Emergency services and their estates are becoming increasingly interlinked,our recent Blue Light Estates Development Conference has heard.

A number of different pressures have pushed emergency services closer together, making such cooperation an increasing norm across estates and providing services.

The impact of austerity and the push of the government from 2010 onwards towards consolidation of public services provided a significant incentive for blue light organisations to combine estates in a cost-cutting measure.  [emaillocker id=”71749″]

Sallie Banks-Nash, Coordinator at the National Police Estates Group,  described this shift: “In the blue light sector since 2010, in the police particularly, estate strategies have been all about saving money and the number of sites in those ten years have reduced by 25%.”

This has caused a serious reduction in the spending available to individual services for estate development, Martin Scoble, Assistant Chief Officer at Northamptonshire Police & Fire said: “The amount of money going towards fire generally and particularly within the built environment has been almost negative.” 

A joint approach between fire and police estates is being taken in many councils, including Northamptonshire, which Scoble has been tasked with consolidating. The cross-service nature of modern emergencies has shown a need for collaboration, Scoble said: “We’re increasingly asking our police officers and fire service to deal with more complex events.” 

Blanks-Nash raised attention to inter-service issues at the Grenfell Fire, she said it was her understanding that: “There was a problem during the fire with the national police air service’s video system where the fire service teams on the ground weren’t able to access to see images from the air.”

Changes are coming to the sector, following government commitment to increase police numbers and all parties promising spending increases for the blue light sector ahead of the 2019 December General Election. Scoble said: “We’re now seeing the opportunity over the last 9-10 months of actually being able to put some money aside and develop our estates.”

These spending increases also provide new challenges for police, as raised by Simon Dackombe, Strategic Planner for Thames Valley Police: “Plugging in however many offices a year, how is that going to be managed, the kind of pressure that’s going to put on us is going to create administrative challenges for us.”

The Thames Valley Police are currently building its first bottom-up created tri-light facility, Dackombe said: “It’s a large scale blue light hub in Milton Keynes which is due to come online for occupation the middle of next year.” 

Dackombe also noted the need to consolidate disparate technological systems, he said: “It’s about the whole system approach and whether that’s the best use of technology and best use of innovative approaches.” 

However, Dackombe also dismissed calls for a unified system approach: “If we start bringing in new national IT systems, we’d still be talking about it in 10 years, you don’t need to replace these systems you just need a thin layer of software on top.”

Inspections of the Fire and Police service were merged in 2017 with the advent of the HMICFRS (Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire & Service), as previously the Fire service relied on peer-to-peer inspection if inspections were carried out. 

Despite this, the approach has faced some obstacles, particularly with ambulance estates, as the service is also beholden to the NHS. Blanks-Nash said: “On the ground a lot the clients for the ambulance service would run a million miles if the police are turning up.”

The push has also brought blue light providers in cooperation with other public service organisations, and Blanks-Nash spoke of the increasing prevalence of a consolidated approach: “We’re creating small pods, co-locations where there’s small little police hubs within community centres or town councils, city councils.”  

Regional differences determine the viability of a unified blue light presence, with Banks-Nash noting that it “tends to work better in the rural areas where you have vast distances.” 

The Blue Light sector had to change in the face of funding losses, yet in adapting to struggling conditions, the sector has made efficiency improvements. While cooperation does have limitations, the combination of cooperation and funding increases could lead the sector to a historically strong position.   [/emaillocker]