Video clips from Merseyside's peer challenge questions

Challenge themes: Achieving more through partnerships

This is a video of Merseyside Fire and Rescue Services' peer challenge panel questions and answer session (length: 9 minutes 16 seconds).

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Merseyside's peer challenge questions (WMV, 74.6MB large file)

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Video transcript

(Length: 9 minutes 16 seconds).

Panel member: What I want to drill down on is your other partner organisations. Listed here is Liverpool City Council, you have spoken about the Primary Care Trust (PCT), other agencies, the police, where do they fit in into the mix?

Merseyside Fire & Rescue Service: It is vitally important drilling it down into the partners, especially the five borough councils that the Fire and Rescue Service covers.

I ca not really talk about Liverpool, but would like to talk about the great example that Knowsley has got; you will see in the information that was sent out to you there is no hiding the fact that there are some horrendous problems that we have in some parts of Knowsley.

Certain wards are 200 per cent higher than average for lung cancer, 80 per cent higher than the national average across the board. That is a major problem for us to tackle and the council and PCT could not do it on our own.

May be just a plug from the council and PCT point of view – it is the same for me and hopefully it is the same from the Fire and Rescue Service and other partners because Anita Marsland, Chief Executive Knowsley PCT, is also the Executive Director for Health and Social Care, Knowsley, and you would not know what the difference is with the staff there.

Do they work for the council or do they work for the PCT – it is a fantastic partnership and so it is easier to get things done. We were struggling within Knowsley, tackling the issues with lung cancer and tackling issues with people smoking. Where do we start, who smokes and where do they live.

The ‘Direct Response Group’ is an umbrella of various departments and has everything to do with risk, stress, arson, anti-social behaviour, fireworks, and incident investigation.

We went into partnership with Merseyside police in 2006 where they have an anti-social behaviour taskforce of 60 – 70 police officers, which are dedicated to tackling anti-social behaviour on Merseyside.

Last year it was decided that we would all move to build on that partnership and draw on each others’ strengths, powers, etcetera.  We have had many success stories that have come from that partnership which is still developing.

Each week new problems are encountered and solutions need to be tailored, all be it victims of anti-social behaviour are suffering the same sort of problems. Working in partnership gives us access – we can knock on community members doors’ and they will let us in and give us intelligence.

They will tell us what their problems are we can then signpost to other agencies. For example housing officers, police support, and crime prevention.

Panel member: I think for me that is the exciting bit. Looking to the future, the fact that the fire service is seen as a different service, where people have a warmer feeling towards it.

Panel member: You have said in your submission ‘anti-social behaviour has fallen by over 80 per cent’, what is the measure, what was your baseline and how have you measured it, how do you know?

Merseyside Fire and Rescue Service: Because we work with the police.  Analysis is quite difficult at the moment because we have police analysts and we have our own analysts. We have just had a review of the taskforce to look at things like that and that was one of the recommendations.

The figures that we are looking at are reducing arson and anti-social behaviour in fires that were attended, but it does all tie into the bigger picture. It is not just if you talk about a bonfire, you have got youths drinking, residents with parked cars, criminal damage, alcohol, car pulling up – a whole array of acts that go on.

Panel member: So that 80 per cent is based on your own figures. What is your ambition, in terms of being able to measure that across the piece and then, measure your contribution to that bigger anti-social behaviour reduction?

Merseyside Fire and Rescue Service: There is an ongoing anti-social behaviour issue which will happen tonight, there’s a specific programme Merseyside have in the bonfire period which was horrendous.

The reduction came about the number of incidents around bonfire, fireworks over a fixed period of time that piece of data analysis is specific to that project. In terms of the day-to-day basis the police have got a pretty sophisticated record of anti-social behaviour incidents and we would track an initiative.

We will put a young people’s initiative into an area where there are a lot of kids causing mayhem. Let’s put ‘streetcage soccer’ in, what were the number of incidents per night before we put the ‘streetcage soccer’ in and how have they changed?

We are trying to develop smarter measures that are more positive. To try and track we have invested in partnership with an IT system. So those young people who come into our initiatives, where do they go, how do we track improvement and benefit not just the reduction.

Panel member: Is the partnership IT system a cross-organisational partnership?

Merseyside Fire and Rescue Service: There are various tools and techniques that we have put in place. What we have tried to look at, at a partnership level across the whole of Merseyside, is looking at risk and also looking at needs then drilling down, and understanding what the causes are.

So understanding the people that live in those neighbourhoods and the contextual place, what is the environment like. Examples of what we have done with Merseyside Police, under the key partners is to put into place strategic protocols across the whole of Merseyside at a strategic and operational level.

Looking at anti-social behaviour in particular, we have followed aspects of the national intelligence model, and tied into the Crime and Disorder Reduction partnership (CDRP) approach looking at strategic assessments. We have got a very robust, tried and tested methodology primarily used within CDRPs in the place.

On top of that we had a partnership event some time ago looking at information management across the whole of Merseyside. That was trying to assess data information needs and how can we rationalise the data that we have and reduce duplication which lead to mixed messages.

An agreed outcome from that conference was how we can use effective information, transforming it into what we call ‘Business Intelligence Reports’ used during the busy period of bonfire night.

We also set up a virtual group called ‘Merseyside Informed’. The analysts and other key partners said they needed a platform from which to share information securely.

Rather than investing in new technology, we used technology that already existed, the Association of Greater Manchester Authorities ‘sharepoint’ site. We used this to disseminate information securely across the partnerships.

To support that even further we put together a ‘yellow pages’ directory of signposting people to where the information was and the information sharing protocols.

The purpose of doing that was to illustrate how easy it was to access and share data. We undertook some simple regression analysis. The PCT shared the data from the home fire safety check forum, looking at the data from postcode level avoiding data protection issues, and compared that to the data they already had identified that their customers were our customers with the same needs within Knowsley council.