Independent Review of Conditions of Service for Fire and Rescue Staff in England (Thomas Review)

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Report Summary and Recommendations

Conditions of service underpin the employment of the workforce. As employment costs typically make up a significant (and usually the majority) of any organisation’s resources and budget it is unsurprising that focus should fall on the effectiveness of the workforce in delivering the strategic intent. If change needs to happen it usually needs to happen quickly so that systems and processes can be improved and benefits realised.

Conditions of service also affect people directly. Most people end up living, organising their life and spending in alignment to their work and income. Any change to this can be felt not just by the worker but their family as well. As such there is sensitivity, and much legality, around how conditions of service are deployed and any desire to change them.

This report has followed conditions of service and the areas of the employment and operational relationships that they impact. It has come to conclusions, findings and recommendations that impact on:

• The working environment

• Documented conditions of service

• Industrial relations

• Duty systems

• Management of the fire and rescue service

These conclusions, findings and recommendations are contained within the commentary of the review and extracted below. First, however I have extracted what I believe should be the initial priorities. These are: -

I.

There is much re-building to be done around culture and trust, including addressing the concerns around bullying and harassment. This also has an obvious relationship with equality and diversity. Everyone deserves a work place free from bullying where employment and progression is on merit and free from bias. The fire service needs inspirational leaders able to deliver a high performing, engaged workforce. Where I found these leaders during my fieldwork visits I also found positive industrial relations. Understanding and surfacing the differing levels of industrial relations

2.

I) Culture and trust is vital to moving forward in these areas. A service wide engagement survey focused on culture, equality and trust should be conducted on an annual basis. Management performance objectives should be ‘hard wired’ into this survey. Whilst embedding changes in management culture may take time, I believe the implementation of employee engagement surveys and amendments to management objectives could be taken forward by each fire and rescue authority and implemented relatively quickly.

II) The retained duty system offers significant opportunity to align resources to risk at a significantly lower cost than maintaining full time cover at times of low level risk and activity. However the difficulties in recruiting retained duty system fire fighters were repeatedly communicated to me. In additional to supporting a national recruitment and communication programme Government should bring forward legislation that extends employment protection (as enjoyed by military reservists) to fire fighters engaged on retained duty systems and part-time contracts.

III) Conditions of service are currently documented in the Green, Grey and Gold books. My review makes no recommendation as to the Green Book. However, I find very little value in capturing conditions of service in the Gold and Grey Books. I found the Gold Book to be redundant, unread and unused in virtually every authority I visited or which responded to my questionnaire.

I recommend that the Gold Book is discontinued and that the employers and representative bodies implement this recommendation as soon as is reasonably practicable. The Grey Book is held by fire fighters as a key foundation or anchor for their conditions of service, even though in most fire and rescue services there are local derivations away from the national provisions contained within it.

Employers repeatedly pointed out to me either that the Grey Book was a barrier to alignment of conditions of service with local delivery or that they had managed to change locally the conditions of service despite the Grey Book. Either way it appears to me that the Grey Book should be slimmed down. Consideration should be given by the employers, in consultation with representative bodies, as to replacing the Grey Book with a contract of employment at the local level, supported by an employee handbook.

Base Pay (see section on training) should remain national but all other conditions of service should have a more regional/local flavour and I recommend that the national joint council takes action to explore how such a system could operate in practical terms.

IV) The description of role maps and duty systems in the Grey Book creates inflexibility in the deployment of fire fighters in support of the local

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Integrated Risk Management Plan. Roles maps are too restrictive and duty systems within the Grey Book in many fires and rescue services do not reflect the changing activity from response to prevention. Both the list of role maps and the pre-determined duty systems should be removed from the Grey Book by the employers, in consultation with representative bodies.

Key findings

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