Central government interventions in fire and rescue services in England and Wales

Murphy, P ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8459-4448 and Lakoma, K ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2583-3813, 2025. Central government interventions in fire and rescue services in England and Wales. In: United Kingdom Association for Public Administration, Ulster University, Belfast, 10-12 September 2025.

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Abstract

Independent external inspection of Fire and Rescue Services in the UK has been a consistent feature in the quality assurance and performance assessment arrangements of Fire and Rescue Services since the temporary creation of a National Fire Service between 1941 and 1947. Prior to the war the Home Office had established a Chef Inspector of Fire Brigades within the civil service. After the war the 1947 Fire Services Act returned responsibility for fire services to local government and annual inspection was rolled out with the appointment of a Chief Inspector for England and Wales, (Henry Martin Smith) who reported annually to the Home Office (Ewen 2010, Murphy and Greenhalgh 2018). His Majesty’s Fire Service Inspectorate in Scotland (HMFSI) was established in 1948.

Fire and Rescue Services were still an integral part of local government when the ‘New Labour’ government of Tony Blair embarked on Local Government modernization and subsequently Fire Service modernization (Murphy and Greenhalgh 2013, 2018). Modernization in fire services was not the same as modernization in local government, but it was heavily influenced by the experience in local government. Both programs introduced new performance management regimes focused on organizational performance and continual improvement and both featured external inspections and central government intervention in both the strategic and operational delivery of organizations and services that were found to be either failing or significantly underperforming.

Lakoma (2024) has recently highlighted the continuing influence of external inspections within fire and Rescue services. This paper is the first academic paper to specifically examine central government’s interventions in Fire and Rescue Services in England and Wales between 2004 and 2025. It highlights significant changes in both the form and nature of inspections over the study period and their adequacy as a basis for subsequent central government interventions. It finds that more recent inspections which are operationally, and service based, have not been seen as sufficient to justify addressing what are essentially strategic and corporate challenges such as organizational culture, and strategic leadership and management inadequacies that have recently been highlighted in fire and rescue services. The paper concludes with recommendations for the scope and nature of the future inspection regime in fire and rescue services and the purpose and focus of future central government interventions.

Item Type:	Conference contribution
Creators:	Murphy, P. and Lakoma, K.
Date:	September 2025
Identifiers:	Number Type 2495886 Other
Divisions:	Schools > Nottingham Business School
Record created by:	Laura Borcherds
Date Added:	19 Sep 2025 15:23
Last Modified:	19 Sep 2025 15:23
URI:	https://irep.ntu.ac.uk/id/eprint/54381

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