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The Assistant Chief Fire Officer presented Members with a summary of the Service’s performance for Quarter 1 2020-21 against a comprehensive set of Performance Indicators agreed by Senior Management Board (SMB).
Members' attention was drawn to a minor error at recommendation number ii) where the number of cases of self isolation was actually 43 and not 57 as noted.
Members queried the attendance standard and were assured that this was being looked at with the new CRMP proposals.
Members also queried the increase of false alarm incidents in Herefordshire which was thought to be due to the increase of gardening and burning garden rubbish during lockdown.
RESOLVED that Members note the following headlines drawn from Appendix 1 relating to performance in Quarter 1, 2020-21:
i) A total of 1,791 incidents were attended in Q1 2020-21, a decrease of less than one percent (12 incidents) when compared with Q1 2019-20. While the overall number of incidents for Quarter 1 2020-21 has remained similar to Quarter 1 2019-20, the distribution of incidents has changed. Fires and False Alarms incidents have increased whilst Special Services have decreased.
a. Fires: an overall increase of nearly 100 Fire incidents in Q1 2020-21 was mainly accounted for by an additional increase of over 50% in Secondary Fire incidents when compared to Q1 2019-20. The number of Primary Fire incidents remains comparable to Q1 2019-20 with only 1 additional incident. Although there was an increase in the overall number of Fires during Quarter 1 2020-21, there were no Primary Fire fatalities during this quarter.
b. Special Services: an overall decrease of 165 incidents in Q1 2020-21 was largely attributed to a 59.76% decrease in Road Traffic Collisions when compared to Q1 2019-20. The second largest decrease was in the collaborative incident types – ‘Assist other Agencies’ and ‘Effecting entry/exit’ - with 45 incidents fewer than the same period last year; however, it still accounted for a third of all Special Service incidents in Quarter 1.
c. False Alarms: although there was only a modest overall increase of around 7% in False Alarm incidents, the kind of False Alarms has changed when compared to Q1 2019-20. There was over a 40% increase in Good Intent False Alarms, a decrease of 25 False Alarms Due to Apparatus incidents and 6 less Malicious False Alarms incidents.
ii) Overall Staff Sickness level for Q1 2020-21 was 0.85 days lost per head (which is the ratio of the number of days/shifts lost per person against the average number of personnel) this shows an improvement when compared to Q1 2019-20, where the number of days lost per head was 3.03. In Q1 2020-21 Wholetime firefighter, Non-uniform and Fire Control staff sickness (days lost per head) were all lower than Q1 2019-20. Furthermore, there were 15 cases of Covid-19 sickness, where 8 cases where confirmed. A further 57 cases of self-isolation and one case of shielding across the service.
iii) The Service attended 57.05% (85 incidents) of Primary Building Fires within 10 minutes in Quarters 1 2020-21, compared with 48.95% (70 incidents) in Quarters 1 2019-20. The average time for the first fire appliance to attend a Primary Building Fire was 10 minutes 2 seconds for Q1 2020-21 compared with 10 minutes 41 seconds in Q1 2019-20; an average overall improvement of 39 seconds.
iv) The average for the overall availability of the first On-Call (Retained) fire appliance was 94.99%. The new Wyre Forest hub is not part of the calculations for overall availability figures as this would not give a fair comparison against 2019-20, when Wyre Forest was split across Bewdley, Kidderminster and Stourport fire stations.