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of the public, while at the same time maximising cost effectiveness. In short, whilst there is uncertainty about what the future holds it is clear that the gap between the communication capabilities currently available, and the requirements of the emergency services, needs to be closed. The emergency services, public safety agencies and Government, currently all play a critical role in ensuring the safety of the public and the country. That role relies on having the right interoperable critical communications services available and the functionality currently provided by Airwave must remain as an absolute minimum.

CFOA has no mandate to run fre and rescue services and there is no desire or legal requirement for it to do so. However its support and work forms an essential part of the national capabilities delivered by the fre and rescue service. Currently, risk assessments emerge from input at national and local FRS level, with CFOA working with other agencies to ensure that responses to multi-agency incidents are appropriate and cohesive. CFOA is also increasingly being viewed by Government as playing a crucial role in the management of national resilience, including capability gap analysis. The question of future funding remains a matter for debate in terms of who pays for the local and national resources that need to be in place to meet the requirements of the Government’s National Planning Assumptions and response modelling. It is clear that the requirement to reduce costs to meet budget effciencies, whilst resourcing the ESMCP requirements, will mean that there is a need to take a detailed review of future service requirements to ensure both coverage and resilience for all the emergency services are maintained at an agreed level. The communication requirements of FRSs are increasingly moving towards data traffc, to ensure that mobilised resources have a clear view of the risks and challenges that they will face when attending an incident. Greater communication in and around the incident area will also improve decision making in incident management, this

is also where interoperability between the emergency services to enable joint information gathering, risk assessment and decision making linked to the Joint Emergency Services Interoperability Programme (JESIP), is important. With the advances in mobile communications technology, there may also be the opportunity to assess aspects of commercial, Mobile Network Operator (MNO), provision that the FRSs and other emergency services could potentially tap into in order to beneft from a wider range of non-priority services. Whilst the potential to exploit this opportunity must be explored, it must also be clearly understood that commercial MNOs have to work on business case outcomes, and provide coverage where their customer bases are located, not necessarily where incidents occur. This may mean that there is a potential gap in the priorities of the MNOs and the provision of mission critical communications. An incident cannot be moved to where the best mobile coverage happens to be. This is an issue that emergency services will need to be mindful of as work on the new provision progresses.

CFOA has already taken the initiative in helping to ensure the most effective output from all the emergency services currently using the Airwave Service, by actively engaging in the formation in 2012 of JESIP. JESIP Strategic Board is chaired by Roy Wilsher CFOA’s lead for Operations. This is a programme engaging the three emergency services and linking to Local Resilience Forum, it is cross-departmental and the Home Offce, the Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG), the Department of Health, and the Cabinet Offce are all participants. JESIP’s aim is: “To ensure the blue light services are trained and exercised to work together as effectively as possible at all levels of command in response to major or complex incidents (including fast moving terrorist scenarios) so that as many lives as possible can be saved.” JESIP is a structured programme with key objectives based on using the facilities already available to the

emergency services, but using them in a more effective manner rather than developing something new. In parallel, CFOA is fully engaged in the ESMCP to ensure that shared user requirements are understood and delivered, whilst also working with Airwave to leverage current technology capabilities for the beneft of the FRSs. Effective communications play a fundamental role in frefghter safety. Ensuring the right resources are in the right place with the right equipment to manage an incident, while keeping frefghters as safe as possible is enhanced with reliable communications. Working with Airwave, CFOA has identifed two key areas where current technologies could be used to enhance FRS operations and frefghters’ safety:

Firefghter safety is paramount and enhancing telemetry capability with in-building location monitoring, specifcally at pre-determined locations of known risk, continues to be an area of interest. Radio Frequency Identifcation (RFID) tags can be placed across building locations, and these intelligent bar coded tags can ‘talk’ to a networked system to track frefghters room by room. This enables frefghters and the location of assets to be time stamp recorded to a reasonable accuracy of 4-5 metres. This capability, when integrated with BA telemetry, provides the potential for an enhanced view to monitor frefghters’ safety during the management of incident response.

CFOA has considered the use of live video images from an incident location to support improved operational response and health and safety of frefghters. Current communication between incident and sector commanders, as per the national incident command system, is voice centric and often uses private