London Fire Brigade Headquarters 169 Union Street London SE1 0LL T 020 8555 1200 F 020 7960 3602 T extphone 020 7960 3629 london-fire.gov.uk Freedom of Information request reference number: FOIA2579.1 Date of response: 10 February 2016 Request and response: Any attachments mentioned within this response have been included at the end of this e-mai l On 10 February you wrote to David Wyatt making an information request. You asked: “… I understand that in between meetings of the LSP5 member working group, in response to questions from members, officers prepared numerous letters and reports. Could I ask you to provide copies of these, please, as I believe they will be of relevance to the information I sought below..” So far concerns your phrase “…of relevance to the information I sought below…” we have looked for “letter and reports” which have some bearing on the way the Brigade did modelling to support the proposals in LSP5, and particularly whether we modelled “…to minimise the total number of incidents experiencing increased first and second appliance response times…” (your email of 4 January 2016). In clarification of the material you wanted you said (your email of 12 February 2016) “…Essentially what I’m after, re LSP5, are the various letters and reports prepared by officers that provided information that members had requested or that officers thought would be useful in the light of the kinds of issues raised…”. We have considered your request under the provisions of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). In consultation with David Wyatt, we are able to provide the following information. You may know that the Member-level LSP5 Member discussion group – which was an informal meeting of leading members – met on seven occasions between 31 July 2012 and 9 January 2013. The meeting received a series of papers, presentations or oral updates from officers on the matters related to the preparation and drafting of the draft Fifth London Safety Plan (LSP5). Matters considered at one meeting would often prompt the preparation of a paper, presentation or update to a subsequent meeting, as you would expect. Indeed, most of the papers submitted to the forum formed the basis of supporting documents published to support the draft LSP5 and the consultation process; the full set of supporting documents are still available on our website here. In your email of 12 February, you did say you had checked the website but had not found what you were looking for. For the avoidance of doubt, I would point you to supporting document 20 Operational efficiency work. This was produced from two documents on operational efficiency work, submitted to the Forum, that underpinned the proposals eventually included in the draft LSP5. You can find the published document using this link and I have attached the original two papers. In addition, we also produced LSP5 supporting document 11 on Fire service modelling which explains how the modelling is carried out. It is relatively comprehensive about the modelling and you can find this document on our website here. In advance of the first meeting of the Forum, Rita Dexter and Sue Budden gave a presentations to leading Members separately for each party group. That presentation is attached (the date in the header reflects the date the PDF was created only). Various questions were raised by Members following the presentation, and the first meeting (31 July 2012) of the Forum took a paper “LSP5 - responses to Member questions and requests” and a copy of that is attached. At the Forum meeting on 12 October 2012, the Commissioner did a presentation about operational efficiency savings, based on modelling, and a copy of that presentation is also attached. The Deputy Commissioner met with members of the Labour Group on 12 December 2012 and provided answers to a series of questions in an email to Julian Pinhey on 15 January 2013; this email is attached. In the email, the Deputy Commissioner refers to a separate response to questions raised by Councillor Navin Shah; this email, dated 31 December 2012, is also attached (the email includes the main attachment which is a schedule of the issue and responses, but excludes copies of the draft LSP5 which were originally attached). You will also be aware that senior officers and ORH did provide a briefing for the trades unions on ORH modelling on 26 November 2012; the slides produced by ORH Ltd, and used at the briefing, have been sent by separate email as they are large files. We believe that these documents are ones that provide a response to your request about modelling undertaken in connection with LSP5 and the outcomes of that modelling in terms of operational efficiency savings considered. If you believe there are other documents which exist but we have not provided, if you provide more information, we can conduct further searches. Copyright All LFEPA produced material is the copyright of the London Fire and Emergency Planning Authority unless stated otherwise, and usual copyright restrictions apply. Any information we provide to you in responding to a request for information, is still the copyright of the London Fire and Emergency Planning Authority unless stated otherwise. If you wish to copy any information we have provided, you may do so in any format for any non-commercial purpose provided that: • it is reproduced accurately; • it is not used in a misleading context; • the source and copyright status of the material are acknowledged; and • the material you produce is published or distributed without charge. Material produced by any other organisation is the copyright of the organisation which produced it, unless stated otherwise. Applications for permission to reproduce material for any commercial purpose may be made to David Wyatt, Head of Information Management, LFEPA, 169 Union Street, London SE1 0LL. Permission is normally granted free of charge to educational organisations. Re-use of Public Sector Information You have a right to ask us if you can re-use information for which we hold the copyright. Your request must be in writing. If we agree in principle to the request, we would communicate to you the conditions for re-use and other licence terms within 20 working days. We issue licenses, which include the conditions for re-use, on a case by case basis. To request a licence to re-use our information, contact the Head of Information Management at the above address. This does not affect our copyright. Report title LSP5 - responses to Member questions and requests Meeting Date For LSP5 Discussion Forum 31 July 2012 Report by Document Number Deputy Commissioner 2 27 July 2012 Summary This paper provides Members with responses to various questions and requests for information following recent presentations to party groups. Item 1A: Confirm what we count as part of our measurement of performance against the attendance time target. The standard (6 minutes for the 1st appliance, 8 minutes for the 2nd appliance) is measured from (a) the time an appliance is mobilised to (b) the time the appliance arrives at the incident scene. No special appliances (e.g. aerial appliances, fire rescue units) currently have published attendance times. The standard applies London- wide to any type of emergency incident. The following criterion are used to calculate published attendance time performance: 1. Arrival times for all pumping appliances regardless of location of the appliance at time of mobilisation and will include appliances from other station grounds. 2. 1st appliance and 2nd appliance is determined by the order of arrival at the incident, i.e. the 1st appliance will be the first to arrive not necessarily the first to be mobilised. 3. Mobilisations included in the calculation are for: a. incidents in London only; b. London pumping appliances only; pumping appliances from neighbouring brigades that attend in London are not included; c. appliances on the initial mobilised attendance only (e.g. not reliefs, incident upgrades); and d. mobilisations where a time value is present in the data; sometimes ‘time arrived’ is missing due to a failure (human or technical) to record the time. 4. Mobilisations are excluded where: a. the incident is a ‘shut in lift’ release not attended as an emergency (i.e. not on ‘blue light’)) [4.8% of mobilisations]. b. the calculated attendance time is greater than 20 minutes (because this generally reflects a failure (human or technical) to record a time of arrival in a timely manner [1.8% of mobilisations]. c. the mobilisation is for incident stop code ‘FAT’ (Batch mobilised to flooding incidents) [0% of mobilisations in 2011/12]. Item 1B: What would be the impact of removing calls to AFAs from attendance time performance data? There is clear evidence that crews respond more quickly to some types of incidents than others, with average speeds to fires being quicker than those to special services such as people shut in lifts or lock outs. This, in effect, reflects local risk assessments by crews. When attendance time data was last reported to Members by incident type (in the Thematic Report 10 on appliance attendance times – November 2007), the speed of attendance to AFAs was some 18 seconds faster than to serious fires, and some 24 seconds faster than the overall 1st appliance average to all types of incidents. A review of data for 2011/12 shows that these differences are the same now, albeit that attendance times to all types of incidents are faster than they were five years ago. A response to an AFA is effectively a ‘call to fire’ although only 2-3 per cent of attendances to a ‘fire alarm actuating’ turn out to be fires; the bulk are false alarms.