Bringing positive change to the Fire and Rescue Service

Roy Wilsher, His Majesty’s Inspector of Fire and Rescue Services, reports on how positive and lasting change needs to be introduced across the fire and rescue sector.

Working in the Fire and Rescue Service for 40 years, before my current role as His Majesty’s Inspector of Fire and Rescue Services, I had the privilege of seeing first-hand the dedication of extraordinarily hardworking firefighters and staff.

And through our inspections today, I continue to do so. Day-in-day-out they maintain an unwavering commitment to protecting the public and serving the community, in what can be a difficult job. And fundamental to this is trust in your colleagues. Trust that if anything goes wrong there’s a system in place to protect you and your team. Without this trust, there can be fundamental impacts on both the individual and their service.

Unfortunately, I was saddened to see too many examples of a lack of trust and confidence during our most recent inspection of the Fire Service. You may recall our report into values and culture, published last year. Many would have been concerned by media reports about bullying, harassment and discrimination in the sector. This led to the review into the handling of misconduct, with our findings published last month.

Firstly, I was pleased to see the beginnings of improvements. It’s clear that services have raised awareness of the standards of behaviour they expect. Most senior fire and rescue leaders have demonstrated a commitment to creating a positive, inclusive culture. And they recognise that tackling unacceptable behaviour is a big part of this. In the wake of our report last year, it is positive to see services creating strategies and action plans. For example, implementing the Core Code of Ethics.

But while services are taking steps in the right direction to root-out misconduct and promote culture change, further progress is urgently needed, particularly in regard to trust and confidence.

Put simply, staff don’t have trust in misconduct processes. And this was not just in a handful of cases, but concerningly, there was a widespread lack of confidence in discipline processes. Many of the people we spoke with said they were concerned about what would happen if they raised an issue. They feared they could be shunned by their work colleagues or labelled as a troublemaker. Women, those from an ethnic minority background or part of the LGBTQ+ community, were also more likely to describe a fear of reporting. If services are ever to tackle misconduct effectively, they need to create processes and cultures that people have confidence in, and support staff in coming forward.

For those working within watches, these teams can be a source of strength and support in dealing with sometimes harrowing and difficult work. But they are also where we more often find instances of unacceptable behaviour. And despite efforts to address them, toxic watch cultures have shown they can be resistant to change.

But for misconduct to be handled effectively, it’s vital those who oversee it have the knowledge and skills to do so. They must learn from what went wrong before to prevent it happening in future. Across many services, we found that greater training is needed for those involved in misconduct processes at all stages. For example, how to manage performance of staff, investigate allegations of misconduct, and how to decide cases and hear appeals.

We also found that many of the services we inspected conducted limited analysis of misconduct cases. But these learnings should not be shied away from. Evaluating what went wrong is crucial to protecting a workforce on both an individual and collective basis. Services need to do more to understand what happened, why, and what needs to be in place to stop it from happening again. Taking these learnings and sharing them across the sector is a fundamental building block to positive change, and services must see them as such.

While it is promising to see the early signs of change across the sector, it needs to happen more quickly. In our report, we have made 15 recommendations to help support the vital improvements needed, and to create a more rigorous and well-resourced misconduct process.

We will be closely monitoring the progress of all services against these recommendations. It is my hope that these practical steps will help to bring about the positive and lasting change that fire and rescue staff, and the public, deserve.