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The Public Sector Executive Podcast is the new podcast bringing you closer to the public sector leaders in the UK. Covering everything from the environment to the economy to transport, our podcast will bring you the latest news, views and insight from the people responsible for shaping the country's future.
That must come from experience. We very much look at a coach approach from when you join the fire service and that mentoring approach to developing those skills. You know, one of our main values is about continuous improvement. So you're continuously improving. You can always do better. We can always do better. There's many major threats when you start to look at the national risk registers and you look at, dealing with a climate change. We're getting more flooding, we're getting longer periods of wetness. You're starting to see the large wildfires and gorse fires.
This is the public sector executive podcast bringing you views, insight and conversation from leaders across the public sector, presented by Dan Benn.
Today I am joined by Mark Smith, eastern area commander at, the Northern Ireland Fire and Rescue Service, to talk about his career, making decisions under pressure and, the future of firefighting. So thank you for joining me. the first thing I want to touch on is your career up to this point. What kind of brought you to this point?
Now, my career up to this point, I joined the fire service 30 years ago. Passed in September, passed in 1993. I was a firefighter for 15 years working in west Belfast. And then I started really to climb that career, ladder within the service. started to go on, that path. And it's taken me up through being in charge of operational appliances at supervisory level to managing a project of our learning development centre at the start. Ten years ago, 15 years ago, nearly now, and then led me into, I went into headquarters, worked in our headquarters in Lisbon, did auditing, did assurance, a bit of governance, in and around that bit of debriefing and what have you. And then I was up in the west, of the country, up in the northwest, up in county Londonderry, up in Derry city, where I was area commander, which was responsible for most of the west of the country from the top to the bottom of the country. And then a year and a half ago, I moved then into Belfast here, and I'm now the area commander looking after Belfast and Lisbon. Really our two main. Well, our main capital city of the country and one of our other main cities. Yep.
As you've moved through your career, as you've developed and grown, I assume you know a lot about what skills it really takes to not just follow, but also to lead within the fire and rescue service. What kind of person does it take? What kind of skills and assets do you need?
Well, we're asked many times what sort of leader do you need to be in the fire service? And you need to be able to bring out different leadership styles for different situations. There are at times in the operational world when you're out at an operational incident and something's critical, and high risk, you at times have to be an autocratic leader at the beginning and get that through and then it moves into that more collaborative, joint working and shared working, then with other services and with other teams. And you go back and forward through the operational incident, going back and forward where you, you sometimes just have to, and I very seldom ever have to order someone, but just tell someone what to do. It's not a time for a discussion or a debate. And with your experience you do make the right decisions. And then as the escalates you start to go into that joint working and joint understanding and shared resourcing of incidents. So there's that type of leadership on the operational side of the house and then within, I suppose 90% of my time is probably spent in an office environment. And you very seldom ever use an autocratic approach to managing and leading in that area. Ah, and I suppose for me that's where that collective leadership and compassionate leadership element of what I try to stand on I think is extremely important. and being an authentic leader. So I think there's different stages of leadership required in different situations within our organisation. Dan yeah.
One massive thing that being in the fire and rescue service I assume would entail is making those decisions in real high pressure moments. Now that is something that will also apply to other walks of life, especially across the public sector. how do you go about developing those kind of skills and having that almost confidence in yourself to lead in those high pressure moments?
I think Dan, ah, that must come from experience, experiential and we very much look at a coach approach from when you join the fire service and that mentoring approach to developing those skills. Developing where, you know, there's different people within the organisation have different skills. They're better at rope rescue, they're better at wildfire, they're better at flood, they're better in different elements of the job. But the basics of decision making, we find that that comes from one experience of actually doing that under safe environment where we do training, simulation, training, simulation, assessing and that type of thing. For our incident command, it's really the high risk, high critical, time bound, decisions is really on the operational ground and the operational incidents. So we train for that, we assess for that. But that you only can become an officer in charge of incidents after so many years experience first. and so then there's the importance of being mentored and coached into that. Looking at more experienced officers, looking at more experienced firefighters, learning your trade really well. so there's the experiential learning, then there's a, I suppose the academic learning of understanding the knowledge that's required to understand how fire reacts, what fire does, how we react under stress, in those situations, and understanding the psychological side, of that, and the neurodiversity element of what's required within that. So there's that side of understanding that comes and it's the experiential, it's the knowledge, and it's when you pull those together, you then start to build the confidence to take, to take charge and to be responsible in those high risk situations and critical situations. But to say that anyone and anyone that I would know and have been in almost 31 years, you're fully confident? No. you need a team around you. You need to know when to listen. You need to listen actively to different members of your teams and give opportunity for them to share in the decision making. And we're finding with this joint, emergency services interoperability process that we use of joint working together in the emergency services and also in the emergency planning element within councils and health trusts and different agencies. So that has become a great development over the last sort of 510 years, away from that command and control element all the time. So don't know. Hopefully that's answered the question. I bet we're getting there.
