WCC’s Cabinet Approves New Warwickshire Fire and Rescue Service Operating Model

Following a review of how WFRS use their resources, a public consultation took place earlier this year on a proposed delivery model that would help the service to better align their resources to the risks and demands across all parts of Warwickshire. The feedback from the 1,300 responses that were received has been used to shape a revised model known as Model A.  

This new way of working offers a number of improvements on the current operating model. This includes: 

• Guaranteeing 14 fire engines during the day, when activity is highest, and 13 at night, when the risk is lower. This is a significant improvement from the current guaranteed 11 engines during the day and 8 at night. 

• Providing WFRS with a 27% increase in capacity to conduct prevention work, helping to stop fires and incidents before they occur. 

• Improving average response times for the most urgent incidents across the county by 58 seconds to under 10 minutes, ensuring quicker assistance when and where it is needed the most. It also improves the average response time for a second engine when this is needed. 

Cllr Andy Crump, Portfolio Holder for Fire and Rescue and Community Safety, said: “Having listened to the feedback and suggestions from our communities, staff and partners, I’m delighted that Cabinet have approved the additional allocation of £1.75m to fund this new operating model. We have highly skilled and hard-working staff that includes essential non-operational teams as well as our firefighters and control room. All of them do an incredible job every day for Warwickshire and it’s only right that we make sure they have every chance to support our communities with preventing fires and accidents from happening at all, or by being in the right place at the right time to be able to respond when needed.” 

Chief Fire Officer Ben Brook said: “As part of our responsibility to identify and assess the fire and rescue risks across the county, we have to make sure we have the right arrangements in place to manage those risks. This new model will help us to overcome some of the challenges we’re currently facing and build in resilience so that we can deal with future and emerging risks such as climate change. It also means we have more guaranteed fire engines available during times of higher activity, significantly enhancing our service delivery and making Warwickshire a safer place for all our residents.” 

Following this decision, WFRS will enter into a formal consultation process with their staff and discussions with representative bodies. Any subsequent changes required to the Community Risk Management Plan will be considered by WCC’s Council later this year, with full implementation expected to take up to 18 months and a review of the impact of the new operating model taking place a year after completion.  

A copy of the Cabinet paper for this item can be found here: https://democracy.warwickshire.gov.uk/documents/s37627/WFRS%20Future%20Operating%20Model%20-%20Report%20and%20Combined%20Appendices%201-5.pdf

More information about Warwickshire Fire and Rescue Service can be found online: https://www.warwickshire.gov.uk/fireandrescue