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Previously known as the Public Safety Plan (PSP), this document reflects on the progress we have made over the past five years and looks ahead to the future. It not only identifies upcoming risks, opportunities and challenges, but also reflects what you, the community, have told us is important.
Since we published our PSP in 2020, there have been significant changes locally and globally. The increase in wildfires during the Summer of 2022 showed how important it is for us to be able to respond quickly when there’s a high demand for our help.
We do more than just fight fires. For example, when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, we changed how we work and the services we offered. Our staff helped to help set up vaccination centres and supported our health partners as they delivered vaccines across Buckinghamshire and Milton Keynes.
A large part of our day-to-day job is also about working with the community and partners to help prevent fires from happening in the first place.
Although our financial situation remains challenging, it’s better than it was at the start of the last PSP in 2020. By managing our money carefully and having some flexibility in how much we can ask for from Council Tax payers (for two of the last five years), we’ve been able to take on more staff to keep you safe. Right now, in Buckinghamshire Fire & Rescue Service (BFRS), we have more firefighters than we have had in the last ten years.
As a sector, the fire and rescue service (FRS) continues to focus on cultural transformation, reflecting on how we work and treat each other. At BFRS, we’ve set a clear expectation for ourselves: we won’t get defensive or ignore problems with our culture. We want everyone in our team to feel safe, supported and valued and to create a welcoming, engaging and inclusive place to work.
We’ve recently made a promise to the public along with committing to new values and setting out core behaviours for our staff. We’ll make sure that everything we do reflects these so we can give the best service possible to our community.
As a professional, modern and agile FRS, we’re ready to face the challenges ahead and be ambitious in striving for excellence to serve you, our community.
The CRMP is a high-level strategic document used to inform more specific actions in supporting plans, which will include our Annual Delivery Plan, as well as dedicated station and team plans.
Each plan will outline the key interdependencies and how directorate leads, and their teams, plan to manage and monitor cross-departmental objectives.
In developing our CRMP, it was crucial for us to review the progress made since we published our PSP in 2020. Further details are available on pages 10 to 15.
Each FRS holds and has access to a wide range of data which it uses to help understand, plan for and respond to community risk.
A summary of the resources available to us can be seen in the CRMP Overview on page 6. The term ‘resources’ includes people, skills, money, buildings, infrastructure, equipment and data.
Change is constant and our CRMP must evolve and adapt throughout its lifetime.
The diagram below illustrates the process of building and reviewing our CRMP:
Our promise to the public, values and behaviours are fundamental to everything that we do. These are outlined on pages 16 to 17.
We serve over 800,000 people across diverse rural and city settings which includes the River Thames, the M1, M25 and M40 motorways, as well as rail infrastructure. This demands the expertise of nearly 500 highly skilled firefighters and support teams.
Source: HMICFRS
We currently operate 19 fire stations across our community, housing 30 fire engines (known as pumps) along with a range of specialist and support vehicles. We also host 1 of the 19 Urban Search and Rescue (USAR) teams that are strategically located across England.
Our pumps are deployed to meet daily demands and provide resilience and capacity to handle occasional large-scale incidents or multiple, smaller incidents simultaneously. More insight into demand and use of our pumps can be found on pages 20 to 24.
We place our community and staff at the forefront of all our operations and so consultation with both these groups plays an integral role in shaping our CRMP.
Following consultation we will be implementing two new proposals: redefining our response standard and reviewing the number of pumps during the lifetime of the CRMP. Further details on these proposals can be found on pages 56 to 65.
Details of our initial consultations can be found on pages 29 to 31 and information on how to participate in planned consultations are provided on page 63.
Map A displays our fire station locations and pump types.
Map A, Location of Stations, Pumps and Specialist Vehicles and Boats
Many of the incidents we attend are triggered by automatic fire alarms (AFAs). Research indicates that the vast majority of these (99%) turn out to be false alarms.
We committed to review our response to AFAs in our 2020–2025 PSP.
When not responding to incidents, station-based staff may be delivering home fire safety checks to those most at risk of fire and other emergencies, to proactively mitigate domestic dwelling fires.
At other times they may be conducting site-specific risk inspections. These enhance the protection we give to business premises by identifying and dealing with specific risks relating to each site.
To ensure that firefighter time is used effectively and productively across the three objectives data will be collected. This will help inform decision making linked to the mitigation of identified risks.
