Section 2: Productivity

The Service is pursuing the national Spending Review (SR) target of improving productivity of wholetime firefighters by 3% over the review period.

• Building on the initial pilot which was introduced in 2021/2022 which saw the manual utilisation of outlook calendars in a few stations to record how our wholetime workforce was being used. The Service has expanded this to encompass all wholetime stations. PowerBI has been introduced alongside a new data collection process and our efforts are now focused on ensuring the accuracy of this data.
• In addition to providing managers with visibility of how the workforce is being utilised, comparisons can now easily be made between watches and duty stations to determine outliers or best practice.

This collection and data reporting process will be integral to our on-going efforts and commitment to boost productivity of our wholetime workforce. This focus has already seen benefits such as the increase in home fire safety visits by wholetime watches. An increase from 7,667 in 2022/ 2023 to 8,576 in 2023/2024.

The next phase of this project will see us agree formal targets for utilisation.