No, no, you absolutely have. And I think just to kind of develop on that, of all that you've just said with having that team around you and, sharing the knowledge and sharing the experience, how much does accountability come into things as well?
That's key. That's key to this because you need to be held the account on your decision making. So if in the fireground decision, making that we have, there is what we call ops monitoring officers who come out and they monitor you in the operational world and challenge you on that, you learn from that, you develop from that. One of our main values is about continuous improvement. You're continuously improving. You could always do better. We can always do better. I, haven't met anyone yet who's actually made it right to the company any better stage, you know, we can always do better. So we do that from that perspective. and those ops monitoring officers then hold you to account. You then have a debrief quite often with other senior officers around who hold you to account. You're also. There's training programmes. So every three years or every two year, programmes of competency, assessments and what have you. So every three years in incident command, you're assessed every year in breathing apparatus, training, you're assessed to make sure that you're competent, make sure you're current, and to ensure you're up to scratch to where you are, you're still performing. So there's a lot of. There's a lot of competency based, critical training that we must do for the operational side of the house. on the other side of the house and the management side of it, we have strategic outcomes in the organisation around our people. Asset management, governance, finance, response, community protection. Those are major outcomes that we have, that we look for priorities. From that we come down into our five directorates within the fire service. And of those five directives, then we have our business plans which set out our targets. So I, as an area commander, then have a. Have targets for the area command of Belfast and Lisbon, Eastern, and I'm held to account on a quarterly basis by my assistant chief, who holds me the account from a managerial perspective, from hidden key performance indicators. So, for instance, very small example in, in the fire service, we go out and we do home fire safety cheques, fit smoke alarms, tell people nighttime routines, make sure they don't have lots of hoarding around them or lots of plugs plugged into double adapters, which they should never have, by the way, in case anybody misses the message. So those home fire safety cheques are. There's 28 days we need to. If you ask for one, Dan, we have to have bi fitted it and authorised it within 28 days. That's a KPI we have. So part of my job is across all of Belfast and Lisbon and about 600,000 population, but half a third of Northern Ireland really live in that area. They're looking for smoke alarms being fitted all the time. So it's my job to ensure that whole area is meeting those KPI's. That's only one element. There could be 200 of those KPI's we have to hit. So we have a business planning and an area assurance reporting system to hold media account and I hold everyone who works with me to account to make sure that's done. Hope that helps a bit. Yeah.
So to move away from the skills and the leadership and that knowledge basis that you need in your more recent time, let's say, what kind of things have you achieved in your role or, has the fire rescue service achieved what, whilst you've been in this role?
In this role, I mean, I'm in Belfast, a year and a half, but I was in the west, up in Londonderry for two and a half years as well. So I've been in this role about four or five years almost now. I've been working at it. But one of the big few things that I personally have achieved, I lead for the fire service here in Northern Ireland on wildfire management and I am the co chair of the Northern Ireland Wildfire Strategic Forum. I'm also a national tactical advisor. So we. One of the big things that we have achieved there is we have a national strategy now written, consulted on and ready to put into an action plan or a corporate plan over the next three to five years managing wildfires around Northern Ireland. We're setting a standard across the UK where the first large strategy or national strategy that's been written, Scotland very much of a national programme as well. But England and Wales who work together are watching this space and they're now starting to. So something that I'm quite proud of that we have developed together as a team, internally and externally. One of the other things then we have brought any coach approach, management style within the fire service over the last five years. And we're now starting to get that into our job descriptions, starting to get into our roadmaps for all our leaders, leaders at all levels, that the way to manage performance and improve performance is through a coach approach. So it's that journeying with your team and that sometimes comes to having hard conversations as well around underperformance and how we manage that. It's not just about that whole compassionate and collective approach, but having real conversations. So this is the first time we have driven that and this coach approach and I was the operational lead for that alongside our um.org development team. so that's been brought in. So we see a big sea change. We were moving into in the fire service across the UK, but we're very much adopting it. we've had some major reports, as I'm possibly sure you're aware, in London and South Wales, across the services we have a white paper reform paper reform of the fire service. from our HMI tranche reports, of the english fire and rescue services, we have had our own HMI, her Majesty, his Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire and Rescue Service have come in and done a report for us recently and they're very much highlighting, in many places there's toxic culture and we're highlighting, of course, where we have been for many years, a traditionally meal orientated organisation. And we need to move away from that. We need a much more diverse organisation. So we're identifying some cultural issues within the fire service there, some pretty serious ones, almost described as toxic in some places. What we have been looking at then is, our codes of ethics within the National Fire Chiefs Council who are leading us, we are looking at our national operational guidance and professional standards, and very much we have developed a new leadership framework, National Fire Chiefs Council, leadership framework, and everything we're doing now is based across that. When we're promoting people, when we're recruiting people, we're looking at their leadership, and what their behaviours are like and what those strengths are. So, that has been a real. That's been a real big change to trying to change a culture within the fire service. We need to be much more diverse. Instead of, just as I always keep saying, instead of just ticking the box of diversity, we need to become champions of a diversity, we need to become champions of neurodiversity, of gender diversity, of every element of diversity. We need to be looking at how do we match the communities we serve to do the best we can. So that's a real big change in the UK and especially in the northern Iron fire and rescue service over the last. I, suppose you're talking over the last five or six years, but it's really starting to take momentum now. and we're driving these changes forward to change our culture and modernise, professionalise across the UK.
