Kent Fire and Rescue Service
Creating a safer future – together: Our delivery plan 2025 to 2029

• Continue to collaborate with appropriate partners, particularly the Environment Agency, to ensure compliance and best practice in managing waste sites.
• Work directly with high-risk waste sites to ensure they are operating safely.
• Maintain a waste fire tactical advisor role within the service. This role sits under national resilience and the NFCC waste group.
• Share intelligence to assist in operational pre-planning.
• Collaborate with the Environment Agency providing specialist advice to support them in developing fire prevention plans and issuing permits.
• Develop the waste fire tactical advisor role through continued professional development (CPD) events and shared learning.
• Regularly reassess response plans for waste sites across Kent and Medway

• Deploy appropriate resources to meet the needs of an incident.
• Respond to hazardous materials incidents in a manner that minimises the impact on life, the environment and infrastructure.
• Support the Environment Agency in enforcement where breaches of permits have been identified because of attendance at incidents.
• Maintain a national resilience role in attending incidents within Kent and other areas to support incident commanders at waste fire incidents.
• Continue to work effectively and efficiently in a collaborative way with other responding agencies utilising Joint Emergency Services Interoperability Principles (JESIP).
• Utilise drone assets for effective situational awareness and to support fire investigation.
• Use operational learning process to gather service-wide and multi-agency learning post incident.
• Report areas of notable practice or learning via national or collaborative bodies.

• Review roles and responsibilities to ensure we are working effectively with partners to reduce risk and deploy effective tactics when fires occur.
• Review firefighting tactics and operational policy to take advantage of the latest firefighting technologies and innovations.
• Review training materials and support for firefighters to reflect new information from battery-related fires, including safety procedures and environmental considerations.
• Ensure fire control colleagues can identify risk critical information and are able to give customers key safety advice to stay safe.
• Carry out research to understand customer awareness of how to safely dispose of batteries.
• Work with partners to develop prevention campaigns to raise awareness of the dangers of improper battery disposal.
• Work in partnership with the Environment Agency and waste management companies to ensure proper handling and sorting of battery products in recycling facilities.
• Partner with local government to promote battery recycling programmes in the community.
• Work with the National Fire Chiefs Council, and charities, such as Electrical Safety First, to encourage manufacturers to design batteries with safer disposal in mind, and with retailers to issue clear instructions on the disposal of electrical products at the point of sale.
• Support the NFCC to lobby government on changes to building regulations to implement stricter regulations on battery disposal and waste site operations, with penalties for non-compliance.
• Collect data on waste site fires to analyse trends and improve future fire response protocols.

Incidents:

• Number of battery related fires at waste sites.
• Time spent in attendance at these incidents.
• Severity of the fire at these incidents.

Community:

• Number of waste sites in Kent and Medway.
• Number of unlicensed waste sites.
• Risk assessment visits to waste sites.

• ID 13 – Transport and utilities: vehicles using alternative fuels.
• Fire Control Programme