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Fire and rescue services are a big part of the Local Resilience Forum set up, working closely with partners to plan, prepare and respond to risks. Dave Walton spoke to me about how that works and shares details about preparations for the largest ever national pandemic exercise due to take place this year.
Dave is the Deputy Chief Fire Officer for West Yorkshire Fire and Rescue Service and co-Chair of the Local Resilience Forum. He starts by going back to basics, explaining that the LRF looks at the National Security Risk Assessment and translates it to a local level, with a community risk register focused on their own area. And while the clue is in the name – local – there are risks that appear out of their own area that have an impact, Dave cites the examples of Grenfell Tower fire in 2017 and the Manchester Arena bombing weeks before that.
“There aren’t piles of pounds coming into the public sector right now,” he says with some understatement as he explains how West Yorkshire Fire and Rescue Service and its partners are doing more with less and resources are squeezed, especially when it comes to preparing for something that may never happen.
“The bigger issue on everyone’s minds is the collective resilience of our organisations. No one has the luxury of having a large team ready to go when the worst happens.”
He has a mantra that he often repeats at LRF meetings where he emphasises the need to get a lot of people to do a lot of small tasks, rather than a few taking on a greater burden. He means that disaster response isn’t just for the fire and rescue service or police, it’s for all agencies, big and small. Being ready for a major incident is vital, he cautions. “It’s too easy to put thought and preparation to one side. It will happen and I’m trying to make sure the LRF is as prepared as it can be, through exercising and training.”
This leads nicely on to the government’s national pandemic exercise that has been heavily trailed in and around the recent publication of the updated National Resilience Register and the response to the first part of the Covid Inquiry last year.
The national exercise will allow LRFs to test their structures, processes and responses to a national respiratory pandemic. He says the role of the LRF in this exercise is evolving and as yet unclear. There is a range of possibilities of how it could work, from a paper exercise to full exercise play with the Tactical Coordination Group and Strategic Coordination Group set up.
He explains that there are three phases in exercises, including containment, close down and start up and he’s been asked by the Cabinet Office which phase the West Yorkshire LRF would like to take part in. His guess is that the Cabinet Office will work out from there what it wants from each of the 38 LRFs in England.
At the heart of the exercise is a test of vulnerability. How do the agencies in the LRF ensure that they know who is vulnerable and have in place plans to provide for their needs in advance? And this is where it gets tricky: how do you define vulnerability and how do agencies share information about vulnerable people without falling foul of privacy and data sharing laws?
Dave says that he is looking around at what others are doing. He shares examples of a collective of SW LRFs that has developed a GIS based tool to share data and there’s work going on in South Yorkshire and Lancashire in a similar vein. He is urging his fellow LRF leaders to resist reinventing the wheel and would prefer to see some more direction or at least influence from central government here, particularly when it comes to setting standards for the data collection.
The work he cites here is linked to mapping work being undertaken by Ordnance Survey and developments in 3D mapping that Rob Goldsmith from Devon and Cornwall Police spoke about at last year’s Emergency Services Show.
It all comes back to money again, of course, as he says iy would be good if there was some central funding for this. The ‘mood music’ from the Cabinet Office is promising, agrees Dave, and with the creation of the UK Resilience Academy, the new Resilience Minister, Pat McFadden is showing strong interest in boosting this area of government.
Elsewhere in government, the Deputy Prime Minister recently launched a devolution white paper that could see even more Mayors in place across England. The relationship between combined authority Mayors and the current LRF set up may need rethinking, including a revival of the previous government’s experiment to introduce the role of the Chief Resilience Officer to lead the LRF as a full time job.
HMICFRS is also interested in LRFs and in its response to a consultation on its three year fire inspection programme it confirmed it would be looking for innovative practice by fire and rescue services as they meet their obligations under the 2004 Civil Contingencies Act. Dave welcomes this but acknowledges that a single focused inspection is limited and something multi-agency focused would show the richness of the LRF environment and how local partners work together both in peacetime and during times of crisis.
The resilience space is a fascinating one to be in right now and Dave is immersed in the detail at a local level and contributing at a national level with the National Fire Chiefs Council. We will hear more about the national pandemic exercise over the coming months and it’s clear from talking to Dave that he is looking forward to being part of it.
To learn more about West Yorkshire Fire and Rescue Service, read last weeks’ interview with CFO John Roberts – Putting culture first is the key to the successful move to a new green HQ.