The risks that we face are constantly evolving. Many factors contribute to this, including climate change, new construction, updated legislation and the emergence of new technologies, such as lithium-ion batteries (commonly used in electric vehicles, e-scooters and e-bikes). More information on these emerging risks can be found on pages 23 to 28.
After evaluating the available evidence, we developed an approach to these risks.
Our approach is divided into three objectives (what we want to do) and three enablers (the people, assets and IT/data) that support delivery of the objectives. Each objective and enabler has a corresponding strategy outlined in detail on pages 34 to 52.
To measure the success of these strategies, we will monitor key performance indicators throughout the lifespan of the CRMP. Detailed information on these performance indicators is available on pages 53 to 55.
It is essential that the three main functional areas of prevention, protection and response work together to ensure the achievement of all three of the objectives set out in our CRMP. Priorities across all three objectives will be detailed further in each station plan.
Progress on specific projects and initiatives outlined in the 2020–2025 PSP are reported to the Fire Authority during the annual review and refresh of the Service’s five-year Corporate Plan.
A more detailed evaluation on progress will be carried out after the PSP timeframe ends in March 2025 and the CRMP (2025–2030) timeframe begins.
Underpinning our promise and our values are a set of core behaviours that clearly define what it means to work for us at BFRS. We believe these behaviours encourage a healthy workplace culture that values compassion, integrity and respect.
We create a welcoming, engaging and inclusive place to work, which inspires pride in our people. This is achieved through open and transparent communication, where everyone working within the Service feels safe and confident to offer ideas, feedback and speak up when things aren’t right.
The combination of our promise, values and behaviours set the direction for how we deliver the culture we want to see within our Service, empowering our staff to make the right decisions over the lifetime of this CRMP, and into the future.
We have used a wide range of evidence to build a risk profile, which we have validated with our own operational data.
The following is a summary of our more detailed Evidence Base Document which analyses the full range of evidence available.
We aim to match resources with the combination of likelihood and consequences of hazardous events.
The inputs into our CRMP risk assessment are:
To understand the demand on our resources, we’ve looked at how often we need to use our pumps to respond to emergencies in Buckinghamshire and Milton Keynes (our response area).
This analysis involves counting how many pumps are being used for emergency response, at any point, anywhere in our response area and includes those from neighbouring Services.
Graph A shows that having 12 pumps available covers 99.7% of our demand. A simple way to look at this is 12 pumps would cover our demand for 364 days of an average year.
This is only part of the picture
We also consider when (what time) our pumps are needed.
Graph B shows how the number of pumps needed is not spread evenly across the day and night.
Our data tells us the majority of our simultaneous demand, over 99%, can be handled with 10 pumps or fewer. However, there are occasions where a larger number of pumps are needed.
The maximum number of pumps required at any given time was less than 20. Summer 2022 was an exception when the peak of wildfires required the response of nearly 40 pumps.
This underscores the importance of being able to rapidly increase our resources to meet demand, as well as the support provided by neighbouring services during periods of heightened demand.
How we calculate support from neighbouring FRS
All our modelling considers the availability of resources from neighbouring FRS when we need them. Given the geography of our area, there are some locations where neighbouring Services can arrive quicker than us, even with all our pumps available.
We also have some areas where the pumps of neighbouring Services can reach more quickly, if our closest On-Call pump is not available.
Map B shows locations where neighbouring Service pumps could be called to attend an incident first.
You can find all the risks we’ve identified, in detail, in the supporting Evidence Base Document. The following summary highlights some of the key evidence and explains how we use it.
Deprivation
The Index of Multiple Deprivation (IMD) calculates levels of deprivation across England. It’s important to note that IMD isn’t solely about financial deprivation; it considers various aspects, including education, health and crime.
The link between higher levels of deprivation and an increased risk of fire is evident in the data. Over the past 5 years, households in the most deprived areas experienced around 3 times more fires, proportionally, compared to those in the least deprived areas. This can be seen in Map C.
Maps D and E show our estimated response times and population density across our response area.
We also use this information to target our home fire safety initiatives and other prevention efforts towards those individuals and areas most at risk from fire.
We recognise the increasing impact of climate change which heightens the risk of weather related events, such as flooding and wildfires. We can accurately model areas most susceptible to flooding to help us ensure our specialist resources are best placed to respond effectively.
Map F shows flood zones 2 (1% annual probability of flooding from rivers) and flood zones 3 (higher than 1% chance from rivers) in our response area.
