National review of community risk methodology across UK Fire and Rescue Service

Academic collaboration

A search in Google Scholar yields a search hit rate for “Public Engagement” of about 3,050,000 results, for “Public Engagement with Public Service Cover UK” about 566,000 results. In the subject areas of communication, psychology and public policy there is a wealth of academic knowledge. This suggests that either academia should supply relevant evidence bases to the UK FRS, or that the UK FRS should be commissioning work to establish principles of public engagement as stakeholders of public services and the civic.

Communication with key stakeholders

Regarding the communication to politicians as stakeholder groups (elected members, mayors, or PFCCs) there was no mention in the submissions of how these groups are engaged in the RMP process. Again, academia holds a large amount of knowledge about effective methods and principles of communication; “Communication of risk” yields about 3,380,000 results. “Risk communication to government UK” yields about 2,270,000 results.

Principles of good communication

There are principles of good communication of risk that we recommend the UK FRS consider adopting in their public and political facing engagements (either in face to face or interactions through documentation). These include moving the reader from a position of certainty to a position of uncertainty (addressing the illusion of certainty), aiding the public’s understanding of the relative size of the risks (addressing ignorance of risk), enabling the public to talk about risk (addressing miscommunication of risk) and guiding the public to make inferences from risk information (addressing clouded thinking).

Communicating risk quantities

We advocate that the UK FRSs communicate risk quantities in frequencies to the public, specifically in the format of natural frequencies. This needs to be articulated further with rarer or single event probabilities as there are fewer events of like (by the nature of them being rare) to communicate effectively in frequencies. Academia can provide an evidence review of risk communication should the UK FRS wish to commission one using a reliable and specialised evidence base (such as Gigerenzer, 2002 for risk communication through words and Bao, Wu, Wan, Li, & Chen, 2017) for capturing specificity of risk on a matrix).