Reflecting on 40 years' service: Fire Chiefs' Chair steps down

Fire & Emergency Response

As his tenure as Chair of the National Fire Chiefs Council comes to an end, Political Correspondent Catherine Levin talks to Roy Wilsher about his long career in the Fire and Rescue Service

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Reflecting on 40 years’ service: Fire chiefs’ chair steps down

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sking someone to reflect on a 40-year career in a 45-minute interview is a pretty tall order, but Roy Wilsher rises to the challenge.

Having worked for a large part of his career in London Fire Brigade, achieving the rank of Assistant Chief Fire Officer, he left in 2004 to become Deputy then Chief Fire Officer for Hertfordshire Fire and Rescue Service. In 2017, Roy was appointed to be the first Chair of the National Fire Chiefs Council.

In four years, Roy has led the NFCC through the response to and aftermath of the Grenfell Tower fire and to a national pandemic. With fire and rescue services continuing to deal with major incidents including the Manchester Arena bombing, increasing regularity of wildfires and flooding, the need for a national body that can provide advice and support is more important than ever.

The 2020 Tripartite Agreement between the NFCC, the Fire Brigades Union and the National Employers was groundbreaking and led to the creation of new roles for firefighters to allow them to respond to the impact of Covid-19 on local communities. Much has been said about the success or otherwise of the Agreement and its demise (see Sir Tom Winsor’s comments on pg 20), but it did show how the NFCC could work in the national interest at a time of crisis.

None of which could have been anticipated by Roy, who back in April 2017, spoke to FIRE about his ambitions as Chair of the NFCC. He wanted to maintain and build

a professional Fire and Rescue Service that is more efficient and collaborative; to develop the NFCC as a UK organisation that adds value to the Fire and Rescue Service across the country; and ensure that there would be a second Chair to follow in his footsteps.

Having achieved the latter, Roy talked about the subject of professionalism as part of a conversation about Fire and Rescue Service improvement. He was quick to clarify that he did not mean that personnel were not professional in their approach, rather firefighters should have higher levels of academic entry to reflect the complexity of the modern firefighter role. “We are still seen as a fairly narrowly focused organisation that is just about squirting water at things; it is seen as a blue-collar job.”

Fire and rescue services are complex organisations that require the successful interplay of many different roles in order to keep local communities safe. Bringing in people from different backgrounds adds to the richness of the organisation and there should be recruitment

“We are still seen as a fairly narrowly focused organisation that is just about squirting water at things; it is seen as a blue-collar job” www.fire–magazine.com | April 2021 | 23

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Grenfell Response Any conversation with Roy Wilsher will likely turn to Grenfell; the consequences of that heartbreaking day will reverberate for years within and beyond the fire sector.

When the Grenfell Tower fire happened in June 2017, the Fire Minister was in the first day of his job as was the Housing Minister; Dany Cotton had only just been formally confirmed as the first London Fire Commissioner and Roy Wilsher was less than three months into his new job.

For each of them, Grenfell was a defining moment in their careers and now, four years on, it is only Roy that remains, and by the end of March he too leaves his post.

It is useful to remember that when the NFCC was created in 2017 it coincided with the abolition of the role of the Chief Fire Advisor. This put the NFCC Chair role squarely in the sights of the government, providing professional advice without paying for the pleasure. On the day of the Grenfell Tower fire and in the immediate aftermath, Roy assumed the role of advisor to the government and to the newly installed Fire Minister, attending 12 COBR(A) meetings along the way.

It is a curious position for the Chair of the NFCC to be an advisor but also potential lobbyist seeking to influence policy direction. Asked whether there is a conflict of interest here, particularly when there is a difference of opinion, Roy said: “I think that the provision of advice in this way is better as I have a degree of independence. I am not a civil servant, nor am I employed by a fire and rescue service. I can give the best professional advice, unfettered by budget or politics,

that I and the NFCC Council think is correct. That may not always be what the Fire Minister wants to hear but it is our professional advice. There has been the odd disagreement with the Home Office, but not many. We talk these things through; we advise, politicians decide.”

Roy has a long history in the Fire and Rescue Service to draw on, as his career spans other major incidents, including the Paddington rail crash in 1999. Roy had only just stepped into his Chief Fire Officer role when the Buncefield oil depot exploded. Marking the ten-year anniversary of the incident in 2015, Hertfordshire Fire and Rescue Service released a video that summarises the enormity of what firefighters faced that day. “Little did the service know that it was about to tackle one of Europe’s largest fires since World War II amongst a scene of utter devastation.”

Nearly four years on from the Grenfell fire, the Inquiry continues its mammoth task of sifting through hundreds of thousands of pieces of evidence and questioning those involved. It demonstrates the interdependence of many different organisations and the technical detail is at times overwhelming and hard to fathom. For Roy, the problem at the heart of the Inquiry is quite simple: “The system failed the people at Grenfell.”

So, what should the Fire and Rescue Service do next? All fire and rescue services are looking at how to implement the 46 recommendations of Sir Martin Moore-Bick’s Phase 1 Report, with London Fire Brigade under the spotlight more recently after its recent inspection about this work from HMICFRS (see the March edition of FIRE). Roy replied: “I think the Fire and Rescue Service has come under quite a lot of pressure following Grenfell and we have a lot to learn.

