Agenda and minutes

Apologies were received from County Councillor Lorraine Beavers.

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 last meeting held on the 15 March 2023 be confirmed as a correct record and signed by the Chairman.

County Councillor Hurn introduced himself as the new Chair of the Performance Committee and welcomed the new Member, Loraine Cox to the meeting.

Councillor Cox advised that she had been involved with the previous year’s Brightsparx Campaign in Accrington and asked if it would run in 2023. The Assistant Chief Fire Officer explained that it would run again as it was an annual campaign which involved a great deal of planning with a multi-agency approach. Agencies worked together to minimise risk around the bonfire period.

The Assistant Chief Fire Officer presented a comprehensive report to the Performance Committee. This was the 4^th quarterly report for 2022/23 as detailed in the Community Risk Management Plan 2022-2027.

Members were informed that proposed alterations to some KPIs would be taken to a future Planning Committee meeting, and if approved, the changes would be applied to the report from Quarter 1 of the current year.

This quarter, 3 Performance Indicators (KPIs) were shown in negative exception. These were 1.2.1 Staff Absence Wholetime (WT), 1.2.3 Staff Absence Greenbook, and 3.3.2 Fire Engine Availability On-Call Shift Systems.

Members examined each indicator in turn focusing on those KPIs in exception as follows:

KPI 1 – Valuing our people so that they can focus on making Lancashire safer

1.1           Overall Staff Engagement

Members received an update on how staff were engaged during the period.

From January to March 2023, sixteen station visits were carried out by principal officers and area managers as part of the service-wide station visits programme. Ten station visits involving Corporate Planning and Human Resources (HR) departments were undertaken to engage with members of staff affected by duty system changes as part of the emergency cover review. Eighty-four wellbeing interactions were undertaken ranging from wellbeing sessions with crews to support dog interactions.

The Service engaged staff in several trials relating to the fleet, including helmet communications and firefighting equipment for high-rise buildings. Heads of department were surveyed as part of a review of hybrid working and HR met with two administration teams in relation to changes in rota management.

1.2.1   Staff Absence Wholetime

This indicator measured the cumulative number of shifts (days) lost due to sickness for all wholetime staff divided by the total average strength.

Annual Standard: Not more than 5 shifts lost.

Annual Shifts Lost ÷ 4 quarters: 1.25

Cumulative total number of shifts lost: 8.640

The negative exception report was due to the number of shifts lost through absence per employee being above the Service target for quarter 4.

During quarter 4, January to March 2023, absence statistics showed whole-time personnel absence above target for the quarter.

1,156 Wholetime absence shifts lost = 1.86 against a target of 1.25 which was 3.64 shifts over target.

The Assistant Chief Fire Officer advised that, as discussed at the previous committee meeting, the data had been split between long-term and short-term absences as long-term absences were more likely to be cases of serious illness which were managed via specialist care. However, short-term absences  ...  view the full minutes text for item 4/23

The Committee were provided with a report detailing the performance of NWFC during quarter 4 (January – March 2023).

Negative Exceptions

There was one negative exception which was for the KPI for Emergency Calls with the reason being missing data. An investigation by NWFC and system contractors had found that due a connection failure, the data on a number of calls was not retrievable. This had no impact on service delivery during the period. The connection failure had now been resolved and NWFC were working with system contractors to ensure that resilience was in place to prevent a reoccurrence.

Emergency Calls in to NWFC

NWFC received 26,849 in quarter 4 compared to 37,462 for the same quarter of 2021/22. For the year to date, NWFC had received 135,455 emergency calls compared to 162,590 for the same period of the previous year. Emergency calls included 999 calls from members of the public and emergency calls from Lancashire Constabulary and North West Ambulance Service.

Upon investigating possible reasons for a fall in emergency call numbers, NWFC had established that for quarter 4, there was some missing data for the period which data extraction software was unable to retrieve. This had been reported to system contractors, who had now fixed the issue and were looking at further resilience measures. This had not affected transferring NWFC data to FRS IRS software. There was missing data from 17^th – 29^th January 2023 and from other dates in January and February for several hours at a time during specific days. Not all emergency calls and administrative calls data was missing during these periods, but these had been identified as to when there were connection failures.

Emergency Calls for LFRS

A total of 6,036 emergency calls were received in quarter 4 for LFRS, compared to 9,179 for the same quarter of the previous year. For the year to date, NWFC had received 33,446 emergency calls for LFRS, compared to 39,258 for the same period of the previous year.

Admin Calls in to NWFC 

NWFC had received a total of 25,917 admin calls in quarter 4, compared to 29,507 in quarter 4 of the previous year. The number of calls for the year to date was 115,296, compared to 117,377 for the same period of the previous year. Similar to emergency calls, there was missing data that was not retrievable for administrative calls for quarter 4.

Admin calls included crews and officers contacting NWFC for either guidance, or to offer advice such as notification of missing equipment, defective resources, liaising with control regarding exercises or resources availability.

