Public Safety Service

The Public Safety Service is a small and unique service funded by North Yorkshire Fire and Rescue Service and North Yorkshire Police, which operates in the district of Craven within North Yorkshire.

The Service delivers targeted and specialist interventions and activities within the community and to individuals, groups and families to prevent harm in accordance with Fire and Rescue, Police and NHS priorities. For the Fire and Rescue Service, this means working to prevent people from being seriously hurt of dying due to a fire in their home, or due to water, roads or extreme environmental events.

Public Safety Officers

The Public Safety Service is delivered by 4 Public Safety Officers (one of which is a supervisory role) and each officer is trained to deliver prevention and/or early intervention activities and interventions on behalf of North Yorkshire Fire and Rescue Service, North Yorkshire Police, and Yorkshire Ambulance Service. The Service also works closely with Craven’s Community Safety Hub.

The role of each Public Safety Officer is to:

• Proactively search for, find and engage isolated and minoritised individuals and groups and those who experience barriers in accessing fire and rescue, police and health services, to build trust and improve access to those services.
• Work in partnership to deliver person centred approaches that deliver tangible harm reduction outcomes for rural residents and help build community resilience in rural communities.
• Invest time to consistently earn and maintain community confidence, satisfaction, and trust in public services.
• Target prevention activity based on vulnerability and evidenced risk, to improve community safety, and prevent harm where possible (this includes delivering Home Fire Safety Visits to residents who are at the greatest risk of being seriously hurt or killed due to a fire in their home).
• Provide a visible uniformed presence in communities who have little contact with public services, to reassure and deter anti-social behaviour.

How they are different

Public Safety Officers aim to prevent harm, or intervene early enough to prevent harm from getting worse. Unlike other roles within fire and rescue, police and ambulance which involve ‘responding’ after harm has happened, the role of a Public Safety Officers is the opposite. They have the time to talk with people in communities, to build relationships and to be trusted, so that they can offer help and support to prevent harm and to stop that emergency response being needed.

Public Safety Officers use a combination of skills and training from fire and rescue, policing and the ambulance service, but they are not Police Officers, Police Community Support Officers or Paramedics and they do not respond on blue lights to emergency incidents.

Instead, they are uniformed individuals who focus purely on preventing harm and providing early intervention where they can, as well as providing a first responder role to the Ambulance Service. A First Responder is someone who is local, available and able to reach someone and provide help before an ambulance arrives (an example of this could be being the first on scene where someone has experienced a fall).

Two Public Safety Officers are On-Call Firefighters so are part of the fire service crews at Settle and Grassington. as well as being emergency first responders for Yorkshire Ambulance Service. The officers are employed, and line managed by North Yorkshire Fire and Rescue Service as their ‘host’ organisation, but they are based within their local Neighbourhood Policing Teams.

Meet the Team

History

The Public Safety Service started in April 2020 and was set up as a pilot project to prevent vulnerability, reduce harm and to improve the safety and resilience of communities.

The scheme was introduced by the North Yorkshire Police, Fire and Crime Commissioner, and began as a small pilot in the Craven district of North Yorkshire, with the intention of rolling it out further over time, should it be successful.

The focus of the service was to provide crime prevention, fire safety and health and wellbeing information within communities, and support community problem solving.

The North Yorkshire Police, Fire and Crime Commissioner, the Chief Fire Officer for North Yorkshire and the Chief Constable of North Yorkshire Police decided in 2024 to make the Craven Public Safety Service permanent.

A Day in the Life of a Public Safety Officer

Every day for a Public Safety Officer is different, but it could look something like this:

• Starting the day by attending a North Yorkshire Police briefing with the Neighbourhoods Policing Team to identify opportunities for harm prevention activity.
• Reviewing the daily Fire and Rescue Service call out log to identify individuals who may need extra help and support.
• Making bacon sandwiches at a Community Dementia Breakfast Club, and identifying a couple that would benefit from having a deaf alarm fitted at their home.
• Driving across the Craven area to deliver a Home Fire Safety Visit to an individual who has been referred to us as they require an airflow mattress and are unable to self-evacuate their home due to their mobility.
• Providing scams and fraud advice to groups of people or to an individual following a near miss.
• Attending a Community First Responder call to an older person who has fallen in their property, providing first aid until further resources can attend, and then visiting them a few days later to see how they are feeling and ensure further support is offered if needed.

The future of the Service

The Public Safety Service is funded by North Yorkshire Fire and Rescue Service and North Yorkshire Police based on what each Service can afford. The Service is open to new organisations joining it and by doing so, it may be able to expand into other areas. If you work for an organisation who is interested in finding out more about the Service and opportunities to invest in it, please email prevention@northyorksfire.gov.uk.