Fire Service Review - A scope for innovation

Fire services in England need to become more ‘effective and efficient’, the recently-published government report found. But before this can happen there must be a change of heart in the way fire services think about technology.

The report issued by Sir Ken Knight in May highlighted an important problem with English fire services. While the lives of citizens and public service servants are undergoing a profound change due to the increased influence of digital and social channels and the infestation of technology in general, fire services remain in the shadow, trapped under the rising costs of service provision and more budget cuts than ever before.

There is no doubt, as Sir Ken pointed out, that fire services need transforming. But how exactly would that transformation happen? What needs to change? Many experts in the field of frontline services, myself included, believe that one way of tackling this problem is creating efficiencies by sharing services.

Those aware of the history of shared services in the Fire services sector will probably frown at that suggestion. After all, the famed FireControl project, based on the concept of shared services, cost taxpayers approximately £500m at the time and was scrapped in the not so recent past to avoid generating even greater losses.

While it was indeed a large failure, the idea of shared services, which gave birth to the project, wasn’t flawed in itself. And there are in fact, fire services who are implementing shared services with successful results - already making savings. For example, Cambridgeshire and Suffolk and Hertfordshire and Lincolnshire have all successfully managed to combine their control rooms through the use of technology, in particular - intelligent voice communications technology, in a shared service programme first of its kind in the UK. In doing so, Cambridgeshire has saved approximately £500,000 and continue making savings now.

So why do more fire services not embrace this type of sharing in the current economic climate? One challenge lies in the fact that front of mind for many fire services is citizen safety. As such, promoting successful shared service case studies, where a fully operational fire service with a merged 999 response centre helped achieve efficiently while maintaining front line services, could be a step towards encouraging more fire services to follow.

Fire services could be saving millions by sharing infrastructure with their neighbours but before that happens there must be change of vision in service provisioning. Fire services will have to become open to the idea of sharing their services – taking note of those who have already made significant savings by doing so in the past and emulating their success.