Productivity and Efficiency Plan 2025/2026

Contents

Introduction ……………………………………………………………………. 1

Funding………………………………………………………………………… 1

Medium-Term Financial Plan (MTFP) ………………………………………1

Budget and Reserves ……………………………………………………….. 1

Efficiencies ………………………………………………………………………2

Collaboration ……………………………………………………………………3

Productivity……………………………………………………………………… 4

Technology………………………………………………………………………..5

Part 1 - Introduction

1. In line with previous plans, the Productivity and Efficiency Plan 2025 presents a general overview of the national and local economic environment in which Devon & Somerset Fire & Rescue Service (DSFRS) are operating and the effect of this upon our planning and delivery of services over the medium term. The aim is to offer a degree of context about the way we undertake our financial planning but to also set out that our focus is to ensure the efficient and effective delivery of our services to all of our communities. Ensuring our services are delivered as efficiently as possible whilst also considering our outputs and outcomes is an important driver to improving productivity.

2. Consequently, this Statement describes the financial constraints that we are operating within, sets out the concept of efficiency and productivity as an underpinning principle of how we operate, and provides examples of improvements we have made in addition to those we are striving to achieve in the future. Further information about many of the areas described here may be found in the Medium Term Financial Plan 2025/26-2029/30 (MTFP).

3. Funding Settlement – The Government published the 2025/26 Provisional Local Government Finance Settlement on 18 December 2024. The nature of the one-year settlement makes medium-term financial planning highly uncertain, so planning must be sufficiently flexible to be able to respond to potential future funding changes accordingly. The provisional settlement was broadly in line with expectations following announcements in the Autumn Statement 2024 and the Policy Statement issued earlier in December, with core funding increasing by a modest 1.29% in line with September 2024 CPI of 1.72%. The removal of the following grants also impacted on the Service; Rural services Delivery Grant of 0.575m, the Services Grant of £0.11m, and the Funding Guarantee Grant £1.751m all had a major impact on the Service.

4. Efficiency Target – As part of the Spending Review 2021/22, the National Fire Chiefs Council (NFCC) and the Local Government Association made a commitment, on behalf of the fire sector in England, to create 2% of non-pay efficiencies and to increase productivity in the fire sector by 3%. The narrative that follows sets out the improvements and efficiencies that have been made to date.

5. Capital – The MTFP reflects both capital and revenue expenditure and income. The capital budget sets out the planned purchase of assets, such as vehicles, equipment, property and information systems. Each Authority sets the criteria for capital items based, on their own requirement. For DSFRS, it’s any item which will last more than 12 months and individually, cost more than £0.020m.

6. Revenue – This is funding needed to cover day-to-day running costs of the service. The MTFP allows us to take a well-structured and considered approach to any investments in people or infrastructure, and to be aware of any potential significant costs that could arise from changes to legislation or government policy. The development of the four-year MTFP is always service led, to allow us to achieve the best possible service, whilst also being achievable and sustainable over the medium term.

7. For 2025/26 our day-to-day revenue budget is £98.7m and just over 70% of this amount is derived from Council Tax. Our single largest expenditure is on pay-related costs, which account for approximately 77% of our budget. Looking forward, it is expected that there will be a number of revenue cost pressures over the medium-term. These include: the effect on local government funding of the government’s spending review; the business rate review; increased employer pension contributions; the annual inflationary staff pay increases; the cost of recruiting new full-time firefighters; inflationary increases relating to non-pay expenditure, such as contracts and utility costs.

REVENUE BUDGET 2025/26

revenue budget 2025 - 2026. Total financing £98,959,000

8. Reserves. The Authority holds a number of reserves, typically split between grants carried-forward where we weren’t able to deliver the conditions of the grant in one financial year, earmarked reserves (help for a specific purpose). A capital reserve held to support the capital programme to reduce the requirement to borrow externally and finally a general reserve.

The anticipated balances held at the end of 2025/26 are detailed overleaf:-

Reserves and provisions

Part 2 – Efficiencies.

In achieving a balanced revenue budget for 2025/26, the following efficiencies have been budgeted for:-

£1.7m resulting from changes to the whole-time duty system allowing for better utilisation of the workforce with a reduction in the number of supervisory managers, through natural attrition.

£0.250m; renegotiation of the payment made to On-Call colleagues.

£0.400m savings from the reduced costs for the Airwave provision.

Vacancy margins have been built-in to the budgeting process to recognise delays in recruitment in both On-Call and Professional& Technical positions.

