Northumberland 2021/22

I am very grateful to the staff at Northumberland Fire and Rescue Service who worked diligently with us on this inspection. I want to thank the service for working with us by accommodating the virtual approach of this inspection. Inspections usually take a hybrid approach, but inspecting during the pandemic meant everyone had to adapt. I also want to recognise the disruption caused by the pandemic. This has been considered in our findings.

The service has made significant improvements since our last inspection in 2019. It has made progress against most of the areas for improvement we found two years ago, especially in protecting the public through fire regulation. In this category, I was pleased to see the service has moved from requiring improvement to good. But the service has made poor progress in improving its prevention work through quality assurance and evaluation.

We were impressed that the service proactively engages with local businesses and other organisations to promote understanding of and compliance with legislation. It uses different platforms to raise awareness of current themes and to offer support and advice. We look forward to seeing how successful the new website for the service is, and how the service evaluates its use.

The service has got better at protecting the public. But it still needs to improve several areas of its effectiveness. For example, by doing more to engage with its communities to understand risks, and to broaden its approach to risk. Risk information needs to be consistently gathered and recorded and kept up to date and relevant.

The service will reap huge benefits, and create a more representative workforce, by doing more to access new talent and different ways of thinking. There are still several barriers to open and fair recruitment that need to be overcome. The service should, for example, direct recruitment campaigns at under-represented groups and treat on-call and wholetime staff equally for operational roles.

In 2020, still only 0.8 percent of its firefighters have a black, Asian and minority ethnic (BAME) background and only 7.7 percent of firefighters are women. This latter figure is slightly higher than the England average of 7.0 percent but, in real terms, wholetime women firefighter numbers have stayed the same for the past five years.

There are lots of positives in the service’s financial management, which is generally good. The service now has more funding than when we inspected last. This is positive. We saw improved resourcing of the service’s prevention, protection and response functions. Reserves are well used and we are pleased with how well the service manages its fleets and estates. But the link between the integrated risk management plan (IRMP) and the fleet and estates strategies isn’t clear enough.

The service can, however, show how allocating staff to prevention, protection and response reflects the risks and priorities identified in the Year 5 update for the IRMP.

The service has also developed a sound understanding of future financial challenges, but it needs to work on protecting itself against foreseeable risks.

The service collaborates with the county council and other fire and rescue services but would benefit from being more ambitious in this area. It still needs to improve its plans and exercising for business continuity.

There are some new areas for improvement in its response to incidents. It needs to better inform the public about ongoing incidents and improve its debriefing system.

I saw positive improvements in culture and in the behaviours of staff and crews. But the service needs to do more work on this, alongside developing its leaders and managers better. The negative effects of this can be seen throughout the service. And the service still isn’t managing working hours effectively. We are concerned that arrangements for managing rest periods between on-call and wholetime commitments aren’t suitable or adequate. The service needs to address this issue as a priority.

While the improvements we saw during this inspection aren’t enough for a significant grade improvement, we look forward to seeing the improvements the service has already made being replicated in other areas.