Wakefield District
The district covers some 219 square miles and is home to 315,000 people in a diverse range of city, urban and rural communities.
Since the demise of the coal mining industry, the district has become the base for a number of distribution and manufacturing companies.
The fire and rescue service is a key partner on a number of groups in the district, with focus on arson reduction, youth inclusion (such as the Young Firefighters scheme, which started in Wakefield) fire safety enforcement, and road traffic collision reduction.
"The people of Wakefield can be assured that during the response phase of the Covid -19 emergency we continued to provide services to our communities in terms of incident response with the virus having very little impact to our operational resources. We have changed our ways of working to ensure we keep our staff and those that they have contact with in the community safe, but we are still delivering prevention and fire safety services; albeit in a different manner. We worked collaboratively with a number of partner agencies during the crisis to provide other services that we don’t normally carry out, such as food and medicine deliveries, driving NHS staff and other work to help the most vulnerable in our society. During the recovery phase we will continue to work with others to strive to make the district a safer place to live and work."
District Commander, Lee Miller
To achieve our ambition we will:
- Focus on risk and vulnerability
- Be part of our communities
- Work in partnership
- Be at our best and strive to improve
- Make a positive difference in everything we do
- Promote diversity and create an inclusive workplace
What’s happening in Wakefield district…
To give you an insight to how we work within your area:
A District Command team led by the District Commander are responsible for the delivery of an efficient and effective service for the Wakefield community.
We are pleased with the significant reductions in all incident types over the past year and our performance indicators are very positive; we met our three year targets in all areas. We our proud of our achievements, but will not be complacent, we will continue to reduce the most serious and impactful issues for our community.
Our ambition is to “Make Wakefield District Safer” and the team will work in collaboration to understand the challenges and changing risks that face our communities and those most vulnerable within our society.
Through our Operational Risk Visit and Building Risk Review programmes we will promote and enforce the fire safety measures required by law to ensure that building and occupants are protected. These programmes will also generate risk information to help keep our firefighters safe.
We will ensure that our firefighters are highly trained, and are ready to respond to fires and other emergencies in an effective and professional manner. Health and Wellbeing of all our staff will be integral to our priorities. In addition, we will ensure that we are resilient when responding to major incidents within the district by sharing operational risk information and response plans with neighbouring districts and other fire and rescue services.