Our purpose has three core facets: Progress. People. Community. These facets underpin our ethical and professional service delivery methodology; to ensure we continue making sustainable progress, whilst focusing on developing, supporting and leading our people, to make our communities safer, through resourcing to risk.

Our plans and strategies define our path to delivering an efficient and effective service to the public of North Yorkshire and the City of York, through our committed and passionate workforce. As Chief Fire Officer, it is my absolute privilege to work alongside dedicated teams of professionals and I am excited to introduce our new Strategic Framework (Appendix A) which marks another milestone in our ongoing commitment to delivering service improvement though the Risk and Resource Model (RRM), alongside the Fire and Rescue Plan.

We strive every day to achieve a common goal, “helping people be safe and feel safe” which is rooted in everything we do. Our Strategic Framework, defines our purpose and our intent: “To reduce risk and vulnerability as a progressive, people centred Service, embedded at the heart of the community.”

As a public service, our purpose means we are uniquely positioned to have a positive impact on our communities, providing education that shapes young minds, whilst informing the wider community how to remain safe and reduce the possibility of harm. Our ability to promote public safety through building protection, ensures life safety remains central to the design of our built environment and when required, our response to incidents, provides highly skilled and compassionate interventions through the right skills and right equipment at the right time.

We have made significant progress over the last year, building solid foundations for change and continuous improvement for the public and the Service. We are delivering this through four key principles:

1. Fundamentally and critically reviewing our core and statutory functions. Our back-to-basics approach has seen, and will continue to see, unnecessary complexities removed, ensuring we sort all issues and challenges, before moving on. Without this, we would keep doing the same things “because we’ve always done it this way”
2. Re-designed our Service structure (Appendix D), with supporting strategies and plans that are scalable, so each area of the Service will grow and adapt in unison, ensuring the public and our staff experience sustainable, progressive improvement
3. Instilled a new cultural direction and growth mindset across the Service, promoting open debate and appropriate challenge, whilst seeking to remove unhealthy working environments. Our behaviours represent the shift towards a people centred service that values everyone for their individual and team contributions
4. Positive leadership is driving change through values-based leadership. New promotion processes and leadership development provides a platform for everyone to develop in role, across directorates or for promotion. We are professionally optimistic, and this will ensure everyone has the opportunity to fulfil their career goals, whilst helping their colleagues to grow and deliver the best service we can for the public

The implementation of our plans and strategies seeks to achieve greater public and firefighter safety, through collaborating with key stakeholders who help us achieve our purpose. The Strategic Framework sets the course for our Service mission, through the current RRM and beyond, extending short term goals to deliver real change where our business planning aligns our strategic documents in to one planning cycle (Appendix C).

Our dedication to public safety remains unwavering and the Strategic Framework represents a collective effort to adapt, innovate, and excel in the face of ever evolving challenges. It prioritises five pillars of strategic focus, bringing together the core facets that will enable us to be pro-active and agile in our approach, whilst delivering progressive, sustainable change through our national perspective, with local delivery.

• Digital and Data: we are developing our management and literacy of digital and data capabilities, to support evidence-based decisions. This will enable us to measure and monitor the benefits of our activities, delivering high calibre, ethical and consistent, targeted interventions through our Community Risk Profile. This will also support development of risk-based training for firefighter safety, through harnessing the power of and evolving our data analytics.

• Continuous improvement and sustainability: Firefighter safety and public safety are central to our professional standards. These principles are essential for ensuring the safety of our communities and the well-being of our staff. We are creating an environment that promotes sustainable practices, through aligning our plans and strategy with leadership and investing in training, education, equipment, and technology. To deliver this, individual personal responsibility is a fundamental driver and will feature in all development, leadership and promotion facets.

• Diversity, Equity, Inclusion and Culture: we embrace diversity and inclusivity as core values, both within our Service and in our interactions with the community. We strive to create a positive professional culture in which we can provide a safe and effective service for the public, where everyone feels safe, physically and psychologically and is supported to be themselves. A Service where new staff are welcomed and accepted for their individual contribution and a Service that every one of us can be proud to be part of

• People and inclusive leadership: we are continually adapting, improving and growing through our commitment to a learning and values led culture. We value the contribution of all our staff with a shared sense of belonging and connection, to improve staff welfare and public confidence in our Service. People are confident to raise concerns and challenge behaviours, safeguarding positive working environments, through trusted people management practices

• Collaboration: we recognise our success is intertwined with the well-being of our communities. We will actively engage with the public, partners and stakeholders to seek their insight and tailor our service delivery to be efficient, effective and meet changing societal needs.

The Delivery Plan and Change Pipeline (Appendix C) details the key work products and projects that are underway or planned, to deliver organisational change and improvement. This provides clarity on what is being delivered and when. Our commitments and outcomes align to our Directorates and demonstrate what we need to do to achieve progress in all areas of the Service and enableNY. They are supported by tactical plans, performance metrics and an assurance framework to measure our progress, highlight good practice and, where we need to focus our efforts for improvement.

As we continue this journey, I encourage you to engage and help shape the future of our Service. Our success will depend on our collective effort and together, we will continue to make North Yorkshire and the City of York safer and a more resilient place to live, work, and thrive.

Thank you for your continued trust and support.

Jonathan Dyson

Chief Fire Officer