effectively addressing the built environment risk more broadly whilst improving our operational crews’ knowledge of building construction and how buildings should behave when involved in fire.

During 2022 the Service began rollout of training to operational crews on the delivery of Building Fire Safety Checks (BFSCs). 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 had now been applied within each district, based upon risks identified within the district’s local risk management plan.

The Service proposed to include a new Key Performance Indicator (KPI) into the quarterly performance report ‘Measuring Progress’ to ensure that Members and the public were suitably appraised.

Resolved: that the content of the report be noted and the recommendation to implement a new Key Performance Indicator for Business Fire Safety Checks be approved.

The next scheduled meeting of the Committee has been agreed for 10:00 hours on 20 November 2023 in the Main Conference Room, at Lancashire Fire & Rescue Service Headquarters, Fulwood.

Further meetings are:          scheduled for 5 February 2024

                                                proposed for 15 July 2024

The next meeting of the Committee would be held on Monday 20 November 2023 at 1000 hours in the main Conference Room at Lancashire Fire and Rescue Service Headquarters, Fulwood.

Further meeting dates were noted for 5 February 2024 and agreed for 15 July 2024.