Productivity

Collaboration

Shared Premises

NFRS continues to maintain several ongoing collaborative arrangements. These include having a Joint Headquarters with Nottinghamshire Police, Nottinghamshire Police working from various fire service sites including West Bridgford, Clifton and East Leake, and providing St Johns Ambulance with a training base at Highfields Fire Station to deliver first aid training. Nottinghamshire Emergency Planning occupy an office in London Road Fire Station and East Midlands Ambulance Service work from both London Road and Eastwood Fire stations.

Replacement Mobilising Project

Nottinghamshire Fire and Rescue Service share a Joint Fire Control Room with Derbyshire Fire and Rescue Service. This arrangement has been in place since 2018. NFRS and DFRS created a strategic collaboration to oversee the procurement and implementation of a replacement mobilising solution. This multimillion-pound project ensures both services have continued delivery of a core statutory duty. The Service has seconded an Area Manager to oversee the delivery of this major project.

Local Resilience Forum

A major achievement during 2025/26 was the successful embedding of the new Local Resilience Forum (LRF) Secretariat function within NFRS. The Secretariat Team have responsibility for providing coordinated multiagency support and maintaining a 24/7 On-Call capability to stand up Tactical and Strategic Coordination Groups (TCGs/SCGs). An extensive exercise programme tested the new cascade process and On-Call arrangements, identifying improvements across partner agencies and strengthening resilience across Nottinghamshire. Funding from MHCLG was effectively managed, with the Service on track to fully utilise its allocation and given access to an additional £68,000 of available underspend nationally. The Partner Finance Agreement was finalised with all agencies, enabling formal approval and contributions into the shared LRF budget.

Shared Resources

The Environmental Protection Unit - based at Stockhill Fire Station - is a shared asset operated in collaboration with DFRS. Under a reciprocal agreement, DFRS also provides Command Support Units to support NFRS, ensuring mutual operational resilience.

Asset Management & IT investment

IT Systems

Enhancements to digital systems supported productivity increases across departments. CFRMIS continued to be improved, with phase 2 development (Quick Screens) and data governance enhancements contributing to more accurate, timely and efficient operational recording and reporting. The improved user interface will allow a quicker and simpler completion of forms, and the provision of new devices enables direct input of Business Safety Checks (BSC) and Safe & Well visits (SWV) on-site, removing duplication and protecting the service from the risk of data loss

Mobile Improvements

ICT completed hardware refresh programmes, network infrastructure improvements, and the rollout of new access management systems across all NFRS premises. Appliance tablets and SIMs were upgraded to allow crews to complete admin processes when mobile in their local Communities without the need to return to Station.

CCTV

CCTV on appliances can be accessed remotely through the TrackEye software allowing investigations into collisions to be initiated immediately. Flexi Duty Officers with responsibility for completing initial fact-finding work are now able to access the system remotely and view footage to gather evidence.

Hydrant Testing

All MDTs on fire appliances can access the 3tc hydrant management software (Water Manager) to support the hydrant testing & cleaning programme for 18,000 installations in Nottinghamshire. When SWV, BSC or SSRI are being completed the latent capacity on the appliance is now being utilised to complete this additional workstream - ensuring productivity is maximised by the whole crew when operating in the community. Since this initiative launched in October 2025 743 hydrants have been tested.

New Appliances

A major capital programme is still in the process of being delivered, including receipt of 17 new “clean cab” fire appliances, a refurbished Aerial Ladder Platform (ALP), a newly commissioned ALP, and a new Command Support Unit. These assets enhance firefighter safety, improve reliability, and increase the range and efficacy of specialist response.

Technical Rescue Review

A project to restructure the Services technical rescue capability across the County was initiated with new equipment & PPE procured to support this. Benefits will include enhanced resilience and improved diversity of training across operational teams. It will also unlock unused capacity for Operational Activities as the training burden has been reduced at the previous specialist Stations.

Resourcing

Cell Fire MoU Trial

The Service trialled a new incident type “Cell Fire” requiring just one appliance to attend at small prison-cell fires. This was agreed with Prison Governors and contained several safeguards to ensure response was risk-based. This resulted in a reduction in attendances of 58% (270 – 157). If an average of 1 hour is taken for each appliance’s time commitment this has released an additional 452 hours’ worth of capacity for other Operational Activities. This change has other positive consequences, including ensuring broader operational resilience and reducing fuel consumption, environmental impact, and wear & tear on vehicles.

Flexi Duty Officer Collective Agreement

The Service renegotiated the agreement realising approx. 1,400 hours of increased capacity from this cohort. This equates to 80% of a FTE post which will be utilised for supporting other workstreams such as investigations, performance monitoring, Tactical Plan development and other essential work.

