Fire Service

We welcome the government’s ambition to create an independent College of Fire and Rescue expressed in the white paper Reforming our Fire and Rescue Service and we therefore recommend that …

Although it is for the government to decide how the college should be constituted, we recommend that it should have a permanent staff of sufficient size to manage its operations …

We therefore recommend that fire and rescue services that continue to use low power intrinsically safe radios as part of breathing apparatus consider reserving them only for situations in which …

We therefore recommend that all fire and rescue services give consideration to providing all firefighters with digital radios. (113.60)

Since radio communications are inherently unreliable in certain environments, we recommend that firefighters be trained to respond appropriately to the loss of communications and to understand how to restore them. …

That is a clear indication of a need for better training and we therefore recommend that basic training on the structure and operation of the water supply system, including the …

We therefore recommend that all fire and rescue services establish and periodically review an agreed protocol with the statutory water undertakers in their areas to enable effective communication between them …

We cannot tell whether in any of those cases they would have been able to rescue people higher up the building if they had not done so, but we recommend …