Strategic goal 2

This goal is focused on our statutory role to enforce fire and building safety regulations. We deliver this fire protection duty through our risk-based inspection programme (RBIP), which ensures we focus our resources on the highest risk premises.

Over the last year, we have seen a significant increase in the workload of our fire protection team, in part due to the success of our Business Safety Check programme. This uses warranted officers within our response teams to visit lower risk premises in their area to assess and advise on fire safety regulations compliance. Through this work, we have identified risks which have required the involvement of our fire safety inspectors and have seen an increase in enforcement activity as a result. We have also seen increases in workload related to the regional cladding remediation programme and to supporting the building safety regulator.

Last year, we commissioned an independent evaluation of our risk-based inspection programme (RBIP), which concluded that our approach was robust in identifying high risk premises. We will utilise the findings of the evaluation to further improve our RBIP in the coming year.

Our focus remains on improving the effectiveness of our activities and the efficiency of our ways of working. Changes made to our risk management system towards the end of last year should lead to improvements in process efficiency moving forward.

During 2026-27 we aim to achieve the following objectives:

• Implement and embed new Fire Safety Regulations (Residential Personal Emergency Evacuation Plans) as part of the continued approach to delivering the Grenfell Tower Inquiry recommendations.
• Implement improvements to our RBIP based on recommendations following its evaluation
• Improve the accuracy and availability of management information to support decision making
• Continue to develop strategies to reduce unwanted fire signals
• Establish a premises risk function to improve the end-to-end management of premises risk information
• Implement a continuous professional development programme for all warranted fire safety officers
• Further embed out of hours cover for fire protection expertise, to enable the delivery of our statutory duties at all times.