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by having a fire engine and fire fighters there it just really made the kids engage,” recalls Mr Spring. “It just worked really well: we gave her credibility; she gave us the ability, if you like.”
partnership: “It was the first time I’d ever actually seen a 30-way domestic (dispute)! Everyone had a different view and everyone felt very passionately about the heathland.”
Engaging Dorset’s schoolchildren was one important outcome; perhaps even more significant was the role LIFE played in establishing strong working relationships between the UHP, fire and rescue, police, local council, friends of the heaths and other stakeholders and community groups. Mr Spring well remembers his first visit to a meeting of the local heaths crime reduction
Finding something that all parties could agree on (“we want to see a reduction in heath fires and we hate offroad motorcyclists”), Mr Spring went along to the next partnership meeting and made a suggestion: “We all lay down our arms and we work on the heath fires, we work on the off-road motorcycling, and if we can tidy those up it would be nicer for everybody...[Illegal] off-road motor-
cycling was a massive problem when mini motos were all the rage.” With the LIFE project providing a framework, new relationships were built between the various parties to achieve these common goals. For instance, by requesting support from the police for ‘traffic management’, rather than ‘heath fires’, a lower priority response, the Fire and Rescue Service were able to tackle fires quickly and without massively inconveniencing commuters, as had been the case. Similarly, a scheme was set up to train volunteer wardens, who would be able