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Cambridgeshire Fire & Resue Service

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Our Community Risk Management Plan

All fire and rescue services are required to produce a Community Risk Management Plan (CRMP). This plan looks at different risks across the county, how these could impact our work and what we plan to do to manage the risks. Our CRMP also looks at the opportunities we can take advantage of to help us achieve our aims of operational, community safety and people excellence and value for money.

Our latest plan covers five years from April 2024 to March 2029 and sets out what we will focus on over that time period.

As society and technology change, develop and grow, we must ensure that we change too, to adapt to different risks that emerge and ensure that we have our resources in the right places to best deliver our full range of services.

To write this plan, we carried out a review of many areas to identify potential risks, including historical incident data, housing growth, new census data (2021), national risks and climate change forecasts. We also carried out an extensive engagement exercise with all stakeholders including employees and members of the public.

Within the CRMP we list actions we will take under each of our four strategic aim headings. These actions provide more detail about how we will address the risks and opportunities. We report on progress against these quarterly at our strategic management meetings and also to Fire Authority. The papers for meetings are public documents and can be found in the Fire Authority section.

Our CRMP for 2024/2029 was agreed by our Fire Authority in February and is currently being designed in a PDF document. For now, here is the plan as a standard PDF text document. For an easy-to-read summary of the main risks and opportunities we identify in our CRMP and the actions we will undertake over the next five years under our four strategic aim areas, please see below.

Summary of risks and opportunities

Emerging Technologies

As technology advances and evolves so too can the risks this presents for our communities. We have tragically experienced several fires over recent years involving lithium-ion batteries. It is important that we provide our firefighters with the right skills, training and equipment to deal with fires involving lithium-ion as well as supporting wider work with the National Fire Chief Council (NFCC) to create appropriate guidance in response to fires of this type. We also work to provide appropriate safety advice and guidance to our communities on the safe use of batteries to help prevent further incidents. We must identify those most at risk from these types of fires and define the most appropriate, effective and efficient way of engaging with these groups.

Operational Response

We have been assessed by His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire and Rescue Services (HMICFRS) in 2023 as outstanding at making the best use of our resources. However, there are still opportunities for us to continue to ensure that we have the right resources available in the right place, with the right skills, information and equipment to respond to fires and other emergencies. Our communities and risks continue to evolve, and therefore so must we to ensure we are providing the best service to the public in the most cost effective and affordable way.

Diverse communities

The latest census data gives us an up-to-date picture of the changing demographic of our communities. We also see lifestyle changes post-pandemic and changes in the use of technology that may change the risks in our communities. Monitoring data about who is experiencing fires and emergencies helps us to better focus and shape our prevention and protection activities to ensure that we engage in the most appropriate manner. We found from our recent community engagement activities that there is little awareness of what we do outside of responding to fires and other emergencies and we will be working to address this in the future.

Youth Engagement

We recognise the power of positive engagement at an early stage in life. Using opportunities to engage with young people in our communities enables us to help establish risk awareness to help prevent fires and other emergencies. Not only is this important for safer communities but also for the future of the fire and rescue service in promoting what we do and career opportunities.

Developing our people

It is important that we make sure our people have the right skills to be able to do their role. It's also important for us to focus on their development for the future. We must ensure that we manage, develop and diversify our people and talent within our service, helping people to reach their full potential and supporting those who aspire to progress. We will be focusing our work on our development pathways and programmes, talent management and succession planning to ensure that not only do we have the right skills for today but also for leadership in the future.

Culture

Our service has a good organisational culture that embodies our values and expected behaviours and we put people at the centre of everything we do. We know we cannot be complacent though; recent culture spotlight reports from other areas and other events in the media show us that it is essential this continues to be a priority. It is important to us that our people feel valued and engaged in what we do. We use engagement and culture surveys to help us understand how our people feel about working for the Service. Our recent survey, conducted in 2022, showed that we had improved employee engagement and that colleagues were proud to work for CFRS. It also showed us further areas that we could improve on. We will look at these, along with the recommendations from other external reports, to continue to maintain and improve our positive and inclusive organisational culture.

Technology

As with many organisations, we rely heavily on technology. We are a data-driven organisation, so we collect, process and share data across our organisation and with others. We use technology to deliver efficiencies and reduce administration activities where we can. Not only this, but our most important technology is how we receive emergency calls, mobilise fire engines and communicate with fire crews and officers across the county. We must protect our data and our systems and to do this we continue to invest in our technology. It is an ongoing journey to keep our systems and infrastructure up to date, ensuring value and efficiency, resilient communication links and enabling remote working.

