Introduction

West Yorkshire Fire and Rescue Service (WYFRS) plays a crucial role in making our communities safer, whether it be preventing and protecting people from fire and other risks or responding to the incidents and emergencies that occur.

Our ambition, Making West Yorkshire Safer, continues to be our focus. Our Community Risk Management Plan (CRMP) ‘Your Fire and Rescue Service 2022-2025’ provides an overview of how we are meeting the demands of our changing society. It outlines our Strategic Priorities, Areas of Focus, and the services we deliver (Prevention, Protection, Response and Resilience). It also details how our we aim to use our resources to manage the risks we face now and in the future within West Yorkshire.

This Safer Communities Response and Resilience Strategy demonstrates how we will achieve our statutory duties, deliver the most effective response to local, regional and national emergencies, provide a suitable level of resilience and ensure the safety of responding firefighters.

Legislation and guidance used when producing this strategy:

  • His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary & Fire & Rescue Services (HMICFRS)
  • Fire and Rescue Framework 2018
  • Fire and Rescue Services Act 2004
  • Civil Contingencies Act 2004
  • National Fire Chiefs Council [NFCC] Position statements
  • Fire Standards

What will this strategy achieve?

We aspire to be the best trained, best equipped and most highly skilled fire and rescue service; able to provide the most effective response to emergencies across West Yorkshire, the Yorkshire and Humber Region and the United Kingdom.

Our Safer Communities Response and Resilience Strategy outlines how we manage the deployment of firefighters, appliances and equipment to provide the highest standard ‘speed and weight’ of response. We refer to this as fire cover.

The West Yorkshire Fire and Rescue Service Community Risk Management Model provides details of the risk which is present across the county. Having the correct speed (the time it takes us to get there) and weight (the number of resources/people we send) of response to risk has a significant impact on fire development, risk to life, property loss and firefighter safety.

We aim to make sure that the speed and weight of our emergency response is proportionate to the level of risk and type of emergency. No two fires are the same, every situation is different, and these differences can have a significant effect on the severity of the fire. However, for the purpose of planning, some generalisations have to be made and these have been based on information, evidence and data along with professional judgement and experience

How we will achieve this strategy - To achieve success we will concentrate on four key strands:

Operational effectiveness
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We will:

  • Learn from partner organisations and emergencies to be innovative in our emergency preparedness, utilising technology and developing new ways of working.
  • Use a shared, intelligence-led approach to all foreseeable fire and rescue related risks that could affect our communities.
  • Maintain a ‘foreseeable risk register’, to manage risk within West Yorkshire. This will be based on information and intelligence gathered locally, regionally, nationally and internationally.
  • Anticipate, plan and prepare to prevent and reduce foreseeable risk either through adjusting existing provision via effective collaboration and partnership working, or introducing new capabilities.
  • Have suitable policies, procedures and guidance in place underpinned by National Operational Guidance and the Fire Standards.
  • Be professional, ensuring our staff are informed, confident and skilled to deliver a high quality service.
  • Effectively share inter-agency data and intelligence to ensure the risk and resilience needs are accurate, effective and efficient.
  • Target our resources towards the highest risks that could impact on our staff or the communities we serve. We will ensure that these resources are used effectively and efficiently and achieve best value.
Command and control
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We will:

  • Ensure all operational commanders are competent to command the emergencies they attend.
  • Improve the resources used to command and control at emergencies.
  • Ensure we have command skills available to respond to all emergencies likely to occur.
  • Provide a new, resilient mobilising system and state of the art control room.
Training and exercising
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We will:

  • Learn from our experiences and actively seek feedback from our staff, partners and the people of West Yorkshire, and use it to improve our service. We will evaluate what we do to understand the effectiveness of our services.
  • Gather and share data, hazard and risk information with regards to high-risk premises and scenarios with local partners via the Local Resilience Forum (West Yorkshire Prepared, westyorkshireprepared.org.uk) and nationally via the National Operational Learning and Joint Organisational Learning portals.
  • Undertake risk visits to ensure operational crews have access to up-to-date risk information to inform firefighting tactics and reduce risk to members of staff and our community.
  • Undertake multi-agency training and exercising to test and validate emergency plans.
  • Train on local risks to improve the effectiveness of the initial responders.
Business continuity
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We will:

