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Essex County Fire and Rescue Service

HMICFRS region and HMI

  • His Majesty’s Inspector of Fire & Rescue Services (HMI): Roy Wilsher is HMI for Essex County Fire and Rescue Service
  • The service is in HMICFRS’s Eastern fire region

HMICFRS’s assessment of Essex County Fire & Rescue Service

Our Fire and Rescue Service assessments give you information about how your local fire and rescue service has performed in several important areas. In our latest assessments of Essex County FRS, we made the following graded judgments:

 

About the service

Essex County Fire and Rescue Service is one of the largest fire and rescue services in the country, serving a county which includes Stansted and Southend airports, Harwich seaport, Lakeside shopping centre, Coryton oil refinery, power stations, docks at Tilbury and parts of the M25 and M11 motorways. Essex has one of the largest sections of coastline (350 miles) in the country.

Essex County Fire and Rescue Service provides prevention, protection and emergency response services from 50 fire stations and an Urban Search and Rescue facility.

The organisation is administered from its headquarters in Kelvedon, where the service also has a mobilising control centre. The service is governed by Essex Police Fire and Crime Commissioner, Fire and Rescue Authority, which is responsible for fire & rescue services covering an area over 1,400 square miles and a population of 1.8 million.

Key facts – 2020/2021

Service Area

1,417 square miles

Population

1.86m people
up4% local 5 yr change

Workforce

62% wholetime firefighters
38% on-call firefighters
0.56 per 1000 population local
0.56 national level
local 5 yr change
down5% national 5 yr change

Assets

50 stations
67 fire engines

Incidents

2.3 fire incidents per 1000 population local
2.7 national
2.4 non-fire incidents per 1000 population local
2.7 national
3.1 fire false alarms per 1000 population local
3.8 national

Cost

£23.30 firefighter cost per person per year
£25.22 firefighter cost per person per year (national)