We’re carrying out the Building Risk Review of all highrise residential buildings in England, which is a huge undertaking. What I don’t see is the same pressure applied to building control and other bodies.”

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opportunities at different entry points. For example, the recent advert for an Assistant Chief Officer in East Sussex Fire and Rescue Service did not ask for prior experience of working in a fire and rescue service and recognised equivalence from other professions: this should be the norm, not the exception.

Responding to this point, Roy said there is an NFCC project focused on expanding direct entry. “We as a sector have let people down as we don’t set out any national level training, competence, support and so on. It’s left to the local level. We should bring people in and support them as best we can.”

That said, it will take more than four years of being Chair of the NFCC to improve diversity in the Fire and Rescue Service. Roy said in his 2017 interview: “I think we’ve under-achieved in diversity.” Reflecting on that now, not much has changed, as he explained: “To an extent, I’ve failed as much as anyone else. I’ve tried for years as a principal officer to have a more inclusive and diverse Fire and Rescue Service. It is still an uphill battle for us.”

Linking back to the topic of professionalism, he continued: “Our selling point must be our professionalism, how diverse the career paths are and the level of responsibility that someone can achieve.”

“Our selling point must be our professionalism, how diverse the career paths are and the level of responsibility that someone can achieve” 24 | April 2021 | www.fire–magazine.com

NFCC Chair Roy Wilsher says the system failed the people at Grenfell

Fire & Emergency Response

“It’s not for us to say what the governance should be. We just want good governance”

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End Our Cladding Scandal The End our Cladding Scandal campaign is incredibly impressive. The campaign volunteers are corralling the disparate leaseholders across the country to maintain pressure on the government to do something about the safety of buildings covered in flammable cladding and highlight the financial ruin many are facing. Roy is often drawn into the discussion on Twitter and asked why he engages with the campaign, he provided this illuminating response.

“We’ve had three virtual meetings so far with prominent members of the cladding campaign groups. We’ve talked things through and make things better as far as we can as fire and rescue services. I don’t think people understand the limitation of our power either. For example with simultaneous evacuation guidance, people see that as NFCC guidance and sometimes as my personal guidance and it’s not. I think that there are a number of people who ignore leaseholders who find themselves in a very poor position, especially financially but also in terms of fire risk through no fault of their own. I don’t think it’s right that I ignore them as well.

“If people have got legitimate questions and legitimate concerns, we try within our powers to help as much as we can. Part of that is helping to educate fire and rescue services about what is going on. I keep trying to explain to people that we have no powers to reduce over provision of interim measures.” On this last point, Roy is referring to when there is something like a waking watch that is expensive or over specified; the Fire Safety Order does not give fire and rescue services the legal power to do anything about it as part of their enforcing role.

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Audit Commission. As a result, local approaches have led to inconsistency.

The NFCC is trying to remedy some of this with the Community Risk Programme, which will promote data driven risk management planning based on standard methodologies. This, along with the other NFCC programmes, will take some time to embed and if the experience of the National Operational Guidance Programme is anything to go by, implementation will be challenging as there is no mandate for change.

Asked about whether the White Paper should include discussions about governance, Roy replied: “It’s not for us to say what the governance should be. We just want good governance.” He did offer some food for thought about the idea of directly elected fire authorities that could replace all the forms of fire governance. Now that would be radical.

Since interviewing Roy, the Home Office has published the first part of its review of police and crime commissioners and there is a strong indication there that police, fire and crime commissioners may well end up being the sole governance model for fire. This will require a change to primary legislation.

Fire Reform White Paper Elsewhere in this issue of FIRE, a fire White Paper is discussed. Roy would like to see this deal with some of the recommendations from HMICFRS as set out in both the 2019 and 2020 editions of State of Fire. He talked about the fire-related legislative changes from 2004 and 2005 and the way that the political ideology changed to embrace localism. It was this dogma of localism that led to the dismantling of national institutions including the old Inspectorate, appointment and promotion regulations, the Central Fire Brigades Advisory Council and eventually the

Highs and Lows Drawing the interview to a close, there was some time to consider the high and low points of his career to date.

He really struggled with this question and responded more confidently when the question was expanded to include professional challenges. He talked about the Paddington rail crash and the Buncefield explosion as well as his leadership of the National Operational Guidance Programme and JESIP. He paused before sharing the low points and talked with great sorrow about the deaths of Hertfordshire firefighters Jeff Wornham and Michael Miller at the Harrow Court high-rise fire in February 2005; and in June 2007, about the death of Paul Mallaghan who was struck by a car while tackling a car fire on the A1(M) near Stevenage.

For senior fire officers like Roy Wilsher, whose careers are punctuated by the impact of major incidents and tragedy, the passing of time does not dim the memories of those who gave their lives doing jobs that they loved.

Which might part way explain why someone would stay in the Fire and Rescue Service well beyond the normal 30 years. Retiring to a nearby golf course will not be the next stage of Roy’s career, in fact quite the opposite.

Coincidentally, HMI Zoë Billingham is stepping down, leaving a rather well remunerated vacancy in HMICFRS. Laughing in response to a direct question about whether he will apply, Roy was rather open: “Quite possibly. I’m interested in the job.” Looks like this may not be the last we see of Roy Wilsher. Good luck to him. www.fire–magazine.com | April 2021 | 25