"It's not rocket science, it's about being decent"

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“It’s not rocket science, it’s about being decent”

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There are six women chief fire officers in the UK but only one of them appeared recently in a video, feet up on the table proudly showing her rainbow coloured socks to the world. Meet Alex Johnson, South Yorkshire’s new Chief Fire Officer

South Yorkshire Fire and Rescue’s new Chief Fire Officer, Alex Johnson © South Yorkshire Fire and Rescue

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inner of the 2019 Excellence in Fire and Emergency Award for Most Influential Woman in Fire, Chief Fire Officer Alex Johnson talks to FIRE about her career.

A relative newcomer to South Yorkshire Fire and Rescue, Alex served briefly as ACO and DCFO before taking over from long standing CFO Jamie Courtney at the start of this year.

She takes over at a good time for South Yorkshire, where it received a strong HMICFRS inspection report with ten good grades and just one requires improvement for affordability for the future. Alex is particularly proud of the people pillar of the report: she talks a lot about people, with compelling authenticity and warmth.

“We know if we want to score good across the board, we need to be even better next time. We are looking at everything that HMICFRS pointed out, but we were already looking at a lot of those things.” She talks about making improvements because they are the right thing to do; inspection shouldn’t just be a tick box exercise for the auditors. Linking up South Yorkshire’s response to the Grenfell Tower Inquiry Phase 1 recommendations with the HMICFRS findings allows them to take a more rounded view of improvement.

South Yorkshire With a population of 1.3 million and covering four metropolitan boroughs, South Yorkshire Fire and Rescue employs over 800 staff with both wholetime and on-call staff. Alex will be joined by a new Deputy Chief when

Chris Kirby, currently serving as an Area Manager in West Yorkshire, crosses the border. It is a small world: West Yorkshire’s CFO John Roberts was previously Deputy Chief in South Yorkshire.

Alex talks about how South Yorkshire is an outward looking organisation, keen to learn from others. A good example of this is the National Operational Learning User Group, where South Yorkshire’s Stewart Nicholson is the chair; this is a new approach to learning that emerged from the National Operational Guidance Programme.

Local collaboration is also important with South Yorkshire winning the award for Best Emergency Services Collaboration at the Excellence in Fire and Emergency Awards; a second win for them and a recognition of the work their community safety department is doing with South Yorkshire Police.

Alex is the NFCC lead for Equality, Diversity and Inclusion which she shares with Lancashire’s CFO Justin Johnston.

Between them they are leading the way on this wide brief that includes fitness, recruitment, retention and mentoring.

Keen to make the point that her NFCC brief is not just about women, or BME staff, she explains that it is: “About overall diversity and how we can make our services inclusive places to work.” When asked how the NFCC can go beyond strategies to meaningful change, she says: “It’s about having a conversation with people; pushing my passion on to other people. It’s not rocket science, it’s about being decent to people.” This role dovetails nicely with Alex’s position on the executive committee of Women in the Fire Service.

“It’s more of an inclusive place where people are starting to recognise that diversity is strength rather than something you have to do” 24 | April 2020 | www.fire–magazine.com

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© South Yorkshire Fire and Rescue

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The video that saw Alex in her rainbow socks made the more serious point about the need to face head on the criticism that a modern Fire and Rescue Service does not need to celebrate its employees. That video was about LGBT employees, but its message applies equally to Black History Month where beautiful photographs of black SYFS employees were displayed in public spaces.

There is always a slight worry that when interviewing a woman chief fire officer, the focus always ends up on gender. While there has been a threefold increase in the number of wholetime women firefighters since 2002, as a percentage of the operational workforce it is still woeful at 6.8 per cent.

The reality is that being a woman defines Alex’s experience of being in the Fire and Rescue Service and provides a perspective that is entirely different to the 44 men who currently serve as CFOs in the UK. Much of what Alex said during this interview echoes experience shared in previous FIRE interviews with Dany Cotton, Dawn Whittaker and Ann Millington, despite having different routes to the top.

Discussing her service’s response to the winter floods that saw swathes of South Yorkshire under water, Alex says she is proud of her staff and of their preparedness.

Flooding is becoming more commonplace and Alex says that the impact of responding to increasing numbers of flooding incidents is a strain on resources. Asked whether she supports the FBU’s call for a statutory duty for fire and rescue services to respond to flooding, she wholeheartedly agrees.

From responding to local flooding to dealing with the Covid-19 pandemic, South Yorkshire, along with the rest of the Fire and Rescue Service, is working in challenging times and strong leadership is vital to ensure emergency services can continue to operate safely in communities.

Alex Johnson, along with all the other chief fire officers, will continue to work with a passion and commitment that their staff and the public expect, but need more now than ever.

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Women in the Fire Service Alex started her career with the fire and rescue service in 1992 when she joined Derbyshire Fire and Rescue Service as one of just a handful of women firefighters. “We were quite a novelty as women in the Fire Service. In 1992, it was sheer bloody mindedness that got me through it. I guess I was pretty resilient. There were people who blatantly didn’t want women in the Fire Service.”

Alex describes what it was like to be a woman firefighter in the early 1990s. “I went through a phase where people would say to me, well, you’re OK, you’re one of the lads.

In my first four years I tried to fit in and conform to be accepted. Looking back on it now, that probably wasn’t the right thing to do but I can see it was self-preservation.”

This is similar to what Dany Cotton said in her interview for FIRE shortly after she became London Fire Commissioner.

Promotion to leading firefighter in 1996 gave Alex the confidence to confront the inappropriate behaviour and call out the negative language. She says that bullying and harassment is not just confined to women but comes from an ideology that says to be in the Fire and Rescue Service one has to be a certain type of person. “I started to kick back but people used to say to me, ‘well you put up with it for four years, what’s changed?’ I hadn’t changed; I’d just gone back to the original me.”

This emboldened Alex emerged at the same time as she joined Women in the Fire Service. “I realised there were other people who could support me. There weren’t many role models back then. In 2000 there were five women officers in the country. We became our own support network.” At the same time, Alex was also part of the FBU Women’s Network.

“What I found in the early years was that if you ever saw another female firefighter, you would ignore them because if you went and spoke to them, men would say, ‘Oh, are you discussing your knitting patterns?’” She laughs at how ridiculous this sounds now, but it doesn’t stop it exemplifying the hostile environment that many if not all women firefighters experienced at that time.

“I think the Service as a whole has changed, and not just for women. Generally, I think people are starting to see that the Fire Service isn’t just about using brute force, it’s about those inter-personal skills; it’s OK to have vulnerabilities.

I’ve seen a change in the behaviours in the Service. It’s more of an inclusive place where people are starting to recognise that diversity is strength rather than something you have to do.”

She concludes by saying: “Be true to yourself, don’t change; you change their attitude, don’t change your own.”

This is a mantra that stems from Alex’s time in Derbyshire in the late 1990s and is still there today underpinning her leadership in South Yorkshire.

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“Be true to yourself, don’t change; you change their attitude, don’t change your own”

www.fire–magazine.com | April 2020 | 25