Archived decisions

Appendix C cont..

Hampshire Fire and Rescue Service

Narrative

Our Corporate Plan and IRMP

Achieving efficiency gains is an integral part of our improvement plan and our strategy is to achieve these through our IRMP and Financial Management strategy. In the 2005/06 forward plan we expected to deliver £686k cashable and £650k non cashable gains and we have exceeded these by achieving £1.096m and £1.225m respectively. Additionally in 2004/05 we set a target to divert 2% (£1.2m) of our resources to prevention and protection activities by 2008 and are pleased to report that we achieved this by the end of 2005/06.

Calculating Efficiency Gains

All efficiencies have been calculated using 2004/05 rates and staff costs include employers oncosts for National Insurance, Firefighters' and Local Government Pension Schemes. The cost of mobilising a pump and crew is £251 per hour taken from LG Alert 72/05 Section 12 charge for 2004/05.

Revised shift systems/crewing arrangements (IRMP)

HFRS has had wholetime/retained contracts for several years however since 2004/05 we have increased the number from 92 to 135 producing immediate improvement in RDS crewed appliance availability and enhancing the experience and skills base on retained stations. One off cashable efficiencies for initial training of £68k have been realised with the savings in recruitment still to be identified. In addition we have 29 wholetime/retained contracts for the USAR team and 3 for crewing the Incident Command Unit but the efficiencies relating to these are not easily quantifiable.

Other IRMP

In line with the Government's Strategy for Children and Young People we run Princes Trust Volunteer (PTV) teams and deliver Life Intervention Fire Education (LIFE) programmes, we second the equivalent of 3 wholetime firefighters to these initiatives with ongoing cashable gains of £96k.

A previously reported one off efficiency of £75k for a 20 month contract with Hampshire County Council to provide funding for secondment of an officer to work in their Property, Business and Regulatory Services department to help manage fire safety in all their premises as part of our strategy to reduce the number of fires that occur in buildings has now become an ongoing cashable gain of £46k.

One off cashable gains of £80k were achieved through secondment of specialist officers to the Marine Coastguard Agency, Schools unit, Community Fire Safety and the National Trust in support of our aims for improving water, fire and road safety in the community.

In support of our target to deliver free home fire safety visits (HFSV's) the number of visits carried out by wholetime crews was increased to 2 per day and in 2005/06 a total of 14,218 visits were made of which 11,459 were completed by wholetime crews increasing ongoing non cashable gains by £730k.

A new performance indicator BV 146i was introduced in 2005/06 to measure the number of malicious calls not attended. The non cashable saving by control room staff not mobilising a pump to 429 malicious calls was £108k.

Collaboration

With the aim of championing the benefits of fire protection initiatives, particularly fire sprinkler systems and smoke alarms, to reduce loss of life in premises and lessen the impact on the wider community we formed a new partnership with Southampton City Council (SCC) and have seconded an officer to work with their estates department to promote installation of fire safety systems in their public premises and housing. The officer has also identified people working for SCC who will be able carry out HFSV's on our behalf in some the `hard to reach' sections of the community. One off cashable gain £26k in 2005/06 and £42k in 2006/07.

In 2005/06 we established 3 Co-responder schemes in partnership with Hampshire Ambulance Trust (HAT). HAT provide training, equipment and vehicles and we respond to their calls with one retained firefighter. 1837 calls were attended at a cost to HFRS of £40 per call. This compares very favourably with other schemes operating elsewhere where an appliance and crew are mobilised at a notional cost of £251. The ongoing non cashable saving being £387k. During 2006/07 a further 3 schemes will be started.

HR Other

To ensure that our organisational structure meets the needs of HFRS to deliver the IRMP we completed Senior and Middle Management Reviews and the full grey book job evaluation project which identified efficiencies that can be delivered over the medium term. In 2005/06 we transferred 1 DO post to green book (non-uniformed), 2 DO's FDS to SMA and deleted 1 StnO 42 with recurring cashable gains of £158k.

Best Value Reviews of Workshops and Procurement and staffing reviews in Performance Review and Driver training were carried out in 2004/05 resulting in deletion of 5 posts and replacement of a leading firefighter by a green book driving instructor achieving ongoing cashable savings of £161k.

Procurement

Since his appointment in March 2005 our Procurement Manager has been actively involved in the Regional Procurement Working Group and has been able to identify savings for the benefit of the group as well as HFRS. He has developed our Procurement Strategy in line with the National Strategy, best value and regional and national collaboration. He has reviewed and reduced the number of suppliers, reduced our stockholding, aggregated our spend and negotiated good discounts producing recurring cashable gains of £90k principally in stationery supplies £49k, hand tools £24k and BOC cylinders £7k.

We purchased 53,600 smoke detectors using the Firebuy Framework Agreement for Smoke Alarms with a one off cashable saving of £21k including the saving from not having to undertake an OJEU tender.

Corporate Services

In April a trial was launched in the Popley area of Basingstoke to locate a fire appliance at the community centre which is in an area of identified risk enabling us to integrate our service into the community to provide community fire safety advice as well as improving our response times. We had plans to build a new fire station but following the success of the trial we are developing plans to remain at the community centre and £3m has been removed from the capital programme with ongoing cashable savings of £270k costs of borrowing.

Dir_Fin/Financial Efficiency savings achieved 05 06 - Narrative WL/JMW/6/7/06