Focus on Scotland
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Leading the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service
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Running the fourth largest Fire and Rescue Service in the world is a major undertaking and one that Chief Fire Officer Martin Blunden embraces with characteristic enthusiasm. FIRE Correspondent Catherine Levin finds out how it’s going and what the future holds for the Scottish Fire and Rescue Service
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oving to a new service and a new country, Martin is now leading a fire and rescue service of just under 8,000 staff covering over 80,000 square km, making it geographically the largest in Europe. “It’s a stunning, stunning country to live in,” he says. Rather than be intimidated by the scale of his new job, Martin thinks of it as a Fire and Rescue Service with people. “That’s how I’ve got around the size and scale. I genuinely try not to engage with ‘it’s an enormous service’, otherwise it would just fry my brain.” Having joined in January 2019, Martin is yet to visit all 357 stations. It is a challenge, he says. He spent a four-week handover period working with Alisdair Hay, the first Chief Fire Officer for the combined Scottish Fire and Rescue Service (SFRS). He visited the four areas of Scotland on the mainland and many of the Scottish Islands. The tour gave Martin a sense of not only scale but the differences in the communities that make up Scotland. Trying to understand how firefighting works on the 91 populated islands off the coast of Scotland, he found that: “You walk on a fire station there and it feels like home. It looks like a fire station; people talk fire stuff; they talk about their communities and they are super passionate about what they do.”
Staff Welfare Communication is also a challenge when staff are spread so disparately across Scotland, a hangover from the time when Scotland had eight fire and rescue services. Martin
says that technology has made a massive difference to the way they work. A recent investment in Microsoft Teams for shared working and virtual meeting means that when the Covid-19 crisis hit, they were well positioned to transition from office working to home working. Although they did need to move from desktop computers in offices to laptops based in people’s home, but that was soon addressed. Martin shares his concern about how people work away from their normal office environment. “You are working at home as opposed to working from home. I’ve been really clear on that. That’s a slightly different distinction in terms of my expectations of staff; balancing their work with their life.” Learning from the experience of lockdown, the strategic leadership team at SFRS approved a change to their flexible working policy. They asked staff how they wanted to work going forward; Martin does not want to see a return to normal. “All of a sudden, there’s a difference in the way we can employ people and the way people can work.” He says it is an opportunity for long-term improvement. “Being in control of your work life balance is important: not everyone wants to work nine to five. The pandemic opened up a whole different way of working for many of our staff, but it didn’t have the same impact on our operational staff. They found lockdown hard; they went from the bubble of their fire station to the bubble of their home life.” Looking after staff and, in particular, their mental health is a big consideration for Martin. He says he has spoken
“I genuinely try not to engage with ‘it’s an enormous service’, otherwise it would just fry my brain” www.fire–magazine.com | December 2020/January 2021 | 29