Given the unpredictable nature of wildfires which could occur almost anywhere within our response area, we maintain a wide range of capabilities. This may require the increased use of smaller, more specialised vehicles that can easily travel off-road and tackle the fires before they have spread too far.
We have used the PESTELO analysis framework to evaluate external factors impacting on our operations. The supporting Evidence Base Document details the full range of emerging risks that we have analysed as part of the CRMP preparation work.
Table B summarises our risks, issues and opportunities which are more likely or almost certain to happen and would result in severe, major or significant impacts to our Service.
The likelihood indicates to what extent an emerging risk, issue or opportunity is likely to affect our Service. This is sorted into:
The consequence indicates to us how serious the impact would be if the event did happen.
While the exact impacts depend on the event, they could include:
These sessions were held with a diverse group of residents living in our response area and our staff.
These consultations aimed to explore:
The risks identified by the public and our staff have been included in our risk analysis. More details can be found in our Evidence Base Document (PESTELO and Chronic/Local Risks analysis).
When asked about ideas for improving the resilience and capacity of the Service, participants were asked to rank a number of options in preference order.
The public ranked the options in the following order (most preferred as option 1 to least preferred as option 4):
Our staff ranked the options in the following order (most preferred as option 1 to least preferred as option 4):
When we asked about how we should respond to AFAs given the large number that turn out to be false alarm activations, the public opinion was divided between keeping the existing policy and changing.
In contrast, 83% of our staff who participated in the consultation favoured one of the reduced response options.
Again, participants were asked to rank a number of options in preference order. The public and staff participant responses were separated, however both gave the same order of preference.
The options were ranked in the following order (most preferred as option 1 to least preferred as option 4):
These consultation results were considered when preparing the policy trialled. Details can be found on pages 62 to 65.
Annual delivery plans will be created to support the CRMP objectives and enablers. Community feedback, quality assurance outcomes and evaluation of actions taken will all contribute to the evolution of these plans throughout the 5 year period of the CRMP.
Our commitment extends beyond paper; we actively engage with the local community, ensuring our strategies remain dynamic, responsive and in line with our shared vision for a safer, healthier future.
Updates on progress against our objectives and enablers will be presented at least annually.
For more details on how to keep up to date please refer to our Communication and Consultation section on page 63.
Objective – something we plan to do to reduce the risk to the community.
Enabler – what we use to help deliver our objectives, e.g. people, physical assets, money, data, technology.
Here’s a brief overview of what you’ll discover on pages 34 to 51:
Pages 52 to 55 outlines how we plan to monitor and measure progress against each strategy.
To achieve this, we work closely with our partners to identify, safeguard and support those most at risk. Together, through community engagement and education, we aim to create a safer and more resilient environment for everyone.
Fire safety legislation applies to around 30,000 buildings within Buckinghamshire and Milton Keynes. We are committed to providing fire safety education to those responsible for keeping these buildings safe and, where required, taking proportionate and robust intervention.
To achieve this, we will deliver efficient and effective protection activity ensuring our services are accessible to all members of the community.
To achieve this, we will ensure operational preparedness by maintaining a highly trained and well-equipped workforce, ready to respond safely and effectively to all incidents. We will work collaboratively with local, regional and National Resilience Capabilities to enhance our operational response.
When not attending emergencies, our firefighters will support prevention and protection efforts by delivering home fire safety visits to those most at risk and conduct site-specific risk inspections to improve business safety.
We will also monitor resource utilisation to maximise effectiveness and efficiencies, ensuring firefighter time is targeted where it has the greatest positive impact on reducing risk within our communities.
To achieve this, we are committed to being connected with our staff, ensuring wellbeing is prioritised and empowering all to be professional and ambitious in serving the community. This commitment starts from the moment someone expresses an interest in joining our Service. It continues throughout their working life with us, and even after they have left.
To achieve this, we are committed to upholding the highest professional standards in financial management and ensuring the provision of top-tier facilities and equipment essential for our staff to deliver our duties to our community effectively and safely.
To achieve this we will use technology to balance the need for security and resilience with the desire to innovate and introduce new, efficient ways of working.
We have realigned our internal governance structure to support delivery of the objectives and enablers contained with this CRMP.
The Service Delivery Group will ensure delivery against all our objectives, while the people, and finance and assets delivery groups will ensure the enabling functions are working effectively to support delivery of the objectives.
All groups will ensure that the risks identified in the CRMP, applicable to their respective areas are monitored, along with the actions in place to mitigate those risks.
