Strategic goal 4

This goal is focused on ensuring that our workforce has the professionalism, skills, capacity and flexibility to deliver an outstanding service, within an inclusive and positive workplace environment.

Over the last year we have made improvements in our health and wellbeing provision, including a programme of wellbeing campaigns and the recruitment of an additional nurse into the occupational health team. We also continued to make improvements to contaminant management processes across our sites. We embedded changes to support increasing diversity through our community engagement programme and launched a cultural dashboard to support cultural development across the organisation. We also commissioned a review of our people services functions, the recommendations from which will be taken forward over the next two years.

In addition to this, we have completed wholetime and on-call firefighter recruitment campaigns, with a new cohort of trainee firefighters passing out from initial training in December 2025. Further firefighter recruitment is planned in the coming year. We completed a reorganisation of our ICT team and have increased resources to cope with demanding workloads in fire protection, and support teams including procurement and estates.

The focus on organisational health, culture and staff wellbeing will continue, as we conduct our bi-annual staff survey, refresh our approach to staff engagement and continue to support and develop our staff networks. We will also continue to support improvements to our ways of working and effectiveness, ensuring we have the right people in the right roles to meet the needs of the organisation.

In 2026-27, we aim to achieve the following objectives:

• Undertake a staff survey and respond to the findings from it
• Evaluate the use of the cultural dashboard, to identify learning and any improvements required
• Begin to implement recommendations from the review of our people services functions, including seeking ways to use technology to improve efficiency and effectiveness
• Implement a new computer system for Occupational Health
• Deliver tailored IT skills training to support the development of a digital culture across the organisation
• Reorganise the risk management function to improve our health & safety and corporate risk management
• Review our operational training delivery model, with particular focus on hot fire training