Communities and Local Government
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- Fire and resilience
- About fire and resilience
- Resilience
Resilience
When Central London was bombed on 7 July 2005, the spotlight fell once again on the UK's ability to respond to disaster. And terrorism is not the only threat that we, as a nation, have to deal with. Severe floods in Boscastle, Glastonbury and Carlisle stretched our emergency services to the limit.
Our ability to detect, prevent and respond to all kinds of emergency is known as resilience. Communities and Local Government works to ensure that the fire and rescue service is equipped and trained for any disaster and that local organisations are fully prepared.
The September 11 destruction of the Twin Towers in New York in 2001 marked a turning point in the threat posed by terrorism. It prompted our Government to review and improve our ability to respond to risk.
New Dimension
Through our New Dimension programme, we have invested over £200 million on equipping the fire and rescue service to provide the best possible response to any major incident. This includes mass decontamination, urban search and rescue, flooding and structural collapse.
FireControl
The FireControl project will replace England's 46 control centres with a linked network of nine regional control centres, equipped with the latest technology. This will improve communications, sharing data and making it easier to deal with major regional or national incidents. It will also be easier to mobilise response across borders by identifying the nearest appliance regardless of county boundaries.
These centres are expected to be up and running by 2008/2009. Meanwhile we have given a £1.2m grant to West Yorkshire Fire and Rescue Authority to make interim arrangements for co-ordinating and organising responses to major emergencies.
Firelink
As part of the drive to improve communications the Firelink project will replace individual fire and rescue service's radio systems with a single wide-area digital radio system. Many existing systems are old, outdated and incompatible with other services' equipment. The new system will allow communications between brigades and also with other emergency services.
The new system will have:
- clearer voice quality compared to analogue radios
- facilities for storing shared data
- the option to talk directly between officers' cars and appliances
- national links between control centres and vehicles wherever they are
- the ability to identify the location of a caller using a mobile phone
There is more detailed information about these projects for policy practitioners in the Resilience and response to emergencies section.