Admin Calls for LFRS

Within quarter 4, a total of 5,873 admin calls were received for Lancashire Fire and Rescue (LFRS), compared to 6,772 in quarter 4 of the previous year. For the year to date, NWFC had received 26,385 admin calls for LFRS compared to 25,222 calls for the same period of the previous year.

Calls Challenged Resulting in No Mobilisation

In quarter 4, the percentage of calls  ...  view the full minutes text for item 5/23

Area Manager, Matt Hamer, provided the meeting with an annual report regarding Road Safety Intervention Activity which explained the Service’s core prevention offer and also the challenges on Lancashire’s roads.

Members noted that, through the previous Integrated Risk Management Plan 2017-2022 (IRMP), prevention and protection services and the structure for delivery were reviewed to ensure that the Service was delivering appropriate services in line with the changing operating environment. As a result, working practices had changed with a strategic focus on the quality of the services that continued to be delivered. The services were delivered around key themes: helping people to start safe, live safe, age safe and be safe on our roads with a focus on working collaboratively with other organisations. To ensure constant improvement in all parts of prevention delivery, the Service had dedicated thematic groups whose priorities aligned to the more recent Community Risk Management Plan (CRMP) 2022-2027 and the Prevention Strategy. 

Road Safe Thematic Group

The Thematic Road Safety Group continued to meet every quarter during 2022-2023 with an option of in-person and virtual meetings. Membership of the group came from all areas of the county and was a mix of Community Safety and Operational Staff. Road Safety Champion, County Councillor Ron Woollam, had close links with the group and was in regular communication with Clare Burscough, the Prevention Support Officer for Road Safety.

An annual plan aligned to the terms of reference had been developed alongside a priority work programme which supported the Lancashire Road Safety Partnership (LRSP) ‘Towards Zero’ strategy. An ambition of the group was to improve communication between strategic and practitioner levels and also to send clear messages out to Service Areas with key road safety priorities. The Service sought to deliver focused activities in areas identified as having issues and evaluate effectiveness.

Due to the Coronavirus Pandemic, the Service had developed new ways of working and some of those working practices had been adopted as business as usual and offered a greater choice of delivery methods for the community, improving the Service’s reach and efficacy. The offer of virtual delivery remained part of the service’s plan and continued to be selected by schools as a delivery method across the country.

Lancashire Road Safety Partnership (LRSP)

Lancashire Fire and Rescue Service continued to be a proactive member of LRSP and had representatives at both Strategic and Operational group level. Area Manager, Matt Hamer, was the Vice-Chair of the partnership. The partners worked closely with each other and delivered the partnership strategy ‘Towards Zero’ Lancashire: Road Safety Strategy for Lancashire 2016 – 2026’, in an attempt to reduce those killed or seriously injured on Lancashire’s roads.

LFRS lead on the Children and Young People workstream which brought partners together to look at what was currently delivered, what worked well and where the gaps where so that resources could be pooled to work efficiently and without duplication. The LRSP continued to work through the action plan following the review of the partnership completed in  ...  view the full minutes text for item 6/23

The Assistant Chief Fire Officer provided the meeting with an interim update on work being progressed via the National Fire Chiefs Council (NFCC), in relation to Family Groups and the potential for those groups to deliver comparative performance data at a future point in time.

The Service was engaged in building an understanding of the work being progressed by NFCC on the formation of new Family Groupings. Family Groupings had been used over recent years as a means of providing comparative performance data across services.

Over the last 6 months, the Corporate Programme and Intelligence (CP&I) team had participated in several NFCC workshops across the country. The workshops had provided the Service with an understanding of the methodology that was being developed, and which supported the proposed clustering of certain fire and rescue services.

The work completed to date was the first part of a wider project that aimed not only to group fire and rescue services using a data led approach, but also to provide the means by which services could access a broad range of data sets, which allowed for those comparisons to be made.

The CP&I team would continue to contribute to the national project through a collaborative, supportive approach, and make recommendations on how to achieve the greatest benefit from the data which could be made available.

Work by the NFCC project team and key stakeholders continued, and it was expected that at future point, the revised groupings and data would provide the basis for refreshed comparative data to be brought to the Committee.

The Chair thanked the Assistant Chief Fire Officer and Area Manager, Matt Hamer, for their input into the meeting.

Resolved: - That the Committee noted the content of the report.  

The next scheduled meeting of the Committee has been agreed for 10:00 hours on 13 September 2023 in the Main Conference Room, at Lancashire Fire & Rescue Service Headquarters, Fulwood.

Further meetings are:          scheduled for 13 December 2023 and 6 March 2024

                                                proposed for 26 June 2024

The next meeting of the Committee would be held on 13 September 2023 at 10:00 hours in the Main Conference Room at Lancashire Fire and Rescue Service Headquarters, Fulwood.

Further meeting dates were noted for 13 December 2023 and 6 March 2024 and agreed for 26 June 2024.