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Prevention
Prevention is a key part of our work in keeping people safe. We look to reduce risk through advice, interventions and education of communities to adopt safer behaviours, improving their safety, health and wellbeing. This includes delivering fire safety and health and wellbeing advice to households, road and water safety education, reducing deliberate fires, engaging with schools and young people.
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What are the risks?
National and local data consistently shows that the older you get, the more likely you are to suffer a serious injury or die if you have a fire in your home. This risk increases even more if you live alone or are over 65.
Older people are also more likely to live with conditions like dementia, have poor mobility or experience health problems which put them at risk of having a fire or an accident.
There are other risk factors that impact people under the age of 65 that put them at higher risk of injury or death, such as lifestyle and living conditions. We have seen an increased risk of fire death and injury in males, over 50, who live alone often with mental health issues and alcohol and/or drug dependencies.
At the other end of the age spectrum, we are seeing an increase in the number of young people living with mental health issues. Young people are often responsible for deliberately setting fires, wasting firefighters’ time and putting property and lives at risk.
Raising public awareness and improving public education on the risks that could result from climate change impacts, and how to avoid them, is central to our prevention work in local communities. Influencing how the public behaves in an environment where risks are exacerbated because of climate change impacts is an important part of prevention activity. For example, irresponsible use of barbeques can result in wildfires and cooling off in water in hot summer temperatures comes with water safety risks.
What do we currently do?
- Where we find people who are most at risk of fire and other harm, we work closely with our partners in health and social care to keep them safe.
- We deliver proactive home fire safety visits to homes identified by our risk identification analysis.
- We use a combination of education interventions and partnership engagement to reduce incidents of arson and target deliberate fire-setting behaviour, and the impact this has within our communities.
- Our Fire Cadet scheme, run at four of our fire stations, gives young people aged 13-17 a worthwhile pastime outside school and builds their confidence and skills.
- Our prevention team and firefighters visit every primary school targeting Year 5 pupils across the region to deliver fire, road and water safety education.
- We deliver targeted advice and support on key safety themes throughout the year in collaboration with the National Fire Chiefs Council (NFCC).
- We work with our partners across health, social care, housing and the police to make sure that people are safeguarded and get the support they need.
- We engage with young people, with partners through our Drop-Down Curriculum 3-day delivery programme, which aims to provide meaningful work experience opportunities, positive behaviours and good citizenship.
- We deliver a commissioned falls response service in Hull and part of the East Riding.
We track the severity of dwelling fires to help reduce their impact, even though they cannot be completely prevented. High-severity fires, those causing injury or death, are rare. The number of these incidents peaked in 2010 but still account for 15 to 25 % of fires per year since 2016, with an overall decreasing trend.
Accidental Dwelling Fires
Medium-severity fires have seen the most significant changes and are likely where our prevention efforts can have the greatest impact. These fires also peaked in 2010 but have shown a statistically significant decline since. Additionally, medium and low-risk fires are converging. This indicates that dwelling fires are becoming less severe. Accidental dwelling fires (ADFs) have experienced a similar and significant decrease, following the trend seen in medium-severity fires.
What we plan to do?
- Gradually increase the number of Home Fire Safety Visits we carry out year on year during the lifespan of this Plan.
- Continue to improve the way we target our Home Fire Safety Visits, making sure we visit the people who are most at risk of fire.
- We will continue to monitor this data with partner agencies and actions will be part of the identified projects, described in the Our Project page of this document.
- Continue to improve our partnership approach to arson reduction and prevent deliberate fire setting.
- Continue to explore all opportunities to further collaborate with partners, including volunteer organisations, in identifying joint community prevention outcomes that can be delivered by working together.
- Include safety information about new and emerging technologies, such as lithium-ion batteries in our Home Fire Safety Visits.
- Continue to expand our early intervention youth engagement offerings working with partners to reduce serious violence.
- To develop our volunteering opportunities in partnership with Humberside Police.
- To explore opportunities for expansion of our commissioned falls response service.
- We will support local and national campaigns to raise awareness about seasonal risks and extreme weather safety.