Strategic goal 1

This goal focuses on the work we do to prevent fires and other emergencies and reduce the potential harm such incidents can cause.

Over the life of our CRMP 2025-28, our focus will be on how we can more effectively identify and reach those who are at a higher risk of harm, and on improving our ways of working to deliver person-centred solutions more efficiently. We will also be developing our community engagement activities, with a particular emphasis on youth engagement.

We will continue to increase our productivity, through systems and process improvements. We will also place increased emphasis on working more effectively across multiple agencies and tailoring the delivery of our services.

During 2025-26, we will take the next steps in our improvement journey by achieving the following objectives: • Develop a fully costed business case for a youth engagement programme, with the aim of running pilots during the following year.

• Deliver a co-ordinated programme of community engagement events and campaigns, aligned to the national campaigns calendar promoted by the National Fire Chiefs Council (NFCC).
• Develop, test and evaluate new ways of identifying and targeting those who are likely to be at a higher risk of involvement in road or water incidents.
• Assess the feasibility of using volunteers to help support or deliver our prevention activities.
• Evaluate the impact the restructure of our prevention team, implemented in 2024, has had on our overall productivity and effectiveness in relation to our community safety and engagement work.
• Review how we resource our approach to fire investigations, aligning to national developments in ISO standards and sector best practice.
• Improve our ways of working to ensure we are fully compliant with the relevant fire standards and that we make effective use of learning from all sources, including feedback from service users, outcomes of fire investigations and serious event reviews.