Photo: JESIP.
For several years collaboration with the widest range of partners has been identified as important within the public sector to deliver enhanced services to the community. More recently the Policing and Crime Act 2017 introduced a ‘Duty to Collaborate’ with a specific reference to the blue light services. It requires blue light services to keep collaboration at the forefront of their decision making and to keep opportunities to collaborate under constant review with each other.
The Emergency Services Collaboration Working Group (ESCWG) was founded in 2014 and is underpinned by the principle that change should be centrally supported but locally driven. Its vision is that collaboration should be sought in the interests of smarter strategic and operational working with other emergency services.
The ESCWG is central to the blue light collaboration agenda and its goal is to develop a record of all the collaboration across the blue light sectors, which will include agencies and services across England. It’s a chance to celebrate what is being done well and to share notable practice and lessons learnt with other leaders across the sector.
The group’s aim is to produce a live document with examples of collaboration from across the country. It will build this up from data gathered by previous overviews of collaboration and has also launched a questionnaire through which it will gather the latest information and data to form a rich picture of collaboration across England in order to create an emergency services collaboration database to share best practice among the sector.
The group would welcome your support in ensuring that the collaboration leads for your organisation complete a questionnaire for each collaboration project that is in place with one or more other emergency service.
The survey can be accessed here: www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/EmergencyServicesCollaboration
The deadline for responses for the questionnaire is 18 December 2017.
This information will be used by ESCWG to contribute to: sharing knowledge and experience; finding out about enablers and barriers to collaboration; developing a database of example collaboration projects for the sector to use; and providing strategic support and guidance to our emergency services, Ministers and Government departments.
If you have any questions about submitting your information, please email Rebecca Gill, Senior Programme Manager of the ESCWG, on Rebecca.Gill@staffordshirefire.gov.uk
