The first competence of UK firefighters relates to promoting safety in the community. Many fire and rescue services are keen to build a contribution to road safety into this. Fire and rescue services attend serious traffic accidents and are well aware of the horrendous disablement and loss of life occurring daily on British roads - even though our roads are among the safest in the world.
The Audit Commission recognises this within our Comprehensive Performance Assessment for fire and rescue services. Road safety initiatives were seen as a particular strength of Cambridgeshire and Peterborough Fire Authority.
Themes
Changing lanes says that the biggest challenges in reducing road accidents are around changing road users' attitudes and behaviour. Engineering improvements continue to make the road infrastructure safer. But accidents will still happen as long as road users take risks (deliberately or simply thoughtlessly) or fail to concentrate. Challenging attitudes and behaviour is where the fire and rescue service can combine with other agencies to be most effective. Whether you are the chief fire officer or a watch manager, here are three high-level questions about your contribution to cutting road casualties.
- What opportunities do we have to get road safety messages across to people in our community? How do we engage the public?
- Do we coordinate with other organisations which can get the same messages across? Can we improve our joint working with others?
- What does our fire and rescue work tell us about accidents that could be useful to others? What information/data/intelligence do we collect?
Improvement questions will help you address the issues in your service or unit.
Road crashes take a terrible toll on people's lives. All the organisations that can help make roads safer should be planning together. Our case study C describes reaching an agreement on use of mobile speed signs. This enabled fire and rescue services and other organisations to use the signs as part of their safety promotion in local communities. The example for your local community might be quite different, but the principle of working out a shared approach still applies.
The way forward
The national report poses a challenge not just to fire and rescue services, but to police, health services and so on, as well as to:
- share intelligence about local road safety problems
- pool funding, skills and other resources
- coordinate publicity
- building on the framework for improvement we have devised
Improvement questions
Fire and rescue staff and authority members should use these questions to:
- review how their brigade contributes to road casualty reduction work
- generate proposals for managing it better
The questions do not cover technical aspects of road safety and have no relation to any audit or inspection activity by the Audit Commission.
General/profile
- What is the profile of road safety in your service? Is road casualty reduction a stated priority?
- Do you have a road safety champion? If so, does he/she have sufficient authority to make things happen?
- How is road crash activity reported to members? Is it being incorporated into Integrated Risk Management Plans?
- As an employer, what is your approach to work-related road safety?
- What formal partnerships with other public bodies is your service involved in (for example, local strategic partnership, crime and disorder reduction partnership)?
- Who attends these on behalf of the fire and rescue service? Do they make best use of these partnerships to help develop understanding and solutions?
Engaging the public
- How do you promote road safety? When safety education events and activities take place do they cover road safety as well? For example, do you take advantage of home fire risk assessments, or initiatives involving working with young people, to promote road safety as well?
- Who are you targeting? Is this based on detailed analysis? Which officers are involved in promoting road safety and do they have the right skills to engage with the target audience?
- Are the appropriate people kept up to date with key road safety issues, so that they can help with promoting safety?
- How do you work with the media when promoting road safety?
Joint working
- Where and how are your contributions to road safety improvement and promotion discussed with the council and the police? Do you have the same view of local problems as they do? How do you coordinate your activities so as to avoid gaps and overlaps? How could coordination be improved?
- How much resource are you spending on helping to reduce crashes and deal with the consequences? Do you share this information with road safety partners?
Information/data/intelligence
- If officers began to notice a pattern in the crashes they attend, or had a proposal for preventing them, who would they discuss this with? Is there a forum for discussing such issues? How do you share your data and intelligence on road crashes with partner organisations locally?