Community Safety
Improving the safety of the communities all fire & rescue authorities serve in the region is a key priority. Through working together effective community safety campaigns can be delivered, as well as a more thorough understanding of the nature of risk and how this impacts on demand.
Our key projects for 2008/11 are:
Promotion of Sprinklers and Water Suppression Systems: we will coordinate efforts to promote the benefits regionally and nationally of fire protection initiatives, particularly sprinkler systems, for both business and domestic premises. We will extend our existing sprinkler strategy focussing on three key areas:
- Domestic and residential properties for occupant life safety
- Large single storey retail buildings for fire-fighter safety
- Community assets, such as school buildings for business continuity
Evaluation of Community Safety Activity: benchmarking is critical if we are to demonstrate our impact. We will facilitate peer review as part of this process and participate fully in providing sound evidence of our impact in partnership activities. This will enable accurate regional comparisons, as well as contributing at national level in demonstrating ‘outcomes’ against our use of resources.
Regulation and the Fire Safety Order: as a region we wish to ensure that our regulatory activity is minimal in impact, while it is also maximised in effectiveness and correctly targeted against risk. To do this we need to ensure we have technical and legal competence alongside proportional risk identification. We will deliver effective regulation and effective enforcement of the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005.
Arson and Fire Investigation: We will ensure that we make the most efficient use of our Fire Investigation resources and expertise across the region. We will expand the role of our Fire Investigation services to include not only causation investigations, but also assessment of building design factors, occupant actions and operational response actions, so that we can better inform our risk profiling.
Reduction of Preventable Incidents: we will work together on strategies to reduce call-outs to preventable incidents, such as lock-outs, lift rescues and incidents involving acetylene cylinders.
Road Safety Promotion: We will examine how we can improve on our engagement with the community on road safety and look to gain further benefit from sharing data across the region to target our resources in the most effective way.
Crown and MOD Premises: We will take a regional approach to implementing collaboration so that large significant risks, such as Military establishments and other Crown estate can be adequately assessed and provided for in individual FRA’s Integrated Risk Management Plans.
Children and Young People: We will seek best practice nationally, and look to evidence the outcomes achieved from these identified initiatives, taking account of the scale of resources being invested by FRAs and partner agencies.
Use of national satisfaction survey data linked to Mosaic to focus community safety activity to key risk groups: we will use a marketing data segmentation tool to conduct analysis and segmentation of the national satisfaction survey results relevant to fire in order to inform community safety activities, both for individual FRAs and on a collaborative basis
Other useful information
- Case studies of innovative practice in Community Safety
- Information on our work to promote sprinklers