Service Changes and Achievements

What is the Service doing differently this year?

During 2025/26, the Service delivered a significant programme of change across Prevention, Protection, Response, People, Strategic Support, and Resources, reflecting a step change in how services were organised, targeted, delivered and assured. These changes signal the Service’s commitment to delivering a more data driven and integrated operating model.

The Service also delivered substantial progress in strengthening how it engages with communities and improves workforce diversity, following the findings of the In2People research and the restructure of the Prevention function into the Community Safety & Engagement team. The Service completed the EIA and DPIA requirements, and implemented a refreshed communications plan, including new social media approaches, updated visuals, and improved recruitment website content.

The implementation of the new Risk Based Inspection Programme has increased efficiency for operational crews as it has reduced the duplication of work. The Service Support Hub staff can now support crews effectively by completing initial job allocation and contact tasks accurately, enabling Warranted Supervisory Managers to focus on delivering Business Safety Checks to our local business communities. The Service now has a sophisticated knowledge of the risk to businesses and can allocate its resources more effectively than ever before to improve fire safety awareness and target known areas of non-compliance.

Why are these changes being made?

The comprehensive redevelopment of our RBIP was driven by the Area For Improvement (AFI) highlighted by HMICFRS and recommendations from the Grenfell Tower Inquiry. This AFI required us to assure the Service was prioritising the highest risks and delivering a proportionate response to reduce risk in our community. The Service commissioned an independent evaluation to be undertaken by Nottingham Trent University (NTU). NTU’s evaluation was completed in-year and confirms that the updated RBIP represents a substantial improvement, with a robust, intelligence led methodology that combines NFCC national risk classifications with 13 locally defined datasets to prioritise fire safety inspections.

These improvements have enhanced productivity by ensuring the Service’s Protection resources are deployed efficiently, to the highest risk premises – reducing time spent on lower value activity and strengthening the evidence base that informs audit planning and regulatory activity.

The embedding of the LRF Secretariat function was driven by longstanding desire, supported by national guidance, MHCLG feedback and local debriefs, to remove delays in standing up tactical & strategic command structures and inconsistency in multiagency coordination present under the previous model. Strengthening LRF arrangements ensures that the communities of Nottinghamshire can now depend upon a resilient, dedicated capability to facilitate multiagency incident response, providing expertise to partner organisations and a consistent approach to emergency preparedness.

Improvements to communications, evaluation and recruitment processes, including the introduction of the iTrent recruitment module, development of a recruitment evaluation framework, and refreshed positive action approaches, were necessary to support the Workforce Plan’s diversity ambitions and ensure that future recruitment activity is inclusive, targeted and evidence led. The initiative also sought to strengthen trust and confidence through befriending relationships, improve the consistency of community engagement through shared tools and guidance, and provide a strategic, measurable approach to increasing participation from underrepresented groups – ultimately, aiming to ensure that the service can draw and recruit from a broad range of communities – finding the best future staff to deliver on Service objectives.

What is the Service’s biggest success this year?

Our biggest success in 2025-26 has been the delivery of the CRMP Year 1 Annual Delivery Plan. We have worked hard over the last three years to improve efficiency and deliver real value for money for the public. When setting the Annual Delivery Plan our financial situation for the three years ahead looked set to remain challenging and indicated we would need to make savings to maintain a balanced budget. At the same time, we committed to targeted and affordable investments in many areas of the Service, to ensure we can continue to serve our communities well, with an infrastructure that is safe, aligned to risk and fit for the future.

All core business areas and projects within our improvement programme were completed or were at the appropriate milestone by year end. These business areas are monitored, tracked and scrutinised strategically through the Service’s CRMP Assurance Board which sits monthly.

Notable achievements from projects within our improvement programme include:

• Progressing work on our new state of the art community fire station at Stockhill
• The project to replace our emergency call receipt and mobilising system continues at pace and will go live late Summer 2026
• A full review has been undertaken of our operational specialist rescue capability. The agreed action plan will be implemented across 2026-27 and ensure we have a model that best reflects the risks we face now, and in the future, whilst giving more resilience and providing a greater shared responsibility through a new resourcing model
• We have made significant investment to improve our central database that links to the delivery of premises risk inspections, Safe & Well visits, Business Safety Checks and full fire safety audits
• The introduction of new mobile working technology has significantly reduced the administration times for these activities
• We have completed the refurbishments of several fire stations, improving access and inclusion, decontamination management, and energy efficiency
• We have undertaken departmental reviews, notably within the areas of Digital (ICT) and People and Organisational Development to ensure our resource model aligns to current and predicted needs
• We have introduced 17 new state-of-the-art, fuel efficient, clean cab, fire engines. This has updated our ageing fleet giving our firefighters the latest capability
• We have invested in inhouse live fire training facilities. This new inhouse capability, in time, will deliver savings against outsourcing costs, deliver improved availability and flexibility to the annual training plan, reduce HGV vehicle movements and associated costs and release trainers’ hours through removing travel time to the former training site outside of Nottinghamshire.

We report our annual successes, and detail around how well we have achieved against the commitments we set each year through the publication of our Annual Statement of Assurance. This is published in July of each year.

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