We have also enjoyed efficiencies from the joint procurement of a replacement Control room system shared across 4 partners. We have seen a £0.500m saving the results from the procurement exercise were finalised whilst compared to the anticipated cost to replace the system.

Efficiency data

Part 3 – Collaboration

The Service continues to build on opportunities for collaboration in the following areas:

Internal Audit: As a full voting member of Devon Audit Partnership which has enhanced the quality of our internal audit function, afforded greater flexibility of resources and resilience (non-cash efficiency)

Sector indemnity: DSFRS continues to play a leading role as a member of the Fire and Rescue Service Indemnity Company (FRIC), combining the benefits of insurance with those of risk and financial pooling. Annual returns are c£0.070m (cash efficiency)

South-West Ambulance Service:

Developed a regional co-responding policy and memorandum of understanding to ensure recovery of costs are efficient and fair. Building on this an agreement to provide clinical governance supplied by SWAST at no cost in exchange for gaining entry on their behalf at medical incidents is underway. (non-cash efficiency)

Provided co-responders from twenty fire stations across Devon and Somerset for over twenty years. (non-cash efficiency).

Introducing a pilot of the Tri-Service safety officer (TSSO) which is a collaboration between Devon and Cornwall Police, SWAST and DSFRS to provide an officer in a rural area of Devon who engages with the local community on prevention initiatives for crime, health and fire. This officer is also able to respond to category 1 health emergencies and as an On-Call fire fighter. This initiative has already been successfully implemented in Cornwall and we are benefiting from advice given by Cornwall Fire and Rescue Service. (non-cash efficiency)

Partnership with Local Resilience Forums (LRF): an ongoing process of collaboration takes place in line with our responsibilities under the Civil Contingencies Act (CCA). This is a collaboration with Avon and Somerset LRF (ASLRF), and Devon, Cornwall and the Isles of Scilly (DCIoS LRF) and that focuses on horizon scanning, risk assessment, the preparation of contingency and emergency plans, sharing information, and on business continuity planning. (non-cash efficiency)

Procurement 45. Category management – The adoption of ‘category management principles’ in procurement has allowed us to establish a better platform to engage with the marketplace and to progress more collaborative procurement with our partners, which is leading to better value for money and more competitive contracts. It is our well-versed Category Managers who then monitor spend on live contracts to ensure opportunities for savings can be realised throughout the life cycle of the contract.

Section 4 - Productivity

During 2021/22, DSFRS introduced the Wholetime firefighter utilisation daily return. With this date, we monitor the utilisation of the crews with operational activity, prevention and protection, training and other activities. We recognise that the issue of ensuring that our firefighters are utilised as productively as possible is essential to ensuring an effective operational response. This process has recently been enhanced with the use of PowerBI alongside a new data collection process and our efforts are now focused on ensuring the accuracy of this data.

In addition to providing managers with visibility of how the workforce is being utilised, comparisons can now easily be made between watches and duty stations to determine outliers or best practice.

This collection and data reporting process will be integral to our on-going efforts and commitment to boost productivity of our whole-time workforce. This focus has already seen benefits such as the increase in home fire safety visits by whole-time watches. I.e. an increase from 8,576 in 2023/24 to 8,198 in 2024/25. The reduction was mainly due to suspending home safety visits by crews during the month of December in order that they could undertake eTraining on the delivery of these to become more effective.

Section 5 – implementation of new Technology.

Human resource management systems: The introduction of the new system has enabled greater self- service and workforce planning across the organisation and will enable greater alignment between HR and finance systems. During 2024/25, we also introduced the PPD/1-2-1 app thus removing an internally designed system. This has removed the need for several manual processes across the service – self-service will ensure greater accuracy of data.

Community Fire Risk Management Information System (CFRMIS): this system went live April 2025 within our community safety function. This system will improve the processes for our protection, prevention and risk management activities.

Telematics: Telematics have been introduced which ensures we have the intelligence available to determine where our light vehicle fleet should be based to enable optimum utilisation. It will also be used to determine the priority roll-out of the Electric Vehicle Charging Infrastructure as we will know who travels where and when. Due to the success of the light vehicle fleet, telematics is now being introduced on our fire appliances and specialist vehicles.

Finance system. Following a lengthy due diligence process, a contract was awarded in June of 2024 for a replacement finance system. This will bring all things ‘finance’ into one system thus removing the need of an internally designed budget system which enables managers to manage their budget. Fixed assets and leasing modules are also within scope thus removing the need to keep complex spreadsheets. Go live is forecast to be Q4 2025.

Andrew Furbear

2025-04-30T09:03:00Z

Simon Clews