First Responders
Matt Ridley wrote a thoughtful piece in the Times recently about the big reduction in fire incidents across the UK which can apparently be attributed to two main factors - the widespread use of 'oven chips' and introduction of smoke alarms.
Personally speaking, I would amalgamate the Ambulance Service and the Fire Service - which would provide a better use of resources for all kinds of emergency situations - under a unified management structure.
But a unified and more diverse 'first responder' service would also provide greater job opportunities - particularly for older firefighters who find it difficult to maintain the leave of fitness currently required by the Fire Service.
So, instead of these valuable public servants living in fear of being thrown on the scrapheap late in their careers - they could be redeployed into equal important jobs which perform an equally important service.
London isn’t burning. Don’t fetch the engines
By Matt Ridley
Dramatic reductions in the number of fire incidents across Britain mean we can afford a smaller fire brigade
This morning’s brief strike by the Fire Brigades Union, like the one last Friday evening, will, I suspect, mostly serve to remind those who work in the private sector just how well remunerated many in the public sector still are. The union objects to the raising of the retirement age from 55 to 60, on a generous final-salary pension scheme, with good job security. These are conditions few of those who work for private firms or for themselves can even dream of.
In my case, as somebody always on the look-out for under-reported good news stories, it also served to alert me to just how dramatic the fall in “demand” for firefighters has been. Intrigued by the strike, I looked up the numbers and found to my amazement that in 2011, compared with just a decade before, firefighters attended 48 per cent fewer fires overall; 39 per cent fewer building fires; 44 per cent fewer minor outdoor fires; 24 per cent fewer road-traffic collisions; 8 per cent fewer floods — and 40 per cent fewer incidents overall. The decline has if anything accelerated since 2011.
That is to say, during a period when the population and the number of buildings grew, we needed to call the fire brigade much, much less. Most important of all, the number of people dying in fires in the home has fallen by 60 per cent compared with the 1980s. The credit for these benign changes goes at least partly to technology — fire-retardant materials, self-extinguishing cigarettes, smoke alarms, sprinklers, alarms on cookers — much of which was driven by sensible regulation. Fewer open fires and fewer people smoking, especially indoors, must have helped too. There is little doubt that rules about such things have saved lives, as even most libertarians must concede.
But this is not the whole story. I was stunned to find that the number of deliberate fires has been falling much faster than the number of accidental fires. The steepest fall has been in car fires, down from 77,000 in 2001-2 to 17,000 in 2010-11. This echoes the 60 per cent collapse in car thefts in G7 countries since 1995. Deliberate fires in buildings have more than halved in number; I assume this is also something to do with crime detection — CCTV, DNA testing and so forth, which make it much less easy to get away with arson. Only deliberate outdoor fires show little trend: perhaps because not until he is deep in the woods does an arsonist feel safe from detection.
Behind the firefighters’ strike, therefore, lies a most unusual policy dilemma: how to manage declining demand for a free public service. NHS planners would give their eye teeth for such a problem, since healthcare demand seems to expand infinitely, whatever the policy.
Yet the fire union leaders in the current dispute do not seem especially keen on trumpeting these numbers from the tops of their ladders as proof of society’s growing success at suppressing fire. You would think they might, because firefighters themselves have certainly played a part in prevention by devoting more of their time to it — teaching people about the risks of chip pans and the like. (In passing, I wonder how much the emergence of the oven chip is responsible for fewer fires: chip-pan fires used to cause one-fifth of all residential fires. Maybe, too, the general health war on chips has played a part.)
The reason for the reluctance of firefighters to boast about the success of their efforts at prevention, of course, is that it implies the need for fewer of them. They fear that fitness tests will in many cases lead to redundancy before the new retirement age. The statistics I have quoted come largely from the recent report that recommended that the Government could make large efficiency savings in the fire and rescue service.
Sir Ken Knight’s report to the Government’s fire minister, Brandon Lewis, pointed out that despite deaths from fires having hit an all-time low and the number of incidents falling rapidly, “expenditure and firefighter numbers remain broadly the same. This suggests that there is room for reconfiguration and efficiencies to better match the service to the current risk and response context.” Employment in the fire and rescue service has dropped by just 6 per cent during the time when incidents have decreased by 40 per cent.
It is not just the overall numbers of firefighters that could come down as fires come down. There are plenty of opportunities for efficiency savings, as in any public service. Sir Ken observed that he could not explain the differences in the spending of Britain’s 46 separate fire services. Some areas spent almost twice as much as others, yet the discrepancy could not be explained by population density, degree of industrialisation, or level of deprivation. Nor did greater spending produce a faster fall in the number of fires. Noting that localism can become “siloism”, Sir Ken concluded drily that “fire and rescue authorities spend to their budgets, not to their risk.”
