Improvement
The Local Government White Paper Strong And Prosperous Communities fundamentally changed the relationship between central and local government and between local government and local communities. Local government is being given more freedom to shape local services which meet the needs of their local communities and to be more effective at delivering outcomes for their communities by working with local partners.
The Fire & Rescue Service welcomes this freedom to shape services to meet the needs of the diverse communities in south-east England. In return, we are also committed to delivering services which are effective, efficient, and most importantly, improve year on year. In the South-East supporting FRAs to improve is the role of the South East Fire Improvement Partnership. Capacity building funding has been successfully drawn down to build new skills and deliver new ways of working. This is important, as the challenge of the new performance framework for fire & rescue authorities means that more of the same will not deliver the step changes in performance the public expects. Central to the improvement journey is the concept of sector-led support and peer review. The peer review brokering service is an example of how seriously the fire & rescue services in the south east take the concept of helping each other.
Our key projects for 2008/11 are:
- Develop a ‘charter’ for regional activity: This project will seek to deliver and actively support through the programme management function the strategic clustering arrangements which underpin regional activity in the life of the business plan
- Member Development: This project will provide access to training and development opportunities for Members of the Board, to further improve the workings of the Board, and to position the board as the highest performing RMB in the Country. Conferences and seminars will also be made available.
- Officer development: This project will provide access to high-quality training and development opportunities for officers through existing development programmes, linked where possible to the Aspire Leadership model. Further places on the Future Leaders programme will be made available to ensure exposure to other organisations as this can bring new approaches into the sector
- Develop mechanisms to improve the sharing of learning and good practice: This project will seek to provide mechanisms whereby key learning and knowledge can be shared so that it is not lost as key individuals leave the service.
- Support the regional peer review process: This project will seek to extend the use of the peer review brokering service, to ensure that FRAs use the mechanisms currently available to them to manage performance within the sector.
- Succeed in drawing down further funding for improvement activities: This project will ensure that IESE is kept informed of progress by SEFIP to ensure that it passes the year 2 & 3 gateway processes for further funding. We will also continue to lobby to raise the profile of fire & rescue issues with key partners and stakeholders, and investigate opportunities for funding from further sources outside of capacity building funding.
- Improving skills in partnership development: This project will provide appropriate access to training on partnership development skills to ensure FRAs are key partners in future local area agreements (LAAs).
- Policy advice and support: This project will share policy opinions on key issues amongst FRAs to ensure that effort amongst policy practioners is not duplicated
- Supporting and driving performance improvement in FRAs: This project will ensure that FRAs have access to improvement support via capacity building and other mechanisms such as mutual support and peer review to ensure that performance maintains an upward trajectory.
- Improving data risk intelligence: This project will use tools to enable FRAs to better understand and interpret large datasets to better meet the needs of the diverse communities served. Tools such as Mosaic will be employed to target resources to those that need them most.
- Development of a satisfaction survey for South East Fire & Rescue Services: This project will commission, and complete an ongoing programme of public satisfaction assessments across all FRAs and link this data to market segmentation software which will allow targeting of community safety messages to key groups.