Keeping communities safe – our five-year plan

The plan, which was approved by the Fire Authority last month, outlines the risks in our communities and how we intend to manage them over the next five years to keep people safe. 

When writing the plan, we looked at our data and listened to what our staff, partners, and those who live and work in Devon and Somerset told us. As your fire and rescue service we are here to keep you safe, so thank you to everyone who provided feedback. 

Some of the feedback we received was about a specific location such as a narrow bridge or a particular landmark. While this may not be for the strategic plan, it will help us when developing the local risk management plans that we talk about in the CRMP.

Over the next five years, we will continue to build upon the work already delivered under our previous plans. Here are some examples of our work under those plans.

• We increased the number of home fire safety visits using new working arrangements and training highly skilled staff to reduce the risk of fire to households.
• We implemented new firefighting technology and provided specific training to ensure our firefighters are prepared to deal with flooding, hazardous materials, and counter-terrorism incidents.
• We introduced a new service delivery operation model to better match our resources to risk.
• We reviewed our vehicle fleet – we have bought 35 new vehicles including 15 front-line fire engines and 20 specialist vehicles, including five to improve our ability to get to locations off-road.
• We collaborated with partners to improve national and local emergency response. Including providing firefighters to drive ambulances during the Covid-19 pandemic.

You can read or download a copy of the plan on our Community Risk Management Plan webpage. 

If you need the information in a different format, please call 01392 872200 or email comments@dsfire.gov.uk 

We will monitor how we are doing through an annual review of this plan, and we will share the progress reports on our website.