Playing with fire: Limitations of the Big Society for an emergency service

Localism and the Fire and Rescue Service

It has been suggested that much of the appeal of localism, like the appeal of the Big Society, lies in its vagueness (see e.g. Jacobs and Manzi, 2012). At its essence is a strategy ‘aimed at devolving power and resources away from central control and towards front-line managers, local democratic structures and local consumers and communities’ (Stoker, 2004: 117). With the advent of New Localism (Stoker, 2004) it also presupposed local action within an agreed framework of national minimum standards and policy priorities. However, under the Coalition government these top-down performance frameworks and supporting targets have been radically reshaped. Some suggest little real power or finance has been devolved, others that it acts conveniently to devolve responsibility for reductions in public expenditure to the local level and does nothing to address macro-structural inequalities in power and resources (see e.g. Hunter, 2011; Martin, 2011).

Localism is already a part of the FRS (Haydon, 2011). In addition to its duty to respond to a wide spectrum of fires and non–fire-related emergencies, it is charged with protection and prevention. This includes the enforcement of fire safety regulations and reducing fire deaths, deliberate fires and the impact of road traffic incidents. Localism is integral to these new roles (Fire Futures, 2010a: 3), which seek to support groups such as the elderly who are at greatest risk from fire and to tackle anti-social behaviour, a major source of deliberate fires. The existing process of integrated risk management planning, for example, is described as ‘a “place map” of community risk, aims and priorities’ (Fire Futures, 2010a: 5), produced by local services, arguably driven by the local agenda and with an emphasis on local risks. Similarly, the retained duty system is given as an exemplar of ‘community spirited individuals coming together for the benefits of their neighbourhoods’ (Fire Magazine, 2011) in the spirit of the Big Society.

While the FRS recognises the benefits in moving decision making to the lowest level possible and enabling citizens to have an appropriate influence in the way individual authorities determine and deliver services, an obvious proviso is that FRAs must also have an ongoing capability to respond to emergencies beyond the local level (Ewen, 2004). One option, for example, focuses on new structural parameters to encompass integrated service commissioning. This includes pooled budgets for a range of local services (including the three blue light services) and supply pluralism to encourage active citizen involvement in lower-tiered interventions and the diverse supply of professional reactive services (Fire Futures, 2010a). In return the Service expects the government to dismantle centrally controlled performance management systems and remove legislative and other obstacles to local innovation and delivery (see Department for Communities and Local Government [DCLG], 2011: 25).

On the face of it, key aspects of localism in the FRS testify to the strong potential in rural areas for local involvement in public service delivery. In particular, reliance on the retained duty system is currently subject to a marked rural–urban gradient. Retained staff account for 17 per cent of all staff in areas that are ‘predominantly urban’ according to the rural/urban definition (England and Wales; see ONS, n.d.), compared to 58 per cent in ‘predominantly rural’ areas (DCLG, 2008). Yet this and other examples of localism in the FRS provide important insights into the limits of the Big Society vision. First, the example of the RDS suggests that citizens may be unwilling to perform public sector functions without the same employment rights as public sector employees and that the motivators for wider community action may have been ‘ill understood in policy circles’ (Mccabe, 2010: 2). Second, there is a resource context to geographical variation in community involvement, raising some questions as to whether local communities are actually taking power back from the state or responding, out of necessity, to unmet need (community action as conscription). Third, key aspects of the emergent modernisation agenda, most particularly the shift towards proactive, preventative and community-based partnership working, are not easily realised in all geographical contexts. In this case, urban areas may have more capacity to deliver new partnerships and new ways of working than their rural counterparts. Finally, while a key aim of rebalancing the relationship between the state and local communities is to drive forward improvements in service quality, evidence from the FRS suggests that higher rates of localism are not associated with higher performance, raising important questions about the implications of the Big Society agenda for social justice and equity.

The Big Society in action: The case of the retained duty system

The retained duty system (RDS) comprises firefighters who are not based at a station but respond to calls from home or work (the majority of RDS staff are employed in other occupations) both day and night. They attend the same type of calls as full-time staff, responding to emergencies (such as fires, road accidents, floods or chemical spills), attending the injured or ill if they are distant from an ambulance station, and getting involved in other activities such as community fire prevention.

The RDS provides a clear example of the Big Society in action, not only from the perspective of the firefighters themselves, who typically place considerable emphasis on doing something worthwhile and community involvement (Maclean, 2002), but also in terms of the goodwill required from (and economic cost to) the local business community. It is an important component of the Fire and Rescue Service. Nearly one third (30%) of all FRS operational staff in England and Wales is employed on a retained basis. Indeed, over half of all fire stations in England are staffed exclusively by RDS personnel and over one-third of FRAs employ more RDS personnel than whole-time staff. Overall, retained firefighters provide fire and emergency cover to about 90 per cent of the area of Britain (DCLG, 2008).

It is also an area where there is considerable geographical variation. Seventy-one per cent of fire stations in predominantly rural areas are wholly retained stations, compared to just 9 per cent in predominantly urban areas. In Norfolk, Suffolk, Cumbria, Dumfries and Galloway, and the Isle of Wight over 85 per cent of fire stations are manned by RDS staff. By contrast, no fire stations are manned by retained staff in London or Merseyside and only one in each of Greater Manchester, the West Midlands, and Tyne and Wear (Keter, 2009). Both the FRS and the government (Fire Futures, 2010b; DCLG, 2011) are now, however, advocating the extension of the RDS, suggesting it may soon, largely for reasons of cost effectiveness, be extended to the urban environment and night-time working.

While the RDS has been described as a service ‘designed to meet the needs of the communities that it serves and not necessarily those of the people who provide the service’ (Hansard, 2009: 11 February, c411), it also demonstrates some of the limitations to achieving greater community involvement in public service delivery. There have, for example, been longstanding problems in the recruitment and retention of retained firefighters, with estimates suggesting that the service has been operating at a 20 per cent shortfall (Taylor, 2005; Retained Firefighters’ Union, 2007). The fact that RDS staff have been expected to provide the same services as whole-time staff while enjoying different contractual arrangements and different rates of pay has played an important role in recruitment difficulties.

In recent years, the employment rights and responsibilities of retained staff have been increasingly regularised. Their pay structure incorporates the principle of parity of hourly rate with employees on other duty systems for all hours of work activity. In 2007, the House of Lords upheld an appeal brought by the Fire Brigades Union, accepting the case that, although retained duty system and whole-time firefighters were engaged in broadly similar work, the former (who were excluded from the Firefighters' Pension Scheme and certain provisions under the sick pay scheme) received worse treatment. While, at the time of writing, the financial details of individual settlements have yet to be finalised, the legal case has been established that all retained firefighters are now recognised and rewarded as part-time workers. Allied issues to be addressed, as the government itself recognises (DCLG, 2011), are thus staff costs and rising management overheads, as well as maintenance of competence and the cost of training. A national review of the RDS produced by the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister (ODPM, 2005) found problems of consistent under-funding and acknowledged the unrealistic expectation that many years of under-investment in the retained duty system could be overcome cost-neutrally. This suggests that cost efficiency has been secured by transferring costs to some individuals and certain communities.

There remain, however, other barriers to recruitment and retention. The vast majority of RDS staff are in paid employment (DCLG, 2006) and need to secure the cooperation of their principal employer in order to be released for fire duties. The extent to which Small and Medium Enterprises (that make up a higher proportion of businesses in rural areas) find it feasible to allow staff to undertake RDS duties – particularly in the current economic climate – has been open to question (Hansard 2009). Moreover, many people now work some distance from their homes, making it difficult to respond to calls during normal working hours.

In order to commit additional time to fire fighting duties, which often involve hazardous work, retained firefighters need the support and understanding of their families. They also need to feel valued. Yet few people are aware of what the retained service is and what it does (The Independent Review of the Fire Service, 2002). The demoralisation of the RDS workforce and related problems of recruitment and retention have also been attributed to concerns that the service itself does not consider retained firefighters to be in the same league as whole-time staff.

It is important to recognise that the community-spirited individuals who make up the RDS are not volunteers but contracted employees who receive an annual retainer fee and are paid on a per-emergency-call basis. Moreover, RDS firefighters and their representatives have consistently defended – and won – the right of retained staff to equal treatment with whole-time workers over a range of issues. Yet, the extent to which this has addressed recruitment problems and reduced the 20 per cent shortfall in the retained service is unknown.

Significantly however, current proposals now seek to expand the use of volunteers, potentially entering into service level agreements with local communities and advocating the possibility of voluntary-run stations providing emergency cover (Fire Futures, 2010b). While Scotland still maintains a mixture of retained, volunteer and auxiliary firefighters, volunteer brigades had been all but phased out in England. Peterborough Volunteer Station provides a unique example of voluntary action in this sector but operates in city which also has two whole-time and one retained fire station (www.cambsfire.gov.uk).

Experience suggests that key assumptions of the Big Society, including this increased involvement of volunteers in service provision, may be open to question. First, whilst admittedly an isolated example, the Peterborough Volunteer Fire Station has been struggling to recruit volunteers, with numbers reportedly the lowest they have been for 20 years (Collett, 2011). Second, research in Scotland, undertaken as a result of concerns by some Scottish brigades over issues of recruitment and retention of rural and retained firefighters, suggests that whilst members of the retained service are concerned over aspects of training, equipment and a lack of appreciation of their commitment and professionalism, this feeling of being insufficiently valued and resourced is further compounded at the voluntary end of the spectrum (Maclean, 2002). The same study also indicates that whilst volunteers may have different motivations, placing greater stress on contribution to the community, they, like retained and whole-time workers, are unfavourably affected by change and uncertainty. Management is rarely well equipped to manage and motivate a voluntary team.

Debates within the RDS have also highlighted problems surrounding rates of pay, pension entitlements, annual leave and the hours of cover individuals are expected to provide. Together they suggest that people providing public sector services tend to compare their experience with public sector wages and conditions. This may be a particular problem in a service where the demographic is distinct from the normal volunteer, being both younger (around half of those joining the rural and retained service in Scotland were 25 years old or under at the time of joining) and primarily male. They are thus also typically employed or self-employed. Together such issues raise doubts as to whether sufficient numbers of volunteers (who do not have the same legal rights as paid employees) can be recruited, even to a ‘highly regarded brand’, and renders uncertain the ability to extrapolate the experience of the RDS to other areas. Possible comparators such as the Royal National Lifeboat Institution arguably depend on community and family tradition, absent in England and Wales from voluntary engagement with the fire service. They may also be the subject of less frequent and more predictable engagement.

Community involvement: The resource context

There is, of course, a resource context to community involvement. One of the reasons that the RDS plays such a significant role in rural areas is that funding is not available to support an adequate complement of full-time brigades. There is no doubt that the use of retained firefighters is highly cost effective. The cost of crewing an RDS appliance is in the region of one-eighth of that for a whole-time appliance and, while the retained duty system employs 30 per cent of all FRS operational staff, it accounts for less than 14 per cent of total workforce costs. However, the fact that the use of retained firefighters may be a necessary response to a resource allocation formula that discriminates against rural areas raises important questions about both equity and capacity for further localism.

There is considerable variation in the distribution of resources for FRAs, expenditure per head (2006/07) ranging from £29.47 in Cambridgeshire to £58.91 in Cleveland. Predominantly urban areas (and, in particular, metropolitan authorities) fare much better than their more rural counterparts with respect to resource allocation. This is a function of a formula that is highly responsive to deprivation. There is, of course, a socioeconomic dimension to service need. Fires, whether accidental or deliberate, affect the poorest people disproportionately (ODPM, 2004). Those on the lowest incomes are 16 times more likely to die in a fire and 5 times more likely to be injured. However, the Fire and Rescue formula also arguably has a number of shortcomings. As a result, the relationship between deprivation and actual service need may be distorted and is likely to discriminate against less deprived, often more rural, areas by assuming that a relationship that is true for a small number of authorities is universal (Hewson et al., 2009).

The formula also excludes a number of resource-intensive statutory duties, perhaps the most significant of which is road traffic incidents. Around 3 calls in 100 made to the FRS are in relation to road collisions, compared to around 24 per 100 requiring attendance at a fire (DCLG, 2008). However, the workload implications of these calls may not be proportional to their incidence. Whilst the FRS is called to fire events of all magnitudes, it is called only to the most serious road collisions. This has considerable resource implications, there being more than ten times as many road fatalities as there are fire fatalities. The distribution of road traffic incidents also varies considerably, with the five authorities with the greatest per capita road traffic fatality burden having three times the burden of the five authorities with the lowest per capita burden. This burden appears to be borne disproportionately by predominantly rural authorities. Nine of the ten authorities with the highest per capita death rate from traffic incidents, for example, are predominantly rural with the highest-placed urban authority ranking 25th.

For these and other reasons, it has been argued that the Fire and Rescue formula discriminates against rural areas (Hewson et al., 2009). This would seem to be the case when funding differentials are expressed in terms of the amount of money allocated by the Fire and Rescue Relative Needs Formula for each call received. ¹ In 2009/10, predominantly urban areas received £10.65 per call, compared to £2.92 per call in predominantly rural areas, suggesting that allocations are unlikely to reflect the actual service burden on the FRS (DCLG, 2009).

Against this background, the high reliance on retained firefighters in rural areas can be seen as a response to underfunding. From this perspective, it is difficult to describe localism as empowering. The requirement that rural communities assume greater responsibility for public service provision than their urban counterparts (and have had little choice in the matter) threatens social justice if this is understood to refer to the entitlement of individuals and groups to fair and equal rights. Moreover, as levels of community involvement are already higher in the countryside, questions arise as to whether rural areas have the capacity to further harness community engagement.

Localism and the emergent modernisation agenda

A second suite of functions that have been associated with localism but whose distributional impact has not been explicitly recognised are those associated with the emergent modernisation agenda. At the heart of modernisation is the emphasis on identifying risk and fire prevention (i.e. an emphasis on a proactive service) and action in support of social inclusion, neighbourhood renewal and crime reduction (DCLG, 2008). To this end, fire services are now increasingly expected to work with public and voluntary partners to improve fire safety and to contribute to quality of life in local areas.

In order to free up resources for fire prevention work, many FRAs have been changing traditional shift systems and working practices. However, questions have been asked as to how an increasing emphasis on community fire safety can be reconciled with a retained staff. Employers may be unwilling and/or unable to release staff for other than an emergency response. There are also resource implications to increasing the activities carried out by RDS staff. For example, Shropshire FRS doubled the number of home fire risk assessments carried out by retained firefighters in 2007 (Audit Commission, 2008). Yet, even with only a very minimal contribution of one hour per week per RDS firefighter, the additional funding would equate to over £11 million a year (see Taylor, 2005). Devon and Somerset are therefore introducing contracts that are open to other than fire personnel (on a reduced rate) for community work of various types.

New partnership arrangements also have significant resource implications for rural areas. One example is co-responder schemes. The 2004 Fire and Rescue Service Act placed new duties on all FRAs, including a statutory obligation to attend any emergency, not just fires. Co-responder schemes, where the FRS works in partnership with the Ambulance Service to provide emergency medical cover in locations where they can respond more quickly to a call, fall within the scope of this Act. They provide another area of emergency response where the formula appears not to reflect changing demands on the service and where the ability to respond locally may be constrained.

Co-responder vehicles are equipped with oxygen and automatic external defibrillation equipment with the aim of preserving life until the arrival of either an ambulance or Rapid Response Vehicle. Their adoption remains a matter of ongoing dispute. The Court of Appeal has ruled that Fire Brigade Union members are under no contractual obligation to participate in co-responder schemes. They have, however, the support of the Retained Firefighters’ Union (RFU), which is particularly active in rural areas. The RFU suggests that the ability of the FRS to provide such assistance is particularly important in more remote areas, a view endorsed by the Chief Fire Officers' Association.

There is no clear difference between the numbers of predominantly urban FRS (40%) that possess co-responder schemes and those in rural areas (38% in ‘significantly’ rural areas, rising to 53% in ‘predominantly’ rural areas). The difference between metropolitan areas (29%) and combined fire authorities/county councils (46/47%) is, however, more pronounced. This is likely to be because a simple presence or absence indicator fails to capture the difference in the actual numbers of schemes between urban and rural areas (an area where statistics are not easily obtained at an aggregate level). Wiltshire FRS, serving a predominantly rural catchment, for example, has been operating a successful co-responder scheme for several years. Every retained pump carries defibrillators and oxygen therapy equipment, many of their stations are equipped with a light vehicle suitable for emergency response work and the FRS has widened the scope of their agreement with the Ambulance Service, increasing the range of incidents to which they can respond (see, for example, OHR Limited, 2009). In Devon, where the scheme is provided mainly from retained rural stations, it has also been expanded, due to community requests and risk assessments, to include fifteen stations (Chief Fire Officers’ Association [CFOA], 2008).

These are just the kind of pooled resources and community responsive action that the localism agenda would support. Yet, the funding implications are not without controversy. The predominantly rural Lincolnshire FRS, for example, has co-responder schemes at 21 fire stations, with firefighters responding to 2,287 calls during 2006 (CFOA, 2008). Given that 84 per cent of Lincolnshire’s fire stations operate on a retained basis and the service answered 3,323 calls to fires in 2006/07, some idea of the potential burden of such calls in rural areas can be obtained. In Devon, meanwhile criticism has attached to the purchase of dedicated light vehicles for co-responder calls because they are funded entirely by fire service money despite not being used for fire service duties.

This has been, therefore, an expanding service where debate surrounds not only its absence from the resource allocation formula but also its appearance on the FRS cost sheet. In consequence, such services are often vulnerable and poorly funded. The co-responder scheme operating from three retained stations on the Lizard Peninsula in Cornwall, for example, was under threat in 2006/07 when annual operating costs of c£30,000 per annum could not be met and the West Country Ambulance Service Trust declined to provide assistance. The final budget settlement allowed the scheme to continue only with a contribution of 50 per cent of the annual cost from Kerrier District Council (Littmoden, 2007).

Unsurprisingly, increased collaborative working, commissioning from (or provision by) other providers and an extension of co-responder schemes are all features that the government see as important components of the FRS of the future (DCLG, 2011). Yet, given current reductions in state spending, particularly in local authorities, and the tendency for public and private sector organisations to go into defensive mode in times of austerity, developing strategic and operational solutions for their own survival (Lowndes and Pratchett, 2012), opportunities to secure additional resources to maintain or roll out such services are likely to diminish. Thus, far from seeing an expansion of services through localism, there is a significant risk of contraction.

Given that the RFU suggests such schemes are not only important in providing an effective response but also have a number of less tangible benefits such as raising the community profile of the service, increasing recruitment, income, workload and hence the presumption against closure, the failure of the resource allocation system to reflect the real costs associated with locality in promoting protection, prevention and partnership could have far-reaching consequences.

Localism: Implications for improving service quality

Despite the fact that the Big Society has become inexorably linked to deficit reduction (Mccabe, 2010), the government has been at pains to point out that this is not an exercise in cost cutting, rather an exercise in changing local democracy and governance, including finding new and better ways of providing services. If greater community involvement is the key to driving forward improvements in the responsiveness and quality of services, one would expect higher rates of localism to be associated with higher performance. Evidence from the FRS suggests that they are not.

National standards were repealed in 2003. The fact that FRAs are now responsible for setting their own response for proactive and reactive service delivery militates against ready comparison and an overview of the national situation. Rurality appears, however, to be recognised in practice as a factor differentiating risk and response. Thus an inspection of Integrated Risk Management Plans suggests that most authorities continue to set response times that are more tolerant for rural areas. To compensate for additional response time, however, the level of response may be heightened. For instance, if a fire-related call to the Devon and Somerset FRS comes from an area outside the designated 10-minute response time, the FRS increases the personnel and pumps in attendance on the grounds that the fire will be more developed by the time they get there. In such a scenario, distance carries a further explicit cost to the provider. It has also been suggested that the rationalisation of the FRS is having the greatest impact in emergency response times in rural areas (Patrick, 2007). Figures released in answer to a parliamentary question reveal that response times to 999 calls to the fire service increased by 11 per cent between 2000 and 2005, with rural communities faring less well than urban areas. In Devon, the length of time to get to emergencies increased by 20 per cent. In Somerset, it was 22 per cent.

Evidence from the Audit Commission (2008) also suggests that the FRS shows considerable variations in performance. In its performance assessment for 2007, the Audit Commission found that the rate of improvement in almost a third (30%) of fire services had slowed, a process it attributed to weak performance management systems and insufficient capacity to deliver priorities. Both actual performance and rates of improvement in performance of FRAs are lower in predominately rural areas. Urban areas appear to have more capacity as measured by resources/value for money, leadership, strategy and future plans. This, it has been suggested, is because they have addressed challenging issues by looking at levels of fire cover and staff numbers and matching resources to risk and demand. As established above, rurality imposes important constraints to reconfiguring services in this way. Against this background, citizen engagement should perhaps be viewed as a necessary response to such resource constraints rather than a mechanism for driving forward improvements in service quality.

Conclusion

Many of the assumptions surrounding the Big Society remain untested. As noted in the introduction to this article, it is commonly assumed that attempts to shift responsibility from the state to civic society will impact most negatively on the poorest, most vulnerable urban communities (Lowndes and Pratchett, 2012). The ‘powerful tradition of mutualism, co-operatives and the social economy’ may be recognised as straddling different ideological standpoints (Oppenheim et al., 2010: 2) but is still often illustrated by reference to the contemporary resilience of the rural. Evidence from the FRS questions this assumption.

The way in which the functions of this service are currently defined and resourced appears to discriminate against features that are central to both localism and the communitarian agenda. Specifically, it has been noted that unconventional forms of working, the allied goodwill of the community and the emergent partnership and preventative agendas are not supported by the resource allocation system. As a consequence, the service is under operational stress, and it is rural services that are often the poorest performers. Even the previous government acknowledged that the RDS was chronically underfunded (ODPM, 2005), and this analysis provides further evidence that organisational and managerial capital too is unevenly distributed. This resource context limits local ability to deliver fair services, develop bespoke options and ensure equal treatment of staff. Recruitment and retention remain problems, as does staff morale. For example, the RFU in their response to the floods of July 2007 drew attention to the moral pressure on crew members to make up for lack of numbers by working harder and longer than should be necessary.

By definition localism is not about treating all communities equally, rather tailoring solutions to meet local needs. Equity however remains an imperative. To be empowering, localism must ensure fair and even access to new rights and opportunities. Yet in the FRS and, indeed, other public service sectors (Asthana et al., 2009), rural areas receive lower levels of public funding relative to service need and have thus been expected to plug the gaps in statutory service provision to a greater extent than their urban counterparts. In this case, an uneven funding base and the differential capacity to make savings suggest that localism may have exacerbated an already unequal geography of service provision.

Against this background, the consequences of extending localism through, for example, the use of retained staff to the urban environment should be carefully considered. Lessons from rural services suggest there are limits to the extent to which the Big Society can replace public service functions without sacrificing service quality or raising issues of social justice.

Costs fall unequally on those individuals, families and communities who support essential services. Question marks remain, for example, over the willingness or ability of the business community to release labour without compensation or for volunteers to act as employees, particularly in times of recession, rather than seeking ‘something qualitatively different in their community activity from the demands, pressures and duties of work’ (Mccabe, 2010: 13). Costs also fall unequally on recipients of the services themselves. The autonomy purportedly associated with Big Society and the localism agenda is demonstrably meaningless unless the necessary resources are available to support locally determined action.

Localism is ostensibly about ‘what works here’ (Coaffee and Headlam, 2008: 1586). However, as Lowndes and Practchett (2012) note, under New Labour the commitment to localism was bounded by a desire both to retain central control over significant public investments and to maintain principles of standardisation and equity. The current reduction in audit and national standards, combined with organisational retreat to core business, an individualistic agenda of deregulation and increasing diversity and local control (Jacobs and Manzi, 2012), sits uneasily with the requirements of an emergency service and suggests the necessary preventative agenda, as so often, will become a residual.