I think that's something that is absolutely going on in organisations across the country, across a number of sectors, not just the public sector as well. There's a big focus on that. and it seems very much like you and the fire rescue service as a whole has a bit of a roadmap to that, to how they want to achieve that, and to what they have to achieve. But in 2024, it's a changing world. What kind of challenges does the fire rescue service face for the rest of 2024 and maybe in the future, what threats does it face?
There's many major threats. When you start to look at the national risk registers and you look at dealing with a climate change, where we're at, we're flooding, we're getting more flooding, we're getting, longer periods of wetness, you're starting to see the large wildfires and gorse fires. You see what hit the southeast of England last year. We're starting to see a climate change in the south of Ireland, in the south of England, starting to become a northern mediterranean type climate, longer periods of dry, and so it's, how do we start to manage that as UK fire and rescue services, where we're going to do a more flood rescue, where we're going and responding to more, much larger, maybe m not more, but much larger goers and wildfires. That's happening as we change. So there's challenges in, around the operational side of that. as we've talked earlier about the challenge around our culture and changing, that's major for us. You'll know that financially and under budget restraints that we have and in the world that we're in now, there's real big challenges around that. providing the service the public want with the limited financial resources that we can do that with. For me, that's about governance and risk management. That's about what's our latest requirement? What's the fire service that we need to provide and then evidence and with good rich data, with research, how do we do that and how do we fund that and how does that. So that's a real challenge. The fire service, how are we dealing with some of those challenges? I suppose there's joint working. for instance, take the climate issue. Here in Northern Ireland. We work very closely with a lot of our major agencies. Environment agency, for instance. The fortunate thing about Northern Ireland is we have one fire service, one police service, one environment. It's really, really good. Whereas across in the UK there's lots of county brigades, County Barmony, county forestry. You know, it's really challenging, in England especially to do that. But Northern Ireland we work together in environmental, so we don't have all the financial resources to provide all the equipment we need. So a few years ago, the environment Agency provided us with 300,000 pounds worth of wildfire fighting equipment, Argocats and Polaris, as these are vehicles that we use, equipment for beaten out fires and all that, because it's actually to the benefit of the environment if we can hit fires quicker and more efficiently. And so we had a partnership agreement to accept that funding. And so we see that more and more this joint response, joint preparedness, joint knowledge, joint or shared understanding, shared decision making at a lot of it. So I think that principle of doing it in a shared environment is where we have to be going forward. Major challenge for us, Dan, because then you start to have the battle who owns what? Who is responsible? Who's going to take the responsibility? Because ultimately you hold the risk then. And so there's always battles in and around that when you want to do joint working. But I think that's a major challenge going into 2024, how we do that, and I suppose around governance, accountability, and getting our ethical frameworks together is a real challenge for us as a fire service to ensure that we give the public the most effective, first of all, and then we make that the most efficient model. So, of course, we have to be an effective model first. We quite often get this the wrong way around. We become efficient, but we lose effectiveness. So once we work out what the effective model is, then we can work out what the budget and the finance is required to make that an efficient, effective model, if that makes sense. So that's a real challenge for us as we move forward and building that confidence in the community that we're still here to do the job that we're here to. We say we're here to do, you.
Know, and I think that's something that can be applied to other aspects of the public sector. You know, if you look at local government, they're, having to balance budgets themselves. do they reduce their services or do they make them more efficient? It's deciding which one to go down, and I think you're absolutely spot on there. That's everything for this episode, then. thank you very much for joining me, Mark. That was really insightful.
Been a pleasure.
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