Buckinghamshire Fire & Rescue Service has a strong tradition of providing a professional, effective and efficient fire safety and 999 emergency service to the communities of Buckinghamshire and Milton Keynes.
Overall, your chances of being injured in a fire in Buckinghamshire and Milton Keynes are lower than the national average, and are steadily reducing.
The single most important measure of our performance is your safety. The vast majority of fire injuries occur in the home, so the key results we look to are the number of dwelling fires, and the number of injuries that result from them. We have used the longest time span we can for each chart, and the most up to date information we can obtain.
Safety is crucial to us, both for the public and for our own staff. The evidence clearly demonstrates that we are achieving our aims of rebalancing service delivery to improve public safety, while continuing to improve the safety of our firefighters.
Accidental injuries in dwelling fires (BV143ii)
Injury rates
Behind the headlines, we collect performance information across a very wide range of measures of our work. Most form part of the national process of gathering information on the comparative performance of fire and rescue services, but we also collect a number of local performance indicators which more closely match our own specific concerns and priorities.
In the chart below, we have compared our performance across a range of the national performance indicators with the average for our family group of similar fire and rescue services (FRS’s), and also against the top 25 per cent (or ‘upper quartile’) of all Fire & Rescue Services. An index of ‘1’ is the benchmark we are comparing ourselves against – above the line is above the average or upper quartile, below the line is below average.
Benchmarking like this helps us to get a better picture of where we need to focus our efforts, and also who else we can learn from – we actively participate in collaboration with FRS’s Fire & Rescue Services across the country and overseas, and with any other organisations we think we can learn from, or who can help us to make you safer.
Buckinghamshire Fire & Rescue Service's performance
against family group and upper quartile 2004/05
National targets
A range of organisations have set measures of performance for Fire & Rescue Services. We have set these targets out below, with our performance against each.
The National Framework
The National Framework is the Government’s contract with Fire & Rescue Services, and sets out the key national targets the Government wants us to achieve.
These are to:
- Reduce the number of accidental fire-related deaths in the home by 20 per cent, averaged over an 11-year period to 31 March 2010, equivalent to 280 fire-related deaths a year, compared with the average recorded in the five-year period to 31 March 1999 of 350 fire-related deaths.
- Achieve a 10 per cent reduction in deliberate fires by 31 March 2010 to 94,000 from the national baseline of 104,500.
Our contribution to these two key targets is as follows:
Reduction in the number of accidental fire-related deaths
in the home by 20 per cent by 2010 (BV143i)
Reduction in the number of deliberate fires by 10 per cent by 2010 (BV206)
In addition to these headline targets, the National Framework also sets out a number of equality and diversity targets for the Fire & Rescue Service. These, and our current performance against them, are as follows:
Equality and diversity targets to be reached by 2009
Female firefighters
Target: 15 per cent
Actual 2005/06: 2.4 per cent
Ethnic minority staff
Local population: 5 per cent
Buckinghamshire Fire & Rescue Service actual 2005/06: 1.25 per cent
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