Remote Working

The Service continues to support flexible working and the use of Microsoft Teams for meetings allows staff to achieve effective work together from locations throughout the County, reducing travelling and improving safety through reduced vehicle movements.

Compartment Fire Behaviour Training (CFBT) Facilities Upgrade

A new attack box for hot fire training was constructed at Service Development Centre in Ollerton. This facility has allowed training to commence within our County. Previously crews had to travel to the Lincolnshire FRS facility at Waddington with additional costs in time, fuel and vehicle wear.

Income Generation

Charging Policies

NFRS has a chargeable special service calls policy, which provides the option to recover costs from a very specific set of fire service activities that sit outside our statutory responsibilities. The Fire Authority (See Appendix 1) reviews the rates annually.

Room Hire

The Service operates a room hire policy, offering rooms at its estate locations for external use. Hire rates are set at £314.80 for a full day, £162.50 for a half day, with an hourly rate available. In 2025/26 community room hire generated £423.00.

Charge For Assets

The Regional Fire Investigation Hydrocarbon Dog Unit is a shared asset between four Fire and Rescue Services, with each service contributing to its operational costs. When the Unit is deployed outside this agreement, the associated costs are recovered. In 2025/26, we received £1,712 in out-of-region charges, with £428 recovered as our service’s share from these deployments. The Service has an agreement with Nottinghamshire Police for the shared use of the Welfare Unit based at Stapleford Fire Station. Under this agreement, Nottinghamshire Police contributed £12,440 in 2025/26 for use of this vehicle.

Information Requests

In 2025/26, income generated from information requests (primarily from insurance companies, solicitors, businesses, and private fire investigators acting on behalf of insurers) totalled £6,414. A standard fee of £88.40 is applied per request, which covers access to a range of materials including fire reports, fire investigation reports, CCTV footage, images, or waveform audio files.

Other

Project Management

As part of wider organisational improvements, the Service strengthened its corporate programme office to improve governance, oversight and delivery of the CRMP change programme. Existing resources were optimised, and long-term resourcing requirements were assessed, including proposals for additional project management capacity. Change management capability was enhanced through new training for Programme Office staff, the drafting of updated change management procedures, and the identification of wider training needs across the management cohort. These improvements supported more consistent project planning, monitoring and reporting, increasing the reliability and efficiency of organisational change delivery.

Outcome-Based Activities

Our current CRMP 2025/28 continues our commitment to the strategic goals implemented in the previous CRMP. Strategic Goal 5 is Service Improvement and whilst this applies to the whole organisation, the MHCLG targets are explicitly highlighted within this goal.

To measure productivity, the Service uses several internally derived performance metrics for Wholetime & On-Call crews. These are:

• Number of Safe and Well Visits (SWVs)
• Number of SWVs delivered at Data-led Community Engagement Events (DICE)
• Number of Business Safety Checks (BSCs)
• Number of engagements under the Community Befriending Scheme
• Completion rates of Core Competencies
• Completion rates of Monthly Theoretical Training Planner
• Maintenance of Site-Specific Risk Information (SSRI)
• Attendance at operational exercises

These metrics are published in our Annual Delivery Plan and further displayed as part of each stations’ Plan on a Page to ensure maximum engagement and understanding across the organisation. The data is reported electronically on dashboards to enable managers at all levels to see up to date performance levels against each metric. Overall targets have been set within the CRMP but are also set each year in the ADP to ensure a sustainable continual improvement.

The Response Area Manager chairs a quarterly evaluation and assurance review meeting to interrogate performance of each station and address any areas of concern, whilst also recognising good practice of local teams and managers. An important part of this meeting is the focus on the quality of the reported metrics through the ongoing evaluation of each activity. NFRS recognises that simply increasing the numbers of any activity is only part of any effective productivity increase; the quality of that interaction and/or activity must be of a high standard to deliver the best value to our communities.

In 2025/26 Nottinghamshire Fire & Rescue Service responded to 12,235 incidents. This represents a 12.1% increase on 2024/25.

In 2025/26 16,636 Safe & Well jobs were completed. This saw an increase on the previous year of 6.2% and exceeded the CRMP target by 3.9%. The majority of SWVs in 2025/26 (10,666) were completed by Wholetime crews with On-Call contributing 1,246 to the overall total. In addition, 1,341 SWV were completed through targeted large-scale data-led events known as DICE. This was an increase of 36% on 2024/25 (986). The Service is committed to using a risk-based approach to SWV to ensure our resources are targeted to the most vulnerable residents in our community and continues to embed its use of the CHARLIE P profiling tool. We identify SWV through a combination of public and partner referral, data intelligence, or post incident engagement. In 2025/26 53% SWV were delivered to residents over 65 years old and 45% were for those declaring a disability.

