This year’s proposals

Helping you in times of need – our approach to flexible resourcing

We are always here, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, helping our customers in times of need. If you need to call 999, we will be there as quickly as possible. For example, on more than 70% of occasions last year, we had a crew of firefighters with a customer within 10 minutes of leaving the fire station following a 999 call. We successfully dealt with all incidents we attended, with highly trained firefighters who understood the needs of our customers. We constantly monitor the quality of the service we give customers and invite other agencies to assess our customer service, such as the Institute of Customer Service.

We have trained and available firefighters in locations spread around Kent and Medway, with the right skills, training, and equipment to help you when we arrive. This includes on-call fire fighters, who live or work close to fire stations, providing important services in their local communities.

We train every day to deal with the types of incident we might expect to attend most frequently, as well as for more complex incidents which need a number of fire engines and specialist equipment and specially trained firefighters to deal with.

We have an operating model of how many fire engines we need day to day to meet what is reasonably likely to happen across Kent and Medway. Currently this maximum number is 50. This doesn’t mean we need every fire engine we have available to us on duty all the time.

Using your money wisely means we balance and flex our resources up and down, and have for many years.

How it works

Most days we have between 32 and 44 fire engines available at any one time. We have 26 fire engines immediately available, during the day, every day¹. The remainder we need come from a number of on-call fire engines. These are mostly based in more rural areas of Kent and Medway.

On occasions we will have a surge in demand, with incidents like flooding, large fires in complex buildings, or field fires. These need a lot of our resources while that incident is dealt with, and we will bring back into service more fire engines as experience has shown we can quickly get additional fire engines available to us if we need to, using an approach called recall to duty. This is why we aim for 50 fires engines overall so we have enough additional skilled people who can be called to the incident, once the initial response has been made. Over the past five years we have used this second line of response many times and always resourced the incident.

With this ability to bring more in should we need to, it’s a more efficient way of providing our response to our customers and makes the best use of the funding you, our customers, give us via the Council Tax.

¹At night, this drops to 15, as 9 fire stations use the day-crewing duty system where firefighters respond from home overnight, adding around five minutes to our attendance time as they travel to the fire station.

How we ensure we have resources when we need them

Minute by minute monitoring of all our resources is done by our 999 call handling team who move fire engines and firefighters around Kent and Medway all the time to meet current customer need. The science and professional judgement based on the layered experience of our 999 call handling team underneath those decisions is explained here.

Informing how many fire engines we have available at any one time is based on defined factors, shown in our planning assumptions, which we have reviewed for this Plan.

Our planning assumptions

We keep striving to know as much as possible about the customers we serve, and the communities they live in. This is also part of our equality of access work as we look at the very different needs people have.
We look at our data on incidents we have attended in the past (historic demand)
We will look constantly at what is happening in real time across Kent and Medway to see if our resources are being stretched (current demand).
We want the first fire engine to arrive at all incidents as quickly as possible at all times of day and night. This supports our approach to flexible resourcing as when the first firefighters arrive, they will quickly judge what other resources are needed and work with our 999 call handling team to get the right number of fire engines and specialist resources on the way to you.
At incidents that need more than one fire engine, we want the time difference between the first and second fire engines arriving to be as small as possible.
We want to always be prepared for a significant number of small incidents spread across Kent and Medway, involving one or two fire engines.

All our data since 2015 suggests a large number of small incidents is the main threat to the availability of fire engines for further incidents, and how quickly we can therefore respond. We used to plan for two significant incidents occurring at the same time in different parts of Kent and Medway. By “significant” we mean an incident which requires between six to ten fire engines to resolve it. In reality although we have significant incidents, it is unusual for two of them to occur at the same time.

Better availability of on-call fire engines would help us

We rely on on-call firefighters to give us the total number of fire engines we want for our flexible resourcing model. They are a critical part of the team keeping our customers safe.

Over the last few years it has become much harder to get on-call fire engines at all times of day and night. This is because people tend to commute for work each day, and it seems to be becoming harder for employers to release people to be on-call firefighters when they are at work. We have made some changes, such as accepting applications from people that live slightly further away from the fire station than we would usually like. We recognise employers that release their staff to be on-call firefighters at our annual awards ceremony.

And on-call fire engines have provided an important resource for longer incidents when those firefighters that initially respond need to be refreshed with new firefighters. We have also run concerted recruitment campaigns for on-call firefighters across Kent and Medway.

During the early stages of the pandemic, when many workers were furloughed, we saw the availability of on-call fire engines increase significantly, as shown in the spike in Graph 1. But this has now returned to what has become more standard levels of between six to 10 on- call fire engines being available to deploy at any given time, and sometimes fewer than that, especially during the day and at weekends. This gives us a gap at times between what we would like, and what we can currently achieve.

Graph 1: current and historic total availability of fire engines

We will now look at all the further options we can to improve the availability of on-call fire engines. For example we have recently agreed that we will cover loss of earnings whilst people are training to become on-call firefighters with us, or training to take on specialist roles like driving. We will continue to look at how we can recruit more on-call firefighters to increase our coverage, and better support them once recruited. We will look again at our expectations of on-call firefighters, and whether we expect too much from them in terms of a time commitment for training. And we will look at making systems more accessible to everyone that works for us, using their own mobile phones and tablet devices so they can, for example, access training at times that works for them.

We will do a large review of fire cover, which we do periodically, called a review of emergency response. This will look at a range of options. Due to the pandemic, we have decided to defer starting this work until October 2022 so we can assess how the pandemic has impacted people’s working lives.