Agenda and minutes

Apologies were received from County Councillors P Britcliffe and N Penney and Councillors M Khan and Z Khan.

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

None received.

RESOLVED:- That the minutes of the meeting held on 9 June 2016 be confirmed and signed by the Chairman.

The Assistant Chief Fire Officer advised Members that this was the 1st quarterly report for 2016/17 as detailed in the Risk Management Plan 2013-2017.

The report showed there were 5 negative KPI Exception Reports. An exception report was provided which detailed the reasons for the exception, analysis of the issue and actions being taken to improve performance.

Members focussed on the indicators where an exception report was presented and examined each indicator in turn as follows:-

2.1.1   Critical Fire Response – 1^st Fire Engine Attendance

This indicator reported the ‘Time of Call’ (TOC) and ‘Time in Attendance’ (TIA) of the first fire engine arriving at the incident in less than the relevant response standard.

The response standards for the first fire engine attending a critical fire (including call handling time KPI 2.1.3) are as follows:-

· Very high risk area = 6 minutes

· High risk area = 8 minutes

· Medium risk area = 10 minutes

· Low risk area = 12 minutes

The response standards are determined by the risk map score and subsequent risk grade for the location of the fire.

Standard: to be in attendance within response standard target on 88% of occasions.

Quarter 1 – 1^st pump response 83.87%, previous year quarter 1 - 87.06%.

This is a negative exception report due to critical Fire 1^st pump response being below the standard. Overall quarter 1 pass rate was 83.87%.

Exception report provided.

The Assistant Chief Fire Officer advised that there had been a marginal improvement in this indicator during 2015/16.  Critical fire activity was within standard during the month of April however, this could be attributed to the unusually low number of incidents during the month. During May, responses failed by an average of 1 minute and 37 seconds and by 3 minutes and 9 seconds during June. This included the call handling time. June contained an incident where the first pump failed to book in attendance at the incident on initial arrival, which resulted in an unusually long response time being recorded. Over the quarter 1 period, 55 incidents failed to achieve the standard response, 31% of the failures failed by less than 60 seconds. It was reported that Preston, Chorley and Hyndburn were accountable for 16 of the 55 failures with the main reasons being distance and time of day.  Many failures occurred between 1600 hours - 1900 hours and the possible relationship between peak travel times and fire engines travelling through congested traffic was noted.

The Deputy Chief Fire Officer confirmed that the standards were not set nationally they were set by the Authority’s Planning Committee and monitored by this Performance Committee.  It was noted that Fire Services across the family group had less stringent targets for example, some had a blanket response time of 10 minutes whereas Lancashire’s response standards were graded on risk.

In response to a question raised by County Councillor Holgate, the Assistant Chief Fire Officer advised that there used to be two separate measures for call handling  ...  view the full minutes text for item 4/16

The next meeting of the Committee will be held on 1 December 2016 at 10:00 hours in the Main Conference Room at Lancashire Fire & Rescue Headquarters, Fulwood.

Further meetings are proposed for: 16 March 2017, 8 June 2017, 14 September 2017 and 30 November 2017.

The next meeting of the Committee had been agreed for Thursday 1 December 2016 in the Main Conference Room, Service Headquarters, Fulwood at 1000 hours.

Further meeting date were noted for: 16 March 2017, 8 June 2017, 14 September 2017 and 30 November 2017.