New and Emerging Communities Project 2015/16

Recently there have been a number of prohibition notices issued by Fire Protection in the Fire and Rescue Service involving people sleeping above commercial premises and relating to high risk kitchen practices in restaurants and fast food outlets.

A joint initiative to educate and create a safe environment which embraces the culture of fire safety awareness both at home and in the work place was undertaken. BME Support Officer Naseem Begum and Paul Cooper Fire Protection Business Education Advocate, have over the past year set up several presentation workshops to educate and increase fire safety compliance for BME and Eastern European communities.

Research has suggested there is a gap within the understanding of fire safety requirements, ownership of smoke alarms and how to report an emergency of many Eastern European migrant communities within the city of Nottingham. To address this issue several ‘weeks of action’ were delivered, which targeted in particular Bulgarian, Romanian, Hungarian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Polish and Slovenian communities within the city of Nottingham.

The weeks of action included educational interventions in schools to key stage one and two students, fire safety workshops, networking lunches with business leaders to make them aware of legal requirements regarding business premises from a fire protection perspective, a social media campaign was also utilised. Through this targeted action 150 home safety checks were delivered to vulnerable people from the communities detailed above.

The uptake for the workshops has been very positive and the outcome has found that many of the issues raised have had a positive impact on the community regarding local businesses and within the family homes.