  • Collaborate with other fire and rescue services to deliver intra-operability (between fire and rescue services) and inter-operability (with other responders such as other emergency services and Local Resilience Forum partners) in line with the Joint Emergency Services Interoperability Principles (JESIP).
  • Provide specialist trained and qualified National Inter-Agency Liaison Officer (NILO) who can advise and support Incident Commanders, Police, Medical, Military, other Partner and Government agencies on the operational capacity and capability to reduce risk and safely resolve incidents.
  • Produce, where necessary, robust single and multi-agency plans for managing risks that have been identified.
  • Review and update resource-sharing agreements with regional Fire and Rescue Services to make sure specialist resources and skills are available.
  • Continue to support regional reinforcement schemes to provide and access support for the most serious emergencies.
  • Continue to provide an effective response from the national resilience assets we host, which include:
  1. Chemical, Biological, Radiological, Nuclear, & Explosive CBRN(E) (including Detection, Identification & Monitoring (DIM) & Mass Decontamination)
  2. Urban Search & Rescue (USAR)
  3. High Volume Pumps (HVP)
  4. Enhanced Logistics Support (ELS)
  5. Water Rescue
  6. Marauding Terrorist Attack (MTA)

What we will deliver

Delivering this strategy will contribute to our ambition of ‘Making West Yorkshire Safer’.

We will use the Risk Based Planning Assumptions detailed in the Community Risk Management Model and operational planning assumptions outlined in the Fire Cover Policy to determine the number and location of the resources we have available at any time.

We will apply staffing models that are proportionate to the risks within a particular area consistently across West Yorkshire.

By using national guidance, debriefing after emergencies and undertaking risk assessments, we will be able to provide an effective and pre-determined operational response to differing emergencies.

The firefighters and support staff who respond and support the response to emergencies will be highly skilled, well equipped, competent and confident to deal with all situations they may face.

Response and resilience arrangements work alongside prevention and protection activities to keep our communities safe.

Partnership working – Who will we work with

Collaboration, partnership working, sharing of information and the joint testing of emergency preparedness are vital components of this strategy. We are an active member of the Local Resilience Forum which allows us to deliver our statutory duties and maintain strong partnerships with local authorities, blue light responders, other category one and two responders and the third sector. Working collaboratively, we will:

  • Assess the risk of emergencies occurring, put in place emergency plans and share risk information and intelligence to reduce risks to staff and the community.
  • Evaluate and report on incident/exercises/operations to ensure shared learning and improvement of future planning or response.
  • Improve efficiency and effectiveness in response and resilience with suitable business continuity arrangements.
  • Identify shared service opportunities.
  • Improve relationships and multi-agency working between partners.

Our specialist teams and officers such as Emergency Planning, Control of Major Accident Hazards (COMAH) team, National Resilience and Counter Terrorism, provide links into and out of key partner organisations to ensure, where necessary, we can share information in a timely and accurate manner.

As part of the Yorkshire and Humber Region we will continue to contribute to our joint resilience by maintaining Memorandums of Understanding with our neighbouring fire and rescue services to provide specialist assets, officers and additional fire engines where necessary.

To build on the resilience within our mobilising function we will work with Cambridgeshire and Suffolk Fire and Rescue services to provide support during periods of high demand.

At a district level we are fully integrated with Community Safety Partnerships. As a statutory member of this group, we will plan and exercise our response to local risk and promote community wellbeing.

How will we measure success?

We will monitor our overall service performance through a set of key performance indicators that are reported to Members of the Fire Authority.

These outputs, metrics and indicators include information such as the number and location of incidents attended, firefighter attacks, injuries to staff and the number of risk visits completed.

The Senior Operations Team will evaluate attendance at incidents to drive improvement and develop the Foreseeable Risk Register.

The Fire Cover Review Group (FCRG) will monitor emerging trends against our planning assumptions and where necessary, manage under performance and learn from good practice.

Realtime learning will be gathered by an operational assurance officer who will be mobilised to emergencies to review the effectiveness of policy, procedures and ways of working.

We will debrief incidents to capture and share learning and integrate this within updated policy, guidance and training.