1 – Improving our prevention and protection work
Permanently increase the specialist staff in our prevention and protection departments and increase prevention and protection activities across the Service.
Proposal
- Permanently expand our prevention and protection departments, including the introduction of additional specialist roles.
- Increase the use of On-call firefighters to deliver more prevention activity in our rural areas.
- Develop the multi-agency Public Safety Service across the Service area in conjunction with partners.
Why are we proposing this?
- If we have to respond to an emergency, harm has already happened. Our ambition is to prevent emergencies from happening in the first place.
- We aim to prioritise and increase the amount of prevention work we do to reduce the risk of harmful fire, road and water emergencies in our area.
- Our proposals will increase prevention expertise to support the delivery of our services and our ability to direct our prevention activity to where it is needed the most.
- Recent investment to expand our protection team is funded by a one-off grant from the Government. We want to make these staffing levels permanent and sustainable.
- We need to increase our prevention and protection capability in our rural areas. Currently, most of our prevention and protection activity is delivered by full-time firefighters, mainly in the more urban areas because that is where our full-time fire stations are located.
- The positive value of the Public Safety Service delivering multi-agency prevention work is being demonstrated in Craven by the work of the Public Safety Officers.