Video of Merseyside Fire and Rescue's peer challenge presentation: part one

Challenge themes: Achieving more through partnerships

This is a video of Merseyside Fire and Rescue Services' 'working together to improve the lives of the most vulnerable' presentation to the Local Innovation Awards judging panel (length: 3 minutes, 26 seconds).

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Watch part two of Merseyside's presentation

Watch clips from Merseyside's question and answer session with the peer challenge panel

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Merseyside's achieving more through partnerships video presentation (WMV, 27.8MB large file)

Or you can read the transcript, below.

Video transcript

(length: 3 minutes, 26 seconds)

Good morning, I am Tony, Chief Fire Officer of Merseyside Fire and Rescue Services. We have John Curtis, Director of Knowsley information, Karen Hughes, one of our anti-social behavior advocates; one of the examples we have used of partnership working is around bonfire removal and the anti-social fire programme, Karen is an expert on anti-social behaviour.

Graham Morgan, who is the Deputy Leader of Knowsley council; Graham is here to represent the strategic partners we have in Knowsley. They are a very active council and are involved in a number of programmes – there are examples in our application evidence.

We also have Helen, who is part of the mayoral trust, who we have done a lot of work with, around young people; ‘street heat’ is one of the examples in the pack of evidence of partnership working. And Richie Davis who is one of our District Managers, Richie has led on a number of applications for beacon councils and similar initiatives.

If we start by going through our vision, what we have tried to do is present the evidence in an easy to read format. It is exactly the same evidence that has been submitted in the Word document [part of Merseyside’s application]. This is an example of a way in which we think it is important to share information in an easy to understand format.

The whole idea behind the bid stems from our vision, ‘making communities safer, stronger and healthier’. And clearly that is not something you can achieve in isolation. As a Fire and Rescue service we cut across five districts, so partnership working is really crucial to the delivery of that vision. And I think also the way that we put in for these awards as a Fire and Rescue service is not typical, particularly for an innovation type scheme.

We have done a lot of work over the years to try and use our brand, use what the Fire and Rescue service can achieve within the community for the greater good of the community.

Particularly in Merseyside where you have some of the most deprived and vulnerable communities in the country by whatever measure; health inequality, health deprivation.

And so there are some real and very significant challenges across all the district and services. The examples we have given you in the evidence are around ‘street heat’, our Knowsley data sharing and smoking cessation programme, and the bonfire anti-social and fire reduction.

We are going to show a video to try give a picture on how this all works in action. This should be helpful to try and bring it together, so we all have a common vision and a common view on what this actually means on the streets.

Ultimately, if we are not making a difference in the community then it just becomes a bit self fulfilling. For us it is about the difference it makes on a wet September night, when some old lady is no longer having fireworks stuffed through her letter box and having a life made a misery.

That really for us is the pay back, and for our partners. So if we watch the video, it’s about seven minutes, and then we will summarise and go to questions.