Agenda and minutes

Apologies were received from County Councillor David O’Toole and Councillors Graham Baker and Zamir Khan.

Vice-Chair Margaret Pattison chaired the meeting as the Chair had been delayed.

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.

None received.

Resolved: That the Minutes of the last meeting held on 3 July 2024 be confirmed as a correct record and signed by the Chair.

The Director of People and Development (DoPD) presented the report. The report was one of the ways the service demonstrated its compliance with the Equality Duty, which was created under the Equality Act 2010. The report supported the delivery of Lancashire Fire and Rescue Service’s (LFRS’s) People Strategy.

Key areas covered within the report included;

Accessibility

LFRS Corporate Communications Department ensured that information was made available in a variety of formats and using multiple channels to best reach Lancashire’s diverse communities. 

During 2023-24, the service published a new website that was compliant with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines version 2.2 AA standard, which was an internationally recognised set of recommendations for improving web accessibility by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

Fire safety advice was available in 26 additional languages on the website to make the information more accessible to people whose first language was not English. In addition, a series of fire safety videos were available in British Sign Language.

All videos were produced with subtitles, including public safety videos from emergency incidents.

The Corporate Communications Department actively supported the prevention work of LFRS working with prevention, community fire safety, and operational teams. A campaign planning process was in place for the effective planning, delivery, and evaluation of prevention campaigns.

Recruitment and Selection

LFRS continued its journey to improve the diversity of the workforce to ensure that it represented the community it served. Positive action was delivered to attract a diversity of candidates to fill the Wholetime firefighter apprenticeship courses. The service had taken an integrated approach in relation to delivering positive action and promoting LFRS as an employer of choice; colleagues from human resources, prevention and operational staff worked together to deliver attraction events supported by other colleagues from the service’s employee voice groups. Eight “Have a Go” events were delivered by project members, at various stations and at our Leadership and Development Centre.

The events were supported by Corporate Communications who delivered an integrated targeted social media campaign utilising Facebook ‘Events’ and Instagram Posts, and Twitter ‘Tweets’ were also utilised to reach almost 1,200,000 people. Social media was targeted at under-represented groups of people. 

Wholetime firefighter applications opened on 7 August 2023 and closed on 16 August 2023 with 956 valid applications received. Of the 956 who applied the demographic profile of applicants was as follows:

The outcome further to a robust recruitment process was as follows:

Firefighter Apprenticeships

LFRS was an employer provider of firefighter operational apprenticeships. As at 31 March 2024 the Service had 88 firefighter apprentices who had all successfully completed their end point assessment. Of the 88 passes, 8 gained distinctions. In addition to those, the  ...  view the full minutes text for item 19/24

Councillor Sean Serridge joined the meeting.

The Director of Corporate Services (DoCS) advised that this report set out the current budget position in respect of the 2024/25 revenue and capital budgets.

Revenue Budget

Lancashire Fire and Rescue Service’s 2024/5 revenue budget was set at £74.149m. The budget profiled to the end of May 2024 was £25.307m and expenditure for the same period was £25.172m, resulting in a year-to-date underspend of £0.129m.

The overall underspend position was further broken down between pay and non-pay budgets; there was an underspend of £0.209 on pay and a £0.080m overspend on non-pay activities.

Adjustments had been made to the forecasts to reflect known changes, but in headline terms the forecast for the year was a small overspend of £0.173m, which was 0.2% of the net budget.

The year-to-date and forecast positions within all departmental budgets were set out in Appendix 1, with the major variances of note shown separately in the table below.

Future Pressures

Green book pay award negotiations were ongoing and were budgeted at 3%. Unison had put the current offer of a flat £1290 pay increase to ballot for industrial action among its members. Current pay projections used the 3% budgeted rate.

Additionally, the employer’s contribution rate to the 2015 Firefighters’ pension scheme as determined by the scheme actuary was increased from 28.8% to 37.6%. Additional grant funding was assumed to offset this pressure.

Capital Budget

The revised Capital Programme for 2024/25 approved by the Resources Committee was £12m. To date £0.984m had been spent predominantly on operational equipment for cutting and extraction. A summary of the programme was set out in Appendix 2.

A summary of the programme is set out below: -

The next scheduled meeting of the Committee has been agreed for 10:00 hours on Wednesday 27 November 2024 in the Main Conference Room, at Lancashire Fire & Rescue Service Headquarters, Fulwood.

Further meetings are:          scheduled for Wednesday 26 March 25

                                                proposed for  Wednesday 02 July 25

The next meeting of the Committee would be held on Wednesday 27 November 2024 at 1000 hours in the Main Conference Room at Lancashire Fire and Rescue Service Headquarters, Fulwood.

Further meeting dates were noted for 26 March 2025 and 2 July 2025.

The Committee is asked to consider whether, under Section 100A(4) of the Local Government Act 1972, they consider that the public should be excluded from the meeting during consideration of the following items of business on the grounds that there would be a likely disclosure of exempt information as defined in the appropriate paragraph of Part 1 of Schedule 12A to the Local Government Act 1972, indicated under the heading to the item.

Resolved: That the press and members of the public be excluded from the meeting during consideration of the following items of business on the grounds that there would be a likely disclosure of exempt information as defined in the appropriate paragraph of Part 1 of Schedule 12A to the Local Government Act 1972, indicated under the heading to the item.

(Paragraphs 4 & 5)

(Paragraphs 4 and 5)

Members considered a report that provided an update on the various issues which had arisen in respect of the changes to the pension schemes applying to the uniformed members of the Fire Sector.

Resolved: That the report be noted.

(Paragraph 3)

(Paragraph 3)

Members considered a report that provided an update on all contracts for one-off purchases valued in excess of £100,000 and high value procurement projects in excess of £100,000 including: new contract awards, progress of ongoing projects and details of new projects.

Resolved:  That the Committee noted and endorsed the report.