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

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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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