Since 2021 the Service has been delivering Business Safety Checks (BSC) by operational crews. This commitment is demonstrated by the continued support of our Fire Protection team delivering a Skills for Justice accredited Level 3

Introductory Certificate in Fire Safety qualification in-house. The Service has worked hard to embed the BSC process with a target of having a qualified & warranted Supervisory Manager on 85% of Watches, maximising the capacity to undertake Short Fire Safety Audits in commercial premises throughout Nottinghamshire. In 2025/26 the Service delivered 1,743 BSC exceeding the ADP target by 5.6%. Operational crews delivered an overall increase of 12.6% from 2024/25 with On-Call teams contributing 39 BSC to the total.

Since 2023/24 all Wholetime crews have been asked to ‘befriend’ a community group whose membership is predominantly from those with a protected characteristic. The objective of this scheme is to raise the profile of NFRS; improve awareness and understanding of the services delivered; raise awareness of career opportunities; remove any fear of uniformed services; and to engage with hard-to-reach groups. During 2025/26 the number of activities taking place decreased by 17% although the CRMP target to engage with 150 groups has still been met.

Core competencies are monitored to ensure all operational staff are “in ticket” regarding their core firefighting skills. NFRS has set an ambitious target of 100% and has consistently delivered above 95% in previous years. Activity has increased from 797 delivered courses in 2024/25 to 945 courses in 2025/26 representing an increase of 18%.

To maximise efficiencies in training a substantial part of the theoretical knowledge required has been transferred online and the Service uses the NFRS learn platform for delivery and recording. In 2024/25 51,583 individual activities were recorded. This increased to 52,613 in 2025/26 indicating a 2% increase.

The Service has set a target of ensuring 90% of all SSRI documents are reviewed within 3 years to ensure accurate pre-planning at relevant sites in the County. There are 600 SSRIs in Nottinghamshire and to complete this work SSRI documents are distributed to all Wholetime Watches to review. Accuracy has been consistently above 95% since 2022. In 2025/26 329 SSRIs were reviewed. This is an increase of 47% from 2024/25 (224).

Although physical attendance at operational exercises has reduced slightly in 2025/26, the Service does also now deliver 2 Tactical Decision Exercises (TDE) to all operational crews per year to test knowledge and command decision making at known local risks. This equates to over 120 events delivered in 2025/26.

Workforce Capacity

The Service has a well-established Working Day Procedure for setting out planned tasks which was reviewed in 2024. The NFRS Collective Agreement for the Rostering of Staff combined with the Working Day Procedure aligns with the MHCLG defined “core hours” period - 12-hour dayshift between 07:00 & 19:00.

During 2025/26 the ridership capacity has generally remained consistent throughout the year. It is lower than optimum, but a substantial recruitment process was run over the Winter 2025/26, and the Service will inevitably see the benefits as these personnel are deployed to stations.

Wholetime capacity data demonstrates 93% of available time is allocated to meaningful tasks as per the Working Day Procedure. Looking at the data in more detail shows:

• 41% of capacity is utilised for Operational Activities
• 45% is allocated to Enabling Activities
• 14% is allocated to Non-Framework Activities.

There are 227 On-Call staff in NFRS who work contracts specific to the time commitment they can provide (25%, 45%, 70%, 92%, and 100% of 120 hours). This equates to 170 Full Time Equivalent (FTE) posts. On-Call capacity is monitored through a PowerBI dashboard showing individual personnel detail with their contracted commitment and performance against this. 2025/26 data highlight a total capacity of 944,732 hours available which equates to an average of 3,690 hours per person.

Availability is another metric that can be used as a proxy for capacity, and figures for 2025/26 show that Wholetime availability was 99.2% and On-Call availability was 83.3% which is one of the best in the UK.

Operational crew productivity is also assessed through HMICFRS six-monthly data returns and in-Service inspections. We benchmark our performance against national mean data provided by HMICFRS, and our delivery targets increase annually in line with our CRMP objectives.

Increasing Productivity

The Service has achieved more than a 3% increase in productivity among all operational Firefighters over the defined period, driven by both an increase in outcome-based activity, as well as changes made to reduce attendance at certain incident types and implementation of new working practices and technology.

SWV figures demonstrate an increase reflecting this improvement from 15,673 in 2024/25 to 16,636 in 2025/26 an increase of 6.2%.

BSC completed by operational crews have increased from 1,548 in 2024/25 to 1,743 in 2025/26 an increase of 12.6%.

SSRI activity has increased from 224 in 2024/25 to 329 in 2025/26 an increase of 68%.

All this in the operational context of a 12.1% increase in incidents from 10,910 in 2024/25 to 12,235 in 2025/26.