Help shape the future of Oxfordshire County Council’s fire and rescue service 

Residents and businesses are being invited to help shape the future of Oxfordshire County Council’s fire and rescue service.  

A set of proposals will be consulted on, designed to ensure that, as Oxfordshire grows and changes its fire stations, resources, and people are in the right place at the right time to meet the needs of communities and improve the safety, efficiency and resilience of the service.

Oxfordshire Fire and Rescue Service has recently completed a review of how it delivers its emergency response and community safety across the county.

Considerations included how, where and when wholetime and on-call firefighters operate to enable the service to better meet demand day and night across all of Oxfordshire. This includes improving both emergency response times and expanding the reach of vital prevention and protection services to all communities.

Rob MacDougall, Oxfordshire County Council’s fire and rescue service’s Chief Fire Officer, said: “It’s important that we regularly review our resources, understand where incidents are most likely to happen and ensure we have the right level of emergency cover in those areas.

“We provide a fire and rescue service for the people of Oxfordshire, and I want them to play an active role in helping us plan and shape the future of the service by participating in our public consultation.”

On-call firefighter staffing levels continue to decline in Oxfordshire, with a 36 per cent reduction in the number of full-time equivalent on-call firefighters over the last 10 years. This is affecting the ability to respond to emergencies when demand is highest, which is during the day.

There is currently greater availability of resource – fire engines and firefighters – at night when demand is lowest, and lower availability during the day when demand is higher. This impacts response times in the day.

The public consultation will seek views on a range of proposals designed to:

• Match resources to risk, based on an understanding of where incidents are most likely to happen across Oxfordshire to ensure that the right level of cover is available in those areas.
• Improve community safety, with the service enhancing its prevention and protection work. This important service will be reshaped to meet the changing needs of Oxfordshire’s population.
• Futureproof the service by reviewing how it operates currently, which will help in making informed decisions that ensure long-term sustainability and resilience.

Councillor Jenny Hannaby, Oxfordshire County Council’s Cabinet Member for Community Wellbeing and Safety, said: “Your feedback is really important in helping us provide an even better fire and rescue service. The more opinions we receive, the more we can be confident that the decisions we take at the end of the consultation will deliver the kind of fire and rescue service you want across Oxfordshire.”

Public consultation

The public consultation includes a number of options that directly involve Rewley Road fire station in Oxford and the resources that are currently based there.

The option that is central to the consultation involves creating five day shift fire engines in Wallingford (or Crowmarsh), Faringdon, Witney, Bicester and Chipping Norton. This will be done by the reallocation of firefighters from existing roles including crewing on one of Rewley Road’s fire engines. This is to help address fire engine staffing levels elsewhere in the county.

This main proposal includes removing the on-call fire engine away from Rewley Road fire station due to very low levels of staffing over many years. Despite the commitment of the on-call at Rewley Road and the efforts made to boost recruitment, between July 2022 and March 2024, Rewley Road on-call provided less than five percent of staffing hours that are needed during the day and only nine percent availability at night.

A further option involves moving the fire engines from Rewley Road and Kidlington fire stations to a new fire station location towards the north of Oxford, to improve response times to the surrounding area as well as creating a more accessible station for firefighters outside the city centre.

For Thame, one of the proposals involves removal of the second fire engine at the town’s fire station which, despite the committed efforts of the local crews, has low availability and attends on average only 17 incidents a year in Oxfordshire.

This move, whilst having no significant impact to first response time to primary fires and road traffic collisions, would allow the employees based at the fire station to focus their efforts on ensuring that just one fire engine is made available.

No closures have been confirmed, however, three on-call fire stations – Woodstock, Eynsham, Henley – have been considered for closure due to persistent low fire engine availability.

This is because, despite the dedication of on-call employees, the pressures of modern life often mean that many of them are unable to commit to offering the hours that they once might have; they make themselves available based on their outside of the fire service work and family commitments.

These closures, should they proceed, are forecast to have a minimal impact on overall response performance due to the ability to deliver a fire engine response from surrounding stations, which is already often the case.

The consultation will be available on Let’s Talk Oxfordshire from Tuesday 28 October 2025.

FIRE Magazine

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