Equality and diversity (https://www.dsfire.gov.uk/about-us/equality-and-diversity)

Equality and diversity

We want to treat everyone fairly. We want everyone to feel able to get in touch with us, work for us and use our services with the same standard of care and support.

Where we need to work harder to reach out to people who don’t feel comfortable talking to us, or who need extra support to stay safe, we will do so. The following information explains why and how we intend to do that.

Statement from the Chief Fire Officer

The Fire and Rescue Service really understand the importance of teamwork.

Day in day out we work together to solve complex and dynamic emergency problems using a range of different skills. All the research shows that the best teams have people with diverse skills, backgrounds and experiences.

At the same time, we need to do more to recruit and retain people to the Service with these skills, backgrounds and experiences if we are to be the best organisation that we can be.

We are keen to build an even more inclusive organisation so that our staff always feel safe to challenge and be themselves at work.

By making sure we are an organisation people want to join and stay part of, supported by a culture of continuous improvement and inclusion, we will become an even better team.

Gavin Ellis

Making an impact

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The Service has achieved a Silver Award from a leading employer network for our work to promote diversity throughout the organisation.

We completed the Employers Network for Equality & Inclusion (ENEI) (https://www.enei.org.uk/) assessment for the first time two years ago and received a Bronze Award. Last year (May 2019-June 2020), after improving many areas in line with our People Strategy, we were proud to receive our Silver Award.

Ninety-eight organisations worldwide, including four fire and rescue services, submitted the assessment and we were 29th overall. This is a fantastic achievement, which highlights the progress we have been making and shows the increased awareness and support for an inclusive culture.

Working for us

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Our People Strategy explains why we want the best possible working environment for all of our people. We want a place where everyone can achieve their full potential, a place where people of all backgrounds want to work because they see a place for themselves amongst us; and a place where our values of working together, honesty, respect and pride in helping others are our day to day experience.

People who want to work for us will have an equal chance of getting a job based on the skills and experience they can bring to the role.

To help us better reflect the communities we serve, we take positive action to encourage certain groups of people to join and start a career with us (https://www.dsfire.gov.uk/careers), such as:

positive action evenings to give women the chance to have a go at our physical tests – something female applicants can sometimes struggle with – before they have to pass the tests as part of the recruitment process
we have set up a number of support groups (https://www.dsfire.gov.uk/careers/looking-after-our-people) where staff members can feel supported and ask for advice
some of our colleagues have told their stories (https://cms.dsfire.gov.uk/news?field_news_type_target_id=3) about what it is like to work for the Service
we regularly carry out people impact assessments to ensure our policies and procedures don’t affect our staff or communities in a detrimental way.

Gender pay gap

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We are taking steps to address our gender pay gap. Find out more about how we're addressing our gender pay gap (https://www.dsfire.gov.uk/addressing-our-gender-pay-gap).

Facts and figures

We collect and use a wide range of data to help us in our equalities work. This includes demographic information about the people who live and work in Devon and Somerset, which groups of people are more likely to be at risk of fire based on the incident and other data and information about our employees, such as how many male and female employees we have and how many are from Black, Asian and minority ethnic groups.

To provide an effective service, it is important that we understand the impact of our policies and working practices on different people and that we ensure we are meeting our duty to eliminate discrimination, advance equality of opportunity and foster good relations. We use the data that we collect when developing services to identify key issues, assess our performance and tailor our services to meet the needs of particular people.

We are adding data from new sources all the time, but below are some of our latest figures from the Recruitment and Workforce Diversity Annual Report January – December 2020.

Recruitment

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There were 10 female on-call new starters in 2021, which was four less than the previous year. With six new female wholetime staff starting in the same period and 18 women leaving operational roles, our female representation dipped following the highest recorded in 2020.
The attraction rate of female applicants for Support vacancies near enough reflects the community.
The female application percentages of 14.1% for wholetime and 17.7% for on-call are higher than the representation in the workforce (6%) and higher than in 2020 (10.8% and 16.6%).
Since 2018, the percentages of female applicants in the on-call group have increased significantly, from 7.4% to 17.7%, but in 2021 this did not lead to an increase in new female starters (15.5% in 2020, 10.3% in 2021).
The numbers of applicants with a minority ethnic background are higher than in our community (5-6%) for all externally advertised vacancies other than on-call. However, percentages of new starters in this category are typically less than half the application rate.
Application rates from LGB (anything other than heterosexual) are higher than the community and staff identification as lesbian, gay or bisexual, with 2.6% identifying within this category, closely reflecting the community average of 2.2%.

Overall staff representation

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In 2021 female representation is 14.7% of the workforce at the end of the period, up from 13.9%.
Within the operational categories, this proportion was 6.2% for the on-call group and an increase from 6.2% to 6.3% for the wholetime staff. Nationally, the percentages are 6.5% (on-call) and 8.0% (wholetime). We have 31 stations without any women on the team.
The Service’s workforce consists of 2.8% ethnic minority staff, slightly up from the beginning of the period when it was 2.7%. The representation of people of colour in the Service (0.9%) is nearly three times less than in the community (2.6%).
Female representation in the senior management team dropped from 21% to 19%.
The percentage of staff identifying as lesbian, gay, bisexual or another sexuality is 2.6%, reflecting the average of 2.2% in the community.
2.6% of the Service’s workforce has declared a disability, far below the average of 11% within the community. This could be expected considering the nature of the firefighter role. However, disability should not automatically be seen as a barrier to joining us as a firefighter or member of support staff.