Other countries have experienced similar declines in fires and deaths from fire. In the United States, fire death rates fell by 21 per cent between 2001 and 2010 but international comparisons are no more clear about the cause than those between British regions. Sweden and New Zealand spend less per head than we do on fire services and suffer more fire deaths; but America and Japan spend more and also suffer more fire deaths. Singapore stands out: very low spending and very few fire deaths.
There is also a remarkable variety of ways in which countries deliver fire services. Some, such as Germany, rely largely on volunteers. Not many countries use as few volunteer firefighters as Britain does. It is pretty clear that there are opportunities for British fire services to use more volunteers and on-call staff, to share senior managers and to copy best practice from each other. But the unions are not helpful: Cleveland Fire and Rescue Authority explored the possibility of an employee-led mutual contracting with the authority to provide the fire service, but under pressure from the union, the local authority nixed the proposal as tantamount to a form of privatisation.
Fire was an abiding terror to our ancestors, consuming not just many of their lives, but much of their property. Almost all of us have family stories of devastating fires. Although we will always need this essential service , thankfully, that experience is becoming steadily rarer. Sir Ken Knight found it likely that this decline would continue, remarking: “I wonder if anyone a decade ago would have predicted the need for fire and rescue services to attend 40 per cent fewer emergency incidents.” The fire service will undoubtedly have to shrink.
In the meantime, for two hours this morning, the union that represents firefighters has merely reminded us that a firefighter who is called out 40 per cent less than ten years ago will retire at 60 and has pension rights equivalent to a private pension pot of half a million pounds, to which he will have contributed half as much as a private sector worker.
Here's amazing table showing the number of firefighters around the UK who failed to meet the the required level of fitness between May 2012 and April 2013 The data has been gathered by Radio 5 Live which submitted Freedom of Information (FOI) requests to 52 fire services around the country.What sticks out like a sore thumb are the huge discrepancies in different parts of the country - with Strathclyde Fire & Rescue coming top of the pops with an unbelievable 66.7% of firefighters failing to pass the test.Scotland's fire services have since been merged into one single national force - from April 2013. But whoever's running Scotland's fire service these days - someone, somewhere clearly has a lot of explaining to do. Failed tests
Dramatic reductions in the number of fire incidents across Britain mean we can afford a smaller fire brigade
This morning’s brief strike by the Fire Brigades Union, like the one last Friday evening, will, I suspect, mostly serve to remind those who work in the private sector just how well remunerated many in the public sector still are. The union objects to the raising of the retirement age from 55 to 60, on a generous final-salary pension scheme, with good job security. These are conditions few of those who work for private firms or for themselves can even dream of.
In my case, as somebody always on the look-out for under-reported good news stories, it also served to alert me to just how dramatic the fall in “demand” for firefighters has been. Intrigued by the strike, I looked up the numbers and found to my amazement that in 2011, compared with just a decade before, firefighters attended 48 per cent fewer fires overall; 39 per cent fewer building fires; 44 per cent fewer minor outdoor fires; 24 per cent fewer road-traffic collisions; 8 per cent fewer floods — and 40 per cent fewer incidents overall. The decline has if anything accelerated since 2011.
That is to say, during a period when the population and the number of buildings grew, we needed to call the fire brigade much, much less. Most important of all, the number of people dying in fires in the home has fallen by 60 per cent compared with the 1980s. The credit for these benign changes goes at least partly to technology — fire-retardant materials, self-extinguishing cigarettes, smoke alarms, sprinklers, alarms on cookers — much of which was driven by sensible regulation. Fewer open fires and fewer people smoking, especially indoors, must have helped too. There is little doubt that rules about such things have saved lives, as even most libertarians must concede.
But this is not the whole story. I was stunned to find that the number of deliberate fires has been falling much faster than the number of accidental fires. The steepest fall has been in car fires, down from 77,000 in 2001-2 to 17,000 in 2010-11. This echoes the 60 per cent collapse in car thefts in G7 countries since 1995. Deliberate fires in buildings have more than halved in number; I assume this is also something to do with crime detection — CCTV, DNA testing and so forth, which make it much less easy to get away with arson. Only deliberate outdoor fires show little trend: perhaps because not until he is deep in the woods does an arsonist feel safe from detection.
Behind the firefighters’ strike, therefore, lies a most unusual policy dilemma: how to manage declining demand for a free public service. NHS planners would give their eye teeth for such a problem, since healthcare demand seems to expand infinitely, whatever the policy.