Sustainability

We’re on a mission to create a more sustainable and environmentally friendly fire and rescue service. Our sustainability strategy covers five key themes – people, transport, property, off-setting and procurement. It includes things like investing in and moving towards electric or hybrid vehicles, investing in our estates and trialling HVO fuel, and our objective is to be carbon neutral by 2030. This is an extremely challenging target. We have already created our baseline, understanding our carbon footprint, and we will use this to measure our progress and review our plans. This is a topic that cuts across all areas of the Service.

Actions

Under the People* Excellence banner, we will continue to:

  • Maintain and improve our positive and inclusive organisational culture and employee engagement and make us an employer of choice. This includes communication and facilitating more opportunities for colleagues from across different areas of the Service to engage with each other.
  • Review how we manage, develop and diversify our people and our talent from within our service, helping people to reach their full potential and supporting those who aspire to progress as leaders. This includes development pathways and programmes, talent management and succession planning.
  • Review our processes for recruitment and progression, including our community engagement activity, to ensure they are accessible to people from a range of backgrounds and that they enable us to improve diversity over time, to greater reflect the communities we serve.
  • Review our mechanisms for the management of safeguarding to protect our people and communities.
  • Review our processes and means for supporting the health and wellbeing of our people.

*Actions to protect and keep safe people in our community are covered in Community Safety Excellence.

Our actions under Community Safety Excellence, which covers fire prevention and protection, will be:

  • Greater collaboration with health, social care and other partners to improve the ways in which we identify and meet the needs of those most at risk of fire.
  • Continue to develop our Firebreak programme to help vulnerable young people become resilient and valuable members of their communities. Explore other early intervention opportunities to positively influence children and younger people and keep them safe from harm.
  • Continue to work with central government, the NFCC and local partners to educate communities and responsible persons on the growing risk of emerging technologies, primarily lithium-ion batteries.
  • Continue to work with partners from the road and water safety partnerships to reduce the number of people killed or injured on our roads and waterways.
  • Ensure effective evaluation focuses our community safety and fire protection activity to keep our communities safe and bring together expertise from across the Service to reduce risk to people, places and events, continuing to build long-term relationships with our diverse communities.
  • Continued work with our partners to protect and safeguard the most vulnerable in our communities and the most high-risk premises.

For Operational Excellence, we will:

  • Work to align operational resources and skills (wholetime, on-call and fire control) to our risk and demand, understanding how we respond to incidents and the number of resources required to safely resolve them, and to ensure that we are maximising our productivity and efficiency.
  • Continue to improve the collection and provision of risk data about identified premises, increasing knowledge of local risks and ensuring appropriate operational risk information is available for colleagues when responding to incidents.
  • Continue our ongoing work to ensure our emergency vehicles and equipment meet our identified emerging risks.
  • Continue to align Service procedures with national operational guidance to improve firefighter safety and our ability to work with other fire services, ensuring appropriate business continuity arrangements are in place for contingency situations.
  • Review current arrangements for operational training and recording to ensure they meet the needs of operational colleagues and our identified emerging risks such as emerging technologies and extreme weather.
  • Develop further assurance across all operational areas to achieve a high level of performance and support the continued development of our people ensuring we continue to learn from what we do.

For Value for Money, we will:

  • Continue to update and enhance our mobilising systems, data, processes and procedures.
  • Collaboration with other partner agencies, including a rationalisation and sharing of estates as well as looking for joined up working practices.
  • Deliver efficient and effective working through existing and new technology, looking at how we can automate activities, enable greater mobile working and improve communication and engagement.
  • Ensure our technology infrastructure and systems are robust and fit for our purposes, reducing the risk of cyber-attacks and ensuring our software is maintained and provides value for money.
  • Delivery of the Service’s sustainability strategies and plans.
  • Continual review of our commercial arrangements for our equipment provision and maintenance to ensure these are appropriate and meet our requirements for now and for the future.
  • Carry out scenario planning for potential future budgetary constraints and new financial burdens and seek appropriate opportunities to create revenue streams across the Service.

 

Integrated Risk Management Plan (IRMP)

Our previous IRMP documents can be found below: