Community Safety includes all emergency response, prevention and protection activities, as well as resilience arrangements.
Emergency response is subdivided into four groups, each consisting of a number of fire stations. These align with existing local authority and partnership arrangements:
- Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole
- Dorset
- Swindon
- Wiltshire
In addition, the Dorset & Wiltshire Fire and Rescue Authority has four Local Performance and Scrutiny Committees, covering Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole, Dorset, Swindon, and Wiltshire. The aligned structure ensures effective performance management and good governance so that we can assure delivery against our vision and Community Safety Plan.
Prevention
Prevention delivers community safety and education to make sure residents and visitors to Dorset and Wiltshire are safe in their homes and on our roads. The department’s principal areas of responsibility are delivering core statutory and non-statutory safety education, by:
- developing education packages and presentations in line with local authority children’s services and delivering them in mainstream, special, private and public schools, learning centres and to the home educated
- training staff and volunteers to ensure that they are competent in delivering education
programmes - providing signposting arrangements for the most vulnerable people, e.g. Safe and Independent Living (SAIL) and Single View data sharing initiative to risk assess vulnerability and enable a risk/resource matching programme
- attending and supporting the Dorset and Wiltshire road safety partnerships
- delivering targeted road safety education that helps to reduce road traffic collisions (RTCs) and related casualties, e.g. Safe Drive Stay Alive (SADA) roadshows
- reducing arson and its associated impacts through education programmes and initiatives supported by our partners
- reducing fires and related casualties in the home
- delivering Safe & Well visits, targeting vulnerable people
- ensuring that safeguarding is at the core of all service delivery
- working with protection teams to identify fire safety issues in specific properties covered by legislation.
Safeguarding
Overall responsibility for supporting the organisation in its commitment to safeguard and promote the welfare of adults and children at risk. We recognise that the protection and safety of these individuals is ‘everyone’s responsibility’. Therefore, all staff, either paid or in a voluntary capacity, have a role to play in safeguarding and preventing the abuse of those who may be vulnerable.
Protection
Protection delivers on all aspects of technical fire safety, ensuring that the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order is met by businesses across both Dorset and Wiltshire. This department’s principal areas of responsibility are:
- delivering a proactive, targeted business support inspection programme to educate, ensure compliance and to enforce where standards are not achieved in high risk buildings
- providing business support and education, promoting residential and commercial sprinkler systems, and developing a partnership approach to strengthen awareness and compliance
- developing partnership approaches with other regulatory authorities such as housing, licensing and the Health and Safety Executive, to reduce risk and strengthen compliance
- developing awareness and use of assistive technology; and use of personal protection systems, to enhance the protection of the most vulnerable in our communities; using innovation to reduce risk, such as misting units to keep vulnerable people safe from fire
- delivering reactive enforcement of the Fire Safety Order following emergencies and incidents involving fatalities and injuries, including post fire audits, specialist fire investigation and prevention support
- delivering building regulation consultations and promoting the use of sprinklers at all viable opportunities
- carrying out prohibition and restriction functions where other support has failed, and dangerous fire safety conditions exist.
Service Control Centre and Response Support
This department primarily:
- provides an emergency command and mobilising centre, crewed 24 hours a day to receive emergency calls, mobilise resources and support the resolution of all incidents
- supports the Collaborative Partnership in the production of operational guidance
- looks after operational communications and station-end equipment
- manages staff resourcing, including on-call, whole time and flexi-duty officers
- researches and introduces incident ground technology to ensure that we continue to maximise firefighter safety.
- manages collaboration with partner agencies, the Networked Fire Services Partnership and other Fire and Rescue Services