In the community

community safety officer explaining fire safety advice to a mother and her two children

Cambridgeshire and Peterborough Fire Authority (the Fire Authority) is committed to improving the safety of our community.  We want to ensure that everyone in our community can fully access and use fire and rescue services appropriate to them.  To do this, we need to better understand the diversity of our community and work to develop services and ways of working that meet their needs.

Our equality schemes set out our plans to improve outcomes for people who have suffered discrimination in the past or have found it hard to access public services.  The main theme of our plans is to ensure we are accountable to the public for what we do.  We will do this by gathering information about the impact of our services, listening and responding to the views and needs of different groups in the community and sharing our progress with them.

We do all this through a process of equality impact assessment.  This means that whenever we consider a new service, policy or way of doing things we will consider the impact it might have on different groups before we introduce it.  If it seems likely that it could disadvantage a particular group then we will explore other options and find a better solution.

Further information

We are currently in the process of drafting a Single Equality Scheme.  Our draft Single Equality Scheme brings together action plans from our previous race and disability schemes and identifies further actions required to meet the needs of those previously or potentially disadvantaged on grounds of gender, transgender, age, religion and belief and sexual orientation.