The Chief Fire Officers Association (CFOA), The Association of Ambulance Chief Executives (AACE) and The Association of Police Chief Officers (ACPO) have worked together to agree a number of key principles regarding future collaboration as a professional response to the changing financial climate in order to secure public health, safety and wellbeing.
Joint working across the services is not a new concept; the services have been working closely together to explore collaboration and integration in order to provide a better service to the public for many years. For example, the Joint Emergency Services Interoperability Programme (JESIP) is well established and looking at how services can work together at serious and major incidents and this collaborative work will continue.
All three organisations are keen to support innovative approaches to service delivery and have developed a number of position statements detailed in the attached document.
Paul Fuller, President, CFOA said “I am delighted that the three services have come together to agree a number of common areas where we can work together to deliver our key objectives of improving public health, safety and wellbeing.
“Fire and Rescue Services face significant financial challenges and it is clear that working closely together will deliver more efficient and effective emergency response services”.
Martin Flaherty OBE, Managing Director, AACE said: “Joint working is nothing new to our three organisations and now that we have agreed a key set of principles around further collaboration we can continue to build on the good examples already in place. In doing so we must ensure that new areas of collaboration are fully evaluated so that we can determine which of those are sensible, workable and truly deliver benefits for our patients and the public.”
Lynne Owens, National Policing Lead for Uniformed Operations, ACPO said “It is good to be able to make our shared position on these things public. It is important to be clear that close working is necessary for reasons of efficiency and to protect the public”.
Read the joint statement here.
The government is expected to release a response to Sir Ken Knight’s review of Fire and Rescue Services in the near future, which will include its views on wider blue light collaboration. AACE, ACPO and CFOA will respond to the white paper in due course.