3 – Response resource in the York area

Proposal

• Change Huntington from a full-time to an On-call fire station, keeping the On-call fire engine and removing the full-time shift fire engine.

If this was to happen we would:

• Redeploy all full-time firefighters from Huntington to other stations or roles, including prevention roles.
• Base a small group of full-time firefighters at the station to increase the availability of the On-call fire engine during the day. Once On-call firefighter availability has improved, the need for a team of full-time firefighters to be based at the station will be reviewed.
• This small group would undertake prevention and protection work in the local area, help recruit more On-call firefighters, and carry out other critical work such as gathering risk information and hydrant maintenance.
• The Aerial Ladder Platform currently based at Huntington will be retained in the York area.

Why are we proposing this?

• The Huntington station area has relatively low combined fire risk and low activity levels. It currently has a full-time shift fire engine and an On-call fire engine. By comparison, York and Acomb station areas have higher levels of risk and activity, but York has one full-time shift fire engine and Acomb has a full-time shift fire engine and an On-call fire engine.
• Of the 7 full-time shift fire engines in the Service, Huntington responds to significantly fewer emergencies. In the last 5 years, Skipton, an On-call station, and Selby, a full-time day-crewed station, responded to more fires in the home than Huntington.
• The Huntington area has one area around New Earswick where the risk of a home fire is higher. There have been few life and property fire incidents in this area over the last 5 years but we would focus our prevention activity in this area to reduce this risk. This area is also close to York and Acomb fire stations.
• The On-call fire engine at Huntington and the full-time shift fire engines at York and Acomb would still provide a good primary emergency response (i.e. the first engine to respond to an incident), across the whole Huntington station area. Over five years of incident data, the average* additional time to respond for the Huntington On-call fire engine compared to the full-time shift fire engine was 3 minutes and 47 seconds. Further emergency response support would continue to be available from Easingwold and Malton.
• The availability of the Huntington On-call fire engine is currently poor, particularly during the day when demand is higher. Daytime availability would improve significantly with the support of full-time firefighters until On-call firefighter availability is improved.
• Without this proposal, we would not be able to achieve proposal 1 to increase prevention and protection resource.