Putting culture first is the key to the successful move to a new green HQ

West Yorkshire Fire and Rescue Service is on the move, with a massive new headquarters sitting alongside a revitalised training centre and relocated fire station, Chief Fire Officer John Roberts and his team talk to me about how they delivered this and why culture was at the heart of their approach.

Located in the centre of West Yorkshire, the new fire service HQ hasn’t moved far geographically, but in terms of modern ways of working, it has moved a million miles. John says that the relocation from the old HQ in a Grade II listed building in Birkenshaw, about half an hour south of Leeds, has been on the cards for a long time.

The new HQ is made up of open plan office working space and all the areas that go along with that including a gym, cafe and plenty of meeting rooms. But nestled in right next door is the new training centre, a massive hangar with enough space to park a few fire engines, rig up some line rescue, practice urban search and rescue and soon train in a fake house perfect for prevention, protection and some non-fire based response.

It’s a far cry from the old training facility on site which John says was falling down and when it rained, they needed buckets to catch all the water pouring down inside the flat roofed building. The short time lapse video below shows the development of the site and the huge amount of work involved.

Oh, and there’s a new fire station on site too as nearby Cleckheaton crews will soon relocate to this modern facility, leaving their old site ripe for redevelopment and some much-needed capital receipts because all this development doesn’t come cheap. John says it’s a £31m project and a once in a generation opportunity to set the service up for the long haul as it seeks to meet the needs of its communities and the risks of the modern world.

Evolving culture of the service

John arrived as the new chief of WYFRS in 2017 and found a traditional service with a “them and us” culture. “We needed to move on from that and our working practices needed to move on too. I didn’t want everyone squirrelled away in their own offices.,” he says. The move to a new building offered the chance to remedy all of this.

“The old HQ on this site was the place where you came to get told off. It was known as the ‘big house,’ where the red carpet up the grand staircase led to the chief’s office and by today’s standards, culturally it felt wrong. It didn’t fit in with our plans for moving the service on.”

The open plan office space is a delight, with meeting rooms walls adorned with line art drawings of firefighters at work and in some rooms there is WYFRS logo emblazoned wallpaper as a reminder of where you are – as Station Manager Ant Devine proudly shows below. He led on the HQ development programme over the last three years and is an expert on all aspects of the build. There is even a new lecture theatre, which is comfortable enough to sit for hours and ideal for some fundraising film nights, popcorn in hand.

So far, only a few teams have moved into the building but there is a plan to phase the relocation of staff over the coming months. Staff have been heavily involved in many aspects of the development of the site, so much so, that some have signed the steels used in the construction of the building, in anticipation of sitting at a desk nearby.

It’s a big investment for the fire authority and they have not borrowed to pay the bills, using reserves and investing savings made over many years. The alternative was to “carry on, but limping along,” John recalls. There was also a timely alignment of the service’s command and control system coming to the end of its life, the training centre was in disrepair and the green agenda provided a driver to reduce emissions and meet sustainability goals.

It is a green building with an array of solar panels covering half of the roof of the training centre, air source heat pumps and with a new sub-station on site, the service is reducing its emissions in a big way. Outside there are plenty of EV parking spaces and the potential for more as the infrastructure can easily be scaled up when more staff move over to electric transport.

A healthy building requires healthy practices and John talks about the changes they are making to reduce firefighter exposure to contaminants. And here’s where the fire authority has made an even bigger investment by replacing the whole fleet of fire engines in the space of a year. This massive £20m investment, including 52 new fire appliances from Emergency One, sees the service adopting clean cab principles by getting the BA canisters out of the cab and dirty kit consigned to bags in a huge space at the rear.

The PPE replacement programme that goes along side this investment includes new kit to allow firefighters to have the right kit for the right job: not all incidents require full structural PPE designed for tackling fires in buildings. “It makes far more sense for peoples’ wellbeing and financially in terms of the cost of structural fire kit, if we can give them something else that protects them for the job at hand, than continue to do things just because it’s always been that way.” It’s another example of a cultural shift, he adds.

The development of a new HQ is a huge endeavour for any organisation and hearing about the experience of WYFRS shows how much can be achieved beyond bricks and mortar in terms of improving the culture of the work place, some obvious and others more subtle. Linking it all together to, as John says, provides a solid foundation that should see the organisation through the next forty years.

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