South East Fire Improvement Partnership

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Work areas

• Community safety
• Response & resilience
• Improvement
• Training and HR
• Equality & diversity
• Environment
• Procurement
• Media and communications
• Regional Control Centre & FireLink
• Other regional working
• Health and safety

User area

• SEFIP extranet

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:

• Supporting and driving performance improvement in FRAs: This project will ensure that FRAs have access to improvement support via improvement & efficiency and other mechanisms such as mutual support and peer review to ensure that performance maintains an upward trajectory.
• Member Development: This project will provide access to high-quality training and development opportunities for Members of the RMB, 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 through this route.
• 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: Knowledge loss is a key issue for fire & rescue authorities. This project will seek to provide mechanisms whereby key learning and knowledge can be shared so that it is not lost as individuals leave the service.
• Support the regional peer review process: Peer review is a critical function as set out in the local government white paper and the likely direction of the revised Operational Assessment of Service Delivery toolkit. 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. It will also provide support in the development of implementation plans arising from reviews to ensue that change is embedded subsequent to reviews.
• Succeed in drawing down further funding for improvement activities: This project will ensure that the Regional Improvement and Efficiency Board is kept informed of progress by SEFIP to ensure that it passes the year 2 & 3 gateway processes for further CBF. We will also continue to lobby to raise the profile of FRS issues with key partners and stakeholders.
• Improving skills in partnership development: Fire and Rescue Authorities need to continue to work with local partners to identify targets, including fire targets where appropriate, that are priorities within the local area and offer appropriate contributions (time and resource) to meet those targets. To do this effectively we will need to evaluate the effectiveness of partnership arrangements, sharing evidence where appropriate, as well as leading and influencing key partners where we can. This project will provide appropriate access to training on partnership development skills to ensure the future viability of FRAs as key partners in LAAs
• Policy advice and support: This project will share policy opinions on key issues amongst FRAs to ensure that effort amongst policy practitioners is not duplicated.
• Improving data risk intelligence: HFRA project: 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: Following the deletion of the Best Value indicator for public satisfaction, only one question on satisfaction with FRAs will be asked on the place survey under CAA. 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.
• Improving the utility of the After the Incident Survey.