Scottish Fire and Rescue Authorities 2007/08 – podcast transcript

Anne: This is Anne McCubbin here to talk with Miranda Alcock about our report Scottish Fire and Rescue Authorities 2007/08: A progress report.  Miranda, what’s this about?
Miranda:  A year ago we published a major review of service reform in Scottish fire and rescue authorities and this report is an update on what they’ve being doing in the past year.  

Anne: So where have they made progress?
Miranda:  Last year’s report included a number of recommendations and we found progress had been made in a number of these.  In particular, they’ve been engaging elected members and councillors on Scottish fire and rescue authorities are now aware of their governance and scrutiny responsibilities.  They’ve been continuing to put more resources into community safety and preventing fire happening in the first place and they’re also working much better with partners and partner organisations.  There’s progress in staff management in particular they’ve developed personal appraisal systems and they are taking positive steps to build a more diverse workforce and improve equalities.  

Anne: And what do they still need to do?
Miranda:  Well, there has been some much slower progress in some other areas.  For example, we found that fire and rescue authorities still need to evaluate the impact and cost effectiveness of their different approaches to community safety and fire prevention so they can demonstrate they’re using resources to best effect and generally performance management has to improve and further work is also needed to demonstrate and show the efficiency savings that they’re proposing are, in fact, being delivered on the ground.  

Anne:  So what impact has this had on the number of fires?
Miranda:  Well, the number of house fires has gone down over the past 4 years and that’s very good news and shows that some of the preventative work that the Scottish fire and rescue authorities are doing is having an impact.  But, secondary fires, things like rubbish, are going up all the time and there’s a strong link between those kinds of fires and anti-social behaviour which is why it’s so important for fire and rescue authorities to work with other organisations like the police and councils.  We also found that the number of people injured in fires is staying about the same, so it’s a continuing challenge for fire and rescue authorities to bring those numbers down.

Anne: And what happens next with the auditing of fire and rescue authorities?
Miranda:  Well, from 2009 we’re planning to introduce Best Value audits of individual fire and rescue authorities.  These will look at the performance of each authority in much more depth than we’ve been able to do in this brief national overview.

Anne: You use the term fire and rescue authority, what do you mean by this?
Miranda:  In this report we mean both the councillors who sit on the committee, or the joint fire and rescue board and also the fire and rescue service itself.

Anne: Thanks very much Miranda.