![](https://emergencyservicestimes.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/ESS-Button-resized.png")
At last year’s Excellence in Fire and Emergency Awards, Tyne and Wear Fire and Rescue Service (TWFRS) picked up two awards. Taking the top prize for service of the year was a huge achievement but the second award, for Exercise Cerberus, recognises some incredible multi agency working that saw emergency services across the North East working over a nine month period to test their readiness for terrorist attack. Chief Fire Officer Peter Heath and Deputy Chief Stewart Nicholson told me all about it.
Like most emergency services, TWFRS has looked at the recommendations from the Manchester Arena Inquiry and worked out its strengths but also identified gaps. It doesn’t work in isolation and with its neighbours in Northumbria Police, North East Ambulance Service as well as bordering fire and rescue services. TWFRS needs to assure itself that when the worst happens, it can work with its neighbours and learn from the tragic events of May 2017 in Manchester where 22 people needlessly lost their lives in a terrorist attack.
While it may be more than eight years since the attack, and services have plans in place, knowing they work is critical and that’s where exercises come in. The bread and butter of the emergency services, exercises allow the individual organisations to test policy and procedure, tactics and strategy and make adjustments, feeding learning back into training.
Armed with funding from the government to test out preparedness for similar incidents, the North East was able to run a large complex exercise and down the line share that learning with the rest of the country.
Stewart Nicholson joined TWFRS in 2023 and took on the North East regional JESIP lead. With the considerable experience of Peter Heath, who is the national lead for JESIP, they are a formidable team and they wanted to test the region’s ability to respond to a mass casualty incident. They wanted to test the scenario from the planning stage, through response, recovery and then debrief and learn from the outcomes. It was, says Stewart, multifaceted, in its approach.
It’s a tall order running a multi-agency exercise through all these phases and it can’t be done in a day. In fact, it took six days but the idea of taking large numbers of personnel away from operational duties to ‘play’ in this exercise for nearly a week just wasn’t practical. So, instead they ran it over an elapsed period of nine months, completing it in November and with the final reports on it imminent.
Interestingly, the scenario was an attack on a football stadium. In a week where sports ground risk assessments have been front page news after the decision to ban fans from the Israeli football team from an Aston Villa match in November ultimately led to the departure of the chief of West Midlands Police, seeing how the emergency services are involved in risk assessment seems remarkably apt.
The scenario is also well timed to test how venues are readying themselves for Martyn’s Law. The change in legislation brought about after the incredible lobbying of Figen Murray, the mother of Martyn who died in the Manchester Arena attach, will come into force in April 2027 and large venues like sports grounds must be ready. It was perfect timing to test the scenario in a football stadium.
Stewart briefly summarises the exercise and how the ‘injects’ from one day lead on to the next day, with the play ‘flexing’ to accommodate learning along the way. The language of exercising is curious and not every partner gets to play all the time. He makes the point about transition through stages and how some of the partners are more involved in some than others, noting the role of the local authority in the recovery stage.
He says that while the main play was the police, fire and ambulance response, the role of the local resilience forums was critical. It’s such a large area in the North East, that there were three LRFS involved but John Heckles from Northumbria LRF has been central to pulling together all the debriefing documents to ensure all the learning is organised and understood.
Peter commends the ‘actors’ playing the role of victims, a combination of amateur actors, members of Casualties Union and trainee paramedics on hand to make the scenario as real as possible.
“It was incredible to watch responders going to people that were screaming the most, as you’d expect. Yes, it took a little bit of time to get order and command fed into the scenario, because it’s human nature to go and help those that need assistance.”
This leads on to a discussion about Ten Second Triage and whether it is in use in TWFRS and other emergency services in the North East. Did it play a role in this exercise? “Absolutely, yes,” says Peter with great enthusiasm. “It’s a recommendation from the Manchester Arena Inquiry.” In his national role as JESIP lead, he has asked every fire and rescue service if they are using it and in his own service. In TWFRS, the coloured bands with P1, P2 and P3 are a permanent fixture on the fire appliances and part of a firefighter’s day to day equipment. “They use it if they’re out, they’ll use it where they need it,” he adds.
Debriefing the exercise is a tall order and involves all the agencies with the addition of Counter Terrorist police given the nature of the scenario. Individual organisations will do their own internal debriefing but for this exercise, the learning goes back to the regional level and into the North East region JESIP group that Stewart chairs. The strategic gap analysis is at the centre of this and the group will be working out if the experience of the exercise means it needs to be updated. “And then we’ll be off testing and exercising again,” muses Stewart, voicing the cyclical nature of resilience.
As we come to the end of our conversation, I ask why the exercise was called Cerberus. Peter explains that Cerberus was a three headed dog in Greek mythology. He pins it on John Heckles, who explained that each head represented one of the three emergency services. Quite what the link is between this exercise and a dog who guards the underworld is anyone’s guess.
