Communities and Local Government
A selection of images representing communities.
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- Fire and resilience
- Fire safety guidance and legislation
- Fire Safety Law
- Our Fire and Rescue Service (White Paper) 2003
- Fact sheet 8: The Fire and Rescue Service: a rewarding career
Fire and resilience
Fact sheet 8: The Fire and Rescue Service: a rewarding career
- A modern fire and rescue service also means a service that is fair to all the staff who work in it.
- At present many people want to work as full-time fire fighters with, on average, 40 applicants for every job. But there are also real problems.
- The service does not represent the communities it serves - less than 2 per cent of firefighters are women or come from minority ethnic communities. There are also real problems recruiting retained or part-time on-call firefighters who crew 60 per cent of the appliances in the country. Furthermore there is currently no system by which the best can progress quickly to the top.
- The White Paper sets out changes to tackle these issues and ensures that the men and women in our fire and rescue service have a rewarding career.
- We will introduce a new personnel development system, the Integrated Personal Development System (IPDS), to build best practice into the service. This will lead to improved training, development and promotion opportunities for all. IPDS should also go some way to tackle the lack of diversity in the service.
- We will introduce multi-level entry. This will open up the service to a wider pool of talent.
- There will be a choice of family-friendly shift patterns. Local firefighters will be consulted before any change. That does not mean an end to second jobs and there will be, in future, overtime opportunities. For the first time - in many years - firefighters will be able to choose to do voluntary overtime.
- We will reform and modernise the pension scheme so that it is more attractive to a diverse workforce.
- We will modernise the disputes and disciplinary arrangements to bring them into line with ACAS best practice.
- We want to help address the current shortage of retained (part-time on call) firefighters by improving their terms and conditions, including better pay arrangements, an appropriate pension system and more opportunities for training, development and promotion.
