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The Assistant Chief Fire Officer presented Members with a summary of the Service’s performance for Quarter 1 to Quarter 2 2020-21 against a comprehensive set of Performance Indicators agreed by the Senior Management Board (SMB).
Members were made aware of an error in the sickness data where the figures had been transposed. Members were asked to note that there had actually been a decrease in the sickness levels and the recommendation below had been updated to reflect this.
Members were assured that with regard to Covid, any cases had been contained which was helped by splitting work forces into pods and home working where appropriate. This was testimony to the good work of staff ensuring work places were Covid secure.
A Member requested a breakdown between normal sickness and Covid and Members were advised that this information would be sent to them following the meeting.
There was a request from a Member for an amendment calling for a future report to consider the possibility of providing funding for an additional 100 firefighters over 4 years following the Report from the Fire Brigades Union over the loss of 11,000 firefighers across the country. Following discussion the amendment was put to a vote but was lost.
RESOLVED that Members noted the following headlines drawn from Appendix 1 relating to performance in Q1-Q2, 2020-21:
i) A total of 3,763 incidents were attended in Q1-Q2 2020-21, a decrease of 4.4% (173 incidents) when compared with Q1-Q2 2019-20. There has been a small increase of 3.4% in fire incidents and a 16.7% decrease in special service incidents when compared to Q1-Q2 2019-20.
a. Fires: an overall increase of 34 Fire incidents in Q1-Q2 2020-21 was mainly accounted for by an additional increase of 21.2% in Secondary Fire incidents when compared to Q1-Q2 2019-20. The number of Primary Fire incidents decreased by 11.2% when compared to Q1-Q2 2019-20. Although there was an decrease in the overall number of Primary Fires during Q1-Q2 2020-21, there was a 28.6% increase in Primary Fire casualties, but no fatalities.
b. Special Services: an overall decrease of 193 incidents in Q1-Q2 2020-21 was largely attributed to a 29.7% decrease in Road Traffic Collisions when compared to Q1-Q2 2019-20. The second largest decrease was in the collaborative incident types – ‘Assist other Agencies’ and ‘Effecting entry/exit’ - with 66 incidents fewer than the same period last year; however, it still accounted for over a quarter (28.8%) of all Special Service incidents in Q1-Q2.
c. False Alarms: although there was only a very small decrease of 0.8% in False Alarm incidents, the kind of False Alarms has changed when compared to Q1-Q2 2019-20. There were 52 more Good Intent False Alarms, 17 less Malicious False Alarms and 49 less Fire Alarms Due to Apparatus
ii) Overall Staff Sickness level for Q1-Q2 2020-21 was 2.97 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 a decrease when compared to Q1-Q2 2019-20, where the number of days lost per head was 4.06. In Q1-Q2 2020-21 the Wholetime firefighter sickness was 2.67 (days lost per head) which shows a decrease when compared to Q1-Q2 2019-20 where it was 4.22. Fire Control sickness also decreased from 3.92 in Q1-Q2 2019-20 to 2.30 in Q1-Q2 2020-21. Non-uniform staff sickness also decreased from 3.92 in Q1-Q2 2019-20 to 3.73 in 2020-21. Furthermore, there were 14 cases of Covid-19 sickness, where 6 cases where confirmed. A further 129 cases of self-isolation and 19 cases of shielding across the service.
iii) The Service attended 52.47% (138 incidents) of Primary Building Fires within 10 minutes in Q1-Q2 2020-21, compared with 47.44% (148 incidents) in Q1-Q2 2019-20. The average time for the first fire appliance to attend a Primary Building Fire was 10 minutes 31 seconds for Q1-Q2 2020-21 compared with 10 minutes 53 seconds in Q1-Q2 2019-20; an average overall improvement of 22 seconds.
iv) The average for the overall availability of the first On-Call (Retained) fire appliance was 91.51% in Q1-Q2 2020-21 compared to 84.48% in Q1-Q2 2019-20; an increase in overall average availability of 7.03%. The new Wyre Forest hub is included in this calculation and is compared to the sum of Kidderminster, Bewdley and Stourport stations in 2019-20.