Report - Fire Brigades Union

Section
Fire and rescue
service policy
B1 Introduction
Fire and rescue service policy is a matter devolved to the
respective government bodies in Scotland, Wales and Northern
Ireland. In relation to English fire and rescue services,
government policy remains the responsibility of Communities
and Local Government (CLG).
B2 FRS policy – government
responsibility – England
Responsibility for the fire and rescue service for England, and
to some extent the UK through the provision of guidance
advice, lies with Communities and Local Government (CLG).
The secretary of state for Communities and Local Government
is the Rt Hon Eric Pickles MP. Ministers with a direct
relationship with fire are Bob Neill MP as the parliamentary
under secretary of state and the Rt Hon Grant Shapps, minister
for housing and local government.
CLG’s stakeholder bodies for the fire service in 2010 continued
to be the Practitioners’ Forum (PF) and the Business and
Community Safety Forum (BCSF). Dave Sibert, the FBU fire
safety adviser, represented the TUC on the BCSF until it was
disbanded. The general secretary represented the FBU on the
Practitioners’ Forum. Late in the year it became apparent that
the Practitioners’ Forum would be disbanded early in 2011.
The chief fire and rescue adviser (CFRA), who heads the Chief
Fire and Rescue Adviser’s Unit (CFRAU), provides ministers
with strategic advice and guidance on the structure,
organisation and performance of the fire and rescue service.
The current CFRA is Sir Ken Knight.
The principal functions of CFRAU are:
● the commissioning, quality assurance and publication of
operational guidance;
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the coordination of national assets during catastrophic and
major incidents through the Communities and Local
Government Emergency Room and the National Strategic
Advisory Team;
the audit of the fire safety arrangements in Crown
premises on a risk-assessed basis;
providing a broader challenge to specific policy areas
where necessary, particularly on equality and diversity;
the maintenance and updating, together with the Chief Fire
Officers Association (CFOA), of the operational assessment
of service delivery toolkit used by fire and rescue
authorities for self-assessment and peer review;
seeking to ensure that the government is able to engage
influentially in debate on fire and rescue service issues and
that the service’s interests are effectively represented by
the government both nationally and internationally.
CLG is divided into a number of departments which deal with
matters which intersect with aspects of the fire service
function in its widest sense. The primary directorate, however,
is the Communities Group. The CFRA is one of two directors
within the Communities Group with a direct relationship to the
FRS, the other being Neil O’Connor, the fire and resilience
director, who succeeded Shona Dunn in that role during 2010.
The Fire Brigades Union is represented at a number of key
FBU Annual Report 2011 29