The delivery groups will all report into the CRMP Performance Board to maintain strategic oversight of directorate plans and to ensure performance and risk is co-ordinated across all departments.
Strategic oversight will be provided by the Strategic Leadership Board and ultimately the Fire Authority (and its committees). The Fire Authority consists of elected Members and is responsible for making decisions on policy, finance, and resources.
The diagram below illustrates our new governance structure that will oversee the delivery of our CRMP:
Some of these measures allow us to directly measure our performance (e.g. number of Home Fire Safety Visits completed) whereas others are indicative of the demand for our services over which we have limited influence (e.g. number of road traffic collisions attended).
OBJECTIVE 1
Reducing risk and keeping our community safe
OBJECTIVE 2
Protecting people from risk in the built environment
OBJECTIVE 3
Responding quickly and effectively to emergencies
ENABLER 1
An inclusive, healthy and engaged workforce
ENABLER 2
Making the most of our finances and assets
ENABLER 3
Optimising our technology and data
Our previous aim was to keep our average response time within 10 seconds of the previous 5 year period.
During the financial year 2023/24 our average attendance time to all incidents each month ranged from between 8 minutes 35 seconds to 9 minutes 31 seconds.
When you call 999, our Fire Control Service (FCS) swiftly pinpoints your location and dispatches the quickest available pump, regardless of which fire service it comes from.
We measure the time it takes for the first pump to get to you. We call this the response time.
To ensure we are providing an excellent, agile and modern fire service for our community it is important our response standard is easy to understand, measurable, efficient and effective.
Our 2023 HMICFRS inspection findings suggested that our existing response standard could mean that even if our response times worsened, we would still be achieving our targets. As part of this CRMP we’ve redefined our response standard.
Our new response standard has been designed with the five-year CRMP time period in mind, as growth in the built environment and infrastructure changes make achieving our standard increasingly challenging.
The new standard aims to uphold an average response time of 10 minutes. This means the first pump arriving at a scene within an average of 10 minutes for all incidents. This does not include call-handling times.
Areas nearer to our Wholetime and Day-Crewed fire stations can expect a much quicker response.
In areas further from our Wholetime and Day-Crewed stations our response time may extend to between 10 and 20 minutes.
Through analysing data, we’ve found that most routine daily incidents can be handled with less than 9 immediately available pumps.
However, due to Buckinghamshire and Milton Keynes’ geography, we determine that 9 pumps is the minimum required for daily response to meet our new standard.
To ensure we can meet our new response standard during larger or simultaneous incidents, we know we need nearer to 12 immediately available pumps.
On some rare occasions (less than 1% of all demand) we may need to deal with protracted incidents or extreme demand (such as during storms or heatwaves).
To meet these extreme demands, we need to ensure we are ready and able to scale up quickly. We will look to do this through a blended approach; deploying traditional pumps and specialist vehicles crewed by immediately available, On-Call and resilience crews.
This ensures a robust response during routine and exceptional circumstances, providing the service you need when it matters most.
The data shows there is no need to change the number of Wholetime and Day-Crewed pumps or their location.
Currently we have 18 On-Call pumps which primarily provide us with resilience. The quantity and placement of these pumps impacts on our response time.
These vehicles significantly enhance our capacity to respond to exceptional circumstances like major incidents and adverse weather conditions, and our standalone On-Call stations help to reduce our response time in more rural areas.
We are committed to using data to understand the most effective use of On-Call resources to provide resilience, manage risks and uphold our new response standard. This includes evaluating the types of pumps and vehicles we have and exploring opportunities for greater efficiency and effectiveness.
Throughout the CRMP’s duration, we will assess the required number of On-Call pumps to align with our new response standard and address identified risks within the CRMP.
We use data modelling to help us understand how the number of available pumps might affect how long it would take for us to arrive at an incident.
Graph C shows us how first pump response times are affected if between 5 and 30 pumps were available.
Graph D looks at how second pump response times are affected if between 5 and 30 pumps were available.
Lastly, Graph E, tells us the variation in first pump response times, between different areas, if between 5 and 30 pumps are available (standard deviation). Standard deviation is important as it measures the degree of variation in average response times across different areas of our community.
It’s important to consider all these factors when deciding where to place our resources. Having more pumps available doesn’t always make a big difference to our average response time. However, it can in some, but not all, circumstances make a difference in reducing the variance between areas, for example improving response times to areas that are closer to our On-Call fire stations. This would help to make response times more consistent across the community.
