How we get assessed

Fire & Rescue Service Improvement Framework

The Fire & Rescue Service nationally continues to undergo a process of improvement guided by the latest National Framework (2008-11) published in May 2008.

Download a copy from the Communities & Local Government Website

External Assessment of Our Performance

Following recent national political changes the new Government has announced that the Comprehensive Performance Assessment approach to external assessment of Fire & Rescue Services, which was being delivered by the Audit Commission, will cease immediately pending the development of an alternative approach.

Whilst we are justifiably proud of recent assessments under the old system which showed that we were 'Good and improving', we await direction from the Government on the future.

Monitoring our performance is clearly key to ensuring the quality of the service we provide, therefore we have not ceased to do this in the light of the change in Government policy and in the absence of external assessment will continue with our own internal assessment.

Internal Assessment of Our Performance

Our Safe People at Work Team gather information from around the service on how well we are performing. This includes a combination of auditing of:

The team also undertake on-going comparison of a range of 49 performance indicators relating to topics as diverse as number of fires, numbers of home safety checks made, staff time-off due to sickness, number of disabled staff and efficient use of finance.

Managers use the information gathered to identify poor or good performance and take appropriate action to improve performance or share good practices. To give us a 'benchmark' we compare our performance with the other Fire and Rescue Services in the South West of England.