Yet the fire union leaders in the current dispute do not seem especially keen on trumpeting these numbers from the tops of their ladders as proof of society’s growing success at suppressing fire. You would think they might, because firefighters themselves have certainly played a part in prevention by devoting more of their time to it — teaching people about the risks of chip pans and the like. (In passing, I wonder how much the emergence of the oven chip is responsible for fewer fires: chip-pan fires used to cause one-fifth of all residential fires. Maybe, too, the general health war on chips has played a part.)
The reason for the reluctance of firefighters to boast about the success of their efforts at prevention, of course, is that it implies the need for fewer of them. They fear that fitness tests will in many cases lead to redundancy before the new retirement age. The statistics I have quoted come largely from the recent report that recommended that the Government could make large efficiency savings in the fire and rescue service.
Sir Ken Knight’s report to the Government’s fire minister, Brandon Lewis, pointed out that despite deaths from fires having hit an all-time low and the number of incidents falling rapidly, “expenditure and firefighter numbers remain broadly the same. This suggests that there is room for reconfiguration and efficiencies to better match the service to the current risk and response context.” Employment in the fire and rescue service has dropped by just 6 per cent during the time when incidents have decreased by 40 per cent.
It is not just the overall numbers of firefighters that could come down as fires come down. There are plenty of opportunities for efficiency savings, as in any public service. Sir Ken observed that he could not explain the differences in the spending of Britain’s 46 separate fire services. Some areas spent almost twice as much as others, yet the discrepancy could not be explained by population density, degree of industrialisation, or level of deprivation. Nor did greater spending produce a faster fall in the number of fires. Noting that localism can become “siloism”, Sir Ken concluded drily that “fire and rescue authorities spend to their budgets, not to their risk.”
Other countries have experienced similar declines in fires and deaths from fire. In the United States, fire death rates fell by 21 per cent between 2001 and 2010 but international comparisons are no more clear about the cause than those between British regions. Sweden and New Zealand spend less per head than we do on fire services and suffer more fire deaths; but America and Japan spend more and also suffer more fire deaths. Singapore stands out: very low spending and very few fire deaths.
There is also a remarkable variety of ways in which countries deliver fire services. Some, such as Germany, rely largely on volunteers. Not many countries use as few volunteer firefighters as Britain does. It is pretty clear that there are opportunities for British fire services to use more volunteers and on-call staff, to share senior managers and to copy best practice from each other. But the unions are not helpful: Cleveland Fire and Rescue Authority explored the possibility of an employee-led mutual contracting with the authority to provide the fire service, but under pressure from the union, the local authority nixed the proposal as tantamount to a form of privatisation.
Fire was an abiding terror to our ancestors, consuming not just many of their lives, but much of their property. Almost all of us have family stories of devastating fires. Although we will always need this essential service , thankfully, that experience is becoming steadily rarer. Sir Ken Knight found it likely that this decline would continue, remarking: “I wonder if anyone a decade ago would have predicted the need for fire and rescue services to attend 40 per cent fewer emergency incidents.” The fire service will undoubtedly have to shrink.
In the meantime, for two hours this morning, the union that represents firefighters has merely reminded us that a firefighter who is called out 40 per cent less than ten years ago will retire at 60 and has pension rights equivalent to a private pension pot of half a million pounds, to which he will have contributed half as much as a private sector worker.
Lifeline Services (21 September 2013)
5 live Investigates submitted Freedom of Information requests to 52 fire services asking how many firefighters had failed tests between May 2012 and April 2013.
Of these, 36 fire services provided figures, which have not previously been compiled and published. Of 24,272 tests, some 2,890 firefighters failed.
Some 665 firefighters failed to reach a lower standard (35ml of oxygen/kg/min), below which a government-sponsored review published in December 2012 said someone was at risk "of sudden death particularly while undergoing high levels of physical exertion".
Dr Tony Williams, who wrote the review, said at this standard "some firefighters may simply not be fit enough to meet the physical demands of the most arduous tasks they are likely to have to undertake".
Some fire services said their firefighters may have taken the test more than once.
'Arduous physical work'
In Strathclyde, of 652 tested, there were 435 "unfit" firefighters, of whom 111 were "seriously unfit".
The Scottish Fire and Rescue Service (SFRS) said it could not explain why Scotland's figures were worse than the rest of the UK but it has started a review of working practices.
A report published in 2010, based on the most recent Scottish Health Survey showed that a higher proportion of men and women were overweight, including obese, in Scotland than the rest of the UK.
Professor Kevin Sykes, who advises UK fire services on fitness, said it was well established that being in good physical condition minimised the risk to health.
He added: "Firefighters are asked to carry additional weight, which can have a dramatic effect on their ability to perform arduous physical work, particularly for the less fit."
