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

Transparency

To effectively manage risk, proposed prevention, protection, and response activities need to be communicated and approved by key stakeholders. Such communication requires that FRSs are able to understand the factors underlying risk there is a clear need for more transparent, quality assured data, and for information that does not make assumptions about the relevant factors for assessing community risk. The submissions from Cumbria, Lincoln, London and West Midlands all contain a transparent process for how they use datasets to inform the development of their RMP.

Range of data sources

In principle, FRSs should use a number of data sources to inform community risk assessment. These should be assumption free, and be at local, regional, and national level to ensure that an accurate, comprehensive, and up-to-date assessment of risk can be conducted. Nottinghamshire, Lincolnshire, Avon & Somerset, Tyne & Wear, Cheshire, and County Durham & Darlington FRSs report using a good range of data to inform their assessment of risk. As a recommendation, we suggest that FRSs should be using as many datasets from a range of sources, as they need to be robustly confident that they have appropriately assessed risks within their communities. We cannot suggest a specific number, or specific datasets, as local articulation of data should be a driving consideration. However, we do advocate that each FRS should be using national, regional, and local datasets to identify trends and patterns which can inform their own local risk profile.

Furthermore, we advocate exploring the relevance of different sources in assessing and managing community risk. There is evidence of a wide range of sources being used, and research should explore the relative importance of these factors in assessing and managing community risk.

Commercial datasets

The difficulty with current datasets is that they are also not quality assured, and often do not give FRSs the granularity of data that they require to plan for constantly evolving risks. They also cannot be mapped on to one another, so services are required to use a number of distinct datasets and extrapolate and then combine different elements of each to predict risk. In some organisations this means that those responsible for IRMPs use professional judgement to ‘weight’ different risk factors, which is good practice in that they recognise that risk factors are not of equal importance, however, is not based on evidence, and does not adapt to changes in predictors of risk. It is also difficult to apply this throughout the organisation through organisational memory.

Combining data sources

There should be a clear method for integrating sources of data into a single analysis. This has been explored further in the methodology section where we discuss the lack of detail in submissions to demonstrate how FRSs integrate different points of data analysis to inform their risk analysis priority/matrices.

National fire infrastructure for sharing data

UKFRS have the potential to be data-rich and the principles and aspiration of developing a self-sustaining data ecology have been discussed elsewhere in this report. However, the sharing of data between FRSs would also yield benefits at regional and national levels. At regional level the facilitation and support of data sharing would enable FRSs to identify risk and formulate regional responses. Although joint exercising might be common place, integration of data (rather than outcomes of analysis which is typically seen at regional blue light boards) would enable a more sophisticated analysis to be completed.

At national level the aggregation of data could build new national datasets enabling identification of current national trends and patterns. This would also address current challenges with the rarity of national level fire-related datasets. This includes the restricted access and comparison issues to IRS dataset, little or no national level data relating to prevention and protection activities, no fire specific available data to identify patterns and trends to horizon scan with. Leicestershire, Humberside, Tyne and Wear, London and West Midlands all have good practice in their submissions regarding the use of data to horizon scan. Establishing data sharing agreements at regional and national levels would also facilitate the confidence and model successful data sharing across the sector with other relevant partners.

Partner data

Many FRSs report working with other partner organisations in community risk management, and using partner data (e.g. Health data from the Exeter database) to inform community risk assessments. Using such data allows FRSs access to high-quality, rich sources of information that are able to identify those at high risk. We would recommend increasing this practice with the ultimate aim of data-sharing current, up-to-date data between emergency services locally, regionally, and nationally, which would accurate assessment and management of risk, and evaluations of control activities.