Response framework
The challenge
The nature and range of emergency incidents we respond to has changed in recent years. However, the expectation of the community remains the same; when emergencies happen, we respond in the most effective and safe way to protect and limit damage to:
- life
- property
- the environment
We need to ensure:
- our staff are competent and our firefighting vehicles available
- we have a clearly defined response standard, based on risk and balanced against the challenges of operating within a large rural county
- our response is resilient to any disruption to service
Effective business continuity planning will be key to this.
The availability of our on-call staff has steadily declined over the last five years. This has had a direct impact on our ability to meet our response times. This is one of our most significant challenges and we will develop strategies to mitigate the impact on our response.
We will continue to be flexible in the way we manage and deal with emergencies, from receiving the call to after the incident. We seek to develop collaborative opportunities in our response to emergencies.
We must ensure we have the right people in the right place to enable us to meet the expectations of our communities.
We will continually evaluate our operational response to ensure it delivers our intended outcomes. Incident monitoring and debriefing will ensure operational learning is captured and shared in the interests of continuous improvement.
Our ambitions
To meet the challenge, we have set the following ambitions:
- we aim to provide the most effective and efficient response to a range of emergencies, both current and emerging, across the county
- we aim to provide a service to our communities that is:
- efficient
- effective
- person-centred
- we aim to provide robust plans to deal with major emergencies and critical events in conjunction with other blue light and wider partners (JESIP)
- we aim to maintain an ability to respond to national emergencies as required
- we aim to ensure we carry out operational activity in a safe and effective manner
- we aim to ensure we have sustainable and effective duty systems to support operational activity
- we aim to continuously improve our response through active learning both locally and nationally (for example Grenfell Tower)