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Police and fire service respond to an emergency.
The government drive to bring police and fire services closer together is based on the assumption that blue light services have much in common. Photograph: Alamy
The government drive to bring police and fire services closer together is based on the assumption that blue light services have much in common. Photograph: Alamy

As fire services get closer to the police, they risk losing people's trust

This article is more than 6 years old
Chris Hastie

In some communities there is a strong taboo around talking to the police - firefighters worry this could be extended to them too

In July Essex Police and Crime Commissioner Roger Hirst became the first PCC to take over the running of a fire and rescue service, exercising a new option introduced earlier this year by the Policing and Crime Act. Meanwhile, Hertfordshire county council’s cabinet voted to object formally to a similar proposal. Is closer collaboration between police and fire services necessarily a good thing?

The government drive to bring police and fire services closer together is based around the assumption that blue-light services have much in common. Yet one fire service’s recruitment advert suggests that less that 10% of a firefighter’s time is spent on blue-light work.

While the popular image of the fire service is of a fire engine rushing to an emergency, the reality of the modern fire service is that far more time is spent on prevention than on emergency response.

And prevention is a different activity altogether. Prevention is not something you can do to a community, it is something that you must do with a community. To persuade people not to indulge in risky behaviours you need to be able to engage effectively with them. You need their trust so that they open the door to you. Firefighters often have that trust.

As the Chief Fire Officers’ Association notes, firefighters can gain access to people that others cannot. That trust is not universal, though. In my research among disadvantaged communities in the West Midlands I found many people wary of engaging with any public services, including the fire service. Although there are several reasons for this, an important one was a fear of authority and what those in authority can do. People feared that contact with one service would lead to unwanted contact with another.

Often this fear of authority was accompanied by a strong taboo around talking to the police, and firefighters I spoke with worried that this was being extended to them. They told me that in some of the most disadvantaged areas in the West Midlands they struggled to get people to answer the door. Importantly, these are the same areas where the incidence of fires is unusually high.

We know from the Crime Survey for England and Wales [pdf] that confidence in the police is lower among those living in areas of high unemployment, and among black and black British adults.

The very communities that the fire service most needs to reach are those communities where being associated with the police gets in way. It is difficult to see how bringing fire service governance under the wing of a police and crime commissioner will do anything but make the job more difficult.

The heavy focus that fire services have on prevention work gives them more in common with health and social care than with policing. Fire services are increasingly forming innovative collaborations in this area, exploiting the higher levels of trust that they command to benefit the most vulnerable in society. This is the direction in which those seeking to add value should be looking, as they also ask how fire services can improve their ability to reach more marginalised communities.

A closer association between fire and police services only makes it more likely that firefighters will find doors shutting on them.

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