Being realistic about changing the face of the Fire and Rescue Service

摘要

The ambition for fire and rescue services to reflect the communities they serve is absolutely right. Achieving it is not an exact science and that is why we continue to have the debate about how we get there.The Home Office tells us that the main cause for the increase in the proportion of women firefighters in England since 2010 has been a decrease in the number of men firefighters. Women make up just 5.2 per cent of the firefighter workforce. It has taken 15 years to move from 1.7 per cent. That is a very sobering thought.The outlier is Gloucestershire Fire and Rescue Service, where women make up 10.1 per cent of their workforce with a fairly even split across wholetime and retained. Its nearest rival is Lincolnshire at 7.6 per cent. Why is Gloucestershire so different?We are in a new era of recruitment with the chance to inject a new generation of women and ethnic minority staff into the Fire and Rescue Service. We must not lose sight of how great that is, but it is not enough by itself.Let us look at Devon and Somerset as an example: it has been nine years since they recruited wholetime staff. They had 2,888 applicants, 337 of whom were women. In 2017, just four per cent of Devon and Somerset's firefighters were women; 26 per cent of their 2018 intake is women. Now that is an improvement, but is it unusual or a new normal?