Aim to uphold an average response time of 10 minutes. This means the first pump will reach the scene within an average of 10 minutes for all incidents.
Significant consultation was undertaken during the initial development of our CRMP, as well as on the draft CRMP prior to formal approval of the final document.
However, feedback is always welcome and there will also be opportunities to give your views on any changes we may introduce to our resourcing model as part of that planned review (see pages 57-61).
You can contact us in a number of ways:
We will always consult with the public if and when we propose to make significant changes to the way your service is delivered, for example, the number of pumps used within our resourcing model.
All consultation will follow the four best practice Gunning principles:
Accidental Dwelling Fire (ADF) – A fire in a domestic property started unintentionally.
Assets – Refers to everything we own or lease that is used to deliver the services we provide, which includes fire stations, vehicles (including pumps), firefighting equipment, workwear, technology and offices.
Automatic Fire Alarm (AFA) – A system that warns people of a possible fire by automatic or manual means. When activated, the occupants of a building should manage the response to the alarm. It may also, depending on the local arrangements, notify a remote alarm receiving centre which will contact the fire and rescue service.
Deprivation – Deprivation is the absence of essential resources or opportunities needed for a decent standard of living, including things like money, education, healthcare and housing (see also Index of Multiple Deprivation [IMD]).
Emergency Service Mobile Communication Programme (ESMCP) – Home Office-led, this aims to develop and deliver new communications services to replace the current emergency communications system, known as Airwave.
Emergency Service Network (ESN) – The communications systems used to share information between emergency services and their control rooms.
False Alarm – A call to an incident that does not require our attendance, for example where an alarm is being tested, a smoke alarm is sounding due to a failing battery or a fault in the detection system, or steam has been spotted escaping from an extraction unit and thought to be smoke.
Fire Control Service (FCS) – Often referred to as the control room, this is where emergency calls are received and call handlers allocate the appropriate response (i.e. the number of pumps) and/or provide appropriate advice.
Firewall – A technological barrier preventing unwanted or unauthorised access or emails entering the organisation computer network.
His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire & Rescue Services (HMICFRS) – An independent body that assesses, in the public interest, the effectiveness, efficiency, and people aspects of police forces and fire and rescue services.
Home Fire Safety Visit – A free service we offer to people who may be at increased risk of, or from, fire.
Index of Multiple Deprivation (IMD) – The IMD is a government tool in England that measures relative deprivation across small areas. It assigns scores from 1 to 10 based on factors like income, education, health and crime. This helps identify deprived areas and guide resource allocation for community improvement.
Integrated Risk Management Plan – An alternative name for Community Risk Management Plan.
Lower Layer Super Output Areas (LSOAs) – An area on a map made up of between 400 and 1,200 households (usually with a resident population of between 1,000 and 3,000 people).
Modelling – The use of data, calculations and simulations to predict or estimate various factors related to fire and rescue services, such as demand, resource allocation, response times and effectiveness.
Mobile data terminal (MDT) – A tablet device used by firefighters on our pumps that provides crucial information, such as specific risks present at certain sites we may need to attend.
PESTELO – An analysis framework used by organisations to evaluate external factors impacting operations. It includes Political, Economic, Social, Technological, Environmental, Legal and Operational factors, helping anticipate changes and adapt strategies.
Primary Authority Scheme – Allows organisations served by multiple fire and rescue services to form a partnership to receive advice from a single service.
Pumps – The term we use to refer to our standard fire engines (short for pumping appliance).
Response model – A combination of data, statistics and analysis that collectively provides a visual representation (chart, table or graphic) of how we structure our response to incidents.
Standard deviation – A measure of how spread-out numbers are.
Thames Valley Collaboration Group – A forum for all emergency services in the Thames Valley region to work together to improve outcomes for the public.
Thames Valley Local Resilience Forum (TVLRF) – A multiagency partnership made up of representatives from local public services, including the emergency services, from across Berkshire, Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire. The group helps all partners come together to collaboratively prepare, plan and respond as well as warn, inform and advise the public on large-scale incidents.
UK Resilience Framework – An analysis that focuses on the UK’s ability to anticipate, assess, prevent, mitigate and respond to, and recover from, known, unknown, direct, indirect and emerging civil contingency risks.
Wildfire – A term used to describe large uncontrolled fires occurring in open natural vegetation. A wildfire incident usually requires more than 4 pumps, covers an area of 1 hectare or more, takes more than 6 hours to extinguish and has flames longer than 1.5 metres.
