Prevention is a fundamental part of our activities as we continue to reduce risk
through the advice, interventions and education we provide our communities to help
them adopt safer behaviours to improve their safety, health and wellbeing.

Our Prevention, Early Intervention and Safeguarding Strategy sets out how we’ll work together, and with others, to deliver preventative interventions that reduce the risk of death or serious injury from fire, roads, water, and extreme environmental events.

We will continue to reduce risk and increase community resilience by targeting and delivering prevention services to the most vulnerable and at risk. Working with partner agencies to deliver a joined-up, targeted approach to ensure our support reaches the most vulnerable, prioritising those people and communities who are most at risk, and those in remote rural areas where response times are unavoidably longer.

The number of Home Fire Safety Visits we delivered in 2024/25 increased by 18% compared to the previous year. This was supported through our work with the provider Safelincs and the National Fire Chiefs Council Strategic Community Health Lead, to create a Home Fire Safety Visit referral application for partners for their electronic devices. The 18% increase doesn’t capture the huge improvement in productivity, through better targeting of our High and Very High Risk individuals – HFSVs for these groups increased by 544% on the previous year. We also launched our Post Incident Engagement Policy (PIE) and completed training for all our crews, this saw an increase in post incident HFSVs of 37% compared to the previous year.

Our FireBike deployments, which target motorcyclists on our rural roads and at known accident locations increased from 32 deployments in 2023/24 to 58 deployments in 2024/25, equating to 378 hours given by FireBike volunteers.

We also saw an increase in our water safety and wildfire engagement in 2024/2025 compared to the previous year.

Our Achievements

• We have introduced a new structure for the Prevention Team, introducing new roles to better service the needs of our communities.
• We have developed and delivered standardised and targeted engagement and education packages.
• We have increased the amount of Home Fire Safety Visits (HFSVs) undertaken and ensured more are undertaken where the occupants are deemed to be High/Very Highrisk of a domestic dwelling fre. In 2024/25 we increased our overall HFSVs by 18% and increased the amount of High and Very High households by over 500% from 23/24.
• We have ensured our HFSVs are fully aligned to the national NFCC Person Centred Framework guidance.
• We have enhanced our knowledge and understanding of safeguarding and adopted the NFCC Safer Recruitment approach.
• We have complied with the changes to the Rehabilitation of Offenders Act 1974 (Exceptions Order) taking reasonable action to ensure that all individuals working on our behalf have the appropriate DBS check and are safe to do so.
• We have introduced assurance and evaluation measures to check the quality of the delivery of HFSVs.
• We have taken account of emerging technologies such as lithium-ion batteries and updated the content of our HFSVs.
• We have supported local, regional and national safety campaigns around water safety.
• We have worked in partnership with the York & North Yorkshire Road Safety Partnership to deliver targeted road safety education and engagements.
•  We have worked with our wide range of partner organisations to safeguard and promote the welfare of children, young people and adults at risk of abuse, harm, or neglect.
• We have ensured our staff have the necessary competencies and knowledge to deliver prevention services in a professional manner and to a high standard by training, assuring and evaluating our performance.
• We have supported engagement and intervention provisions for our national statutory duties.

Areas of Focus

Over the period of this CRMP we will focus on:

• Developing collaboration opportunities with partner organisations to deliver effective, data driven interventions that reduce risk, with a particular focus on strengthening relationships with housing, social care and health sectors.
• Enhancing our partnership work with organisations who support vulnerable people or may be at an increased risk of fire to ensure we are reaching those who need us the most.
• Carrying out more HFSVs to help residents stay safe in their home. We will continue to prioritise households at the highest risk of fire to prevent incidents happening particularly where response times may be unavoidably longer.
• Continuing to train our On-call staff members to be able to undertake prevention opportunities where their capacity allows.
• Identifying individuals for HFSVs through referrals from our trusted partners who have identifed those at risk. In addition to this, we will proactively use data and insights from previous incidents to target those most vulnerable.
• Delivering consistent early intervention and youth engagement initiatives, working with our partners around fire, road and water safety. We will also explore opportunities where we can support interventions around the serious violence duty.
• Working with our trusted partners to improve how people can access our services and how we can link them to other relevant support they may need.
• Ensuring our prevention and protection teams work together to provide a collaborative and inclusive approach to interventions. We will ensure where it is identified, our protection and prevention specialists provide dovetailed holistic fire safety guidance to both the responsible person and occupants.

You can read our Prevention Strategy on our website www.northyorksfire.gov.uk/aboutus/who-and-what/strategies-policies-and-procedures/