Response to First RBFRS Three Week Rota Proposals and Current Situation Regarding the IRMP Officer Cover Review

10 January 2011

After sharing the proposed rota with the officer FBU members, 145 observations were made objecting to the proposals. Drawing these observations together and considering the issues involved, the FBU makes the following comments regarding the proposals as they currently are.

General

1. The union believes that the Fire Authority has been misadvised into the understanding that approx. £700,000 of savings could be made and at the same time increase minimum officer resilience from nine to eleven.  The union has requested to be provided with the ‘model’ identified in the IRMP project plan, to be advised that it does not exist.  The union believes that the Chief Fire Officer now has an absolute duty to inform the Fire Authority of this.
2. The union queries the immediate necessity of reducing the number of officers.  The original parameter being ‘should budgetary pressure require it’.  The obvious question being: does it still require this?  The union believes that given the indicative local government finance settlement for 2011 and 2012, the Fire Authority has been afforded the time to look at this project more closely and broaden the parameters.
3. The union does not believe that this project has properly defined success criteria for anything other than the amount of money that can be saved.  As an IRMP project, success should be defined in terms of what can be achieved for the investments being made.
4. The union understood the imperatives at the time this review was being planned and now believes the correct thing to do is to react and realign this project to the amended financial environment.  Given what the union considers to be a vastly improved financial environment for 2011 and 2012 than that feared in October 2010 the constraints and parameters of this review should be broadened to include what has been referred to as ‘the day job’.  Effectively the service has been provided an opportunity to do this by the Government and should take that opportunity.
5. The union does not believe it is mathematically possible to reduce from forty-five to thirty three officers and have a minimum of eleven at any one time. 
6. The union queries the potential to realise the full savings indicated to the Fire Authority, especially if there is to be an increased number of non-operational managers. 
7. The union believes there are better ways of redesigning the officers’ rota than the one currently proposed.
8. The union wants to get involved with better proposals but have been informed by the project manager that this can not be achieved through the project itself given the constraints of the project.  For example, although the union was assured at the commencement of the project that a four-week rota would be drafted as an option, this is no longer possible within the constraints of the project (according to the project manager).
9. Given the budgetary information the Chief Fire Officer shared with the union prior to 20 Oct 2010, the union believes there are other options available to the Fire Authority for 2011 and 2012 that will have less impact than reducing the number of officers.

10.The IRMP report identifies a reduced number of operational incidents as a driver for change in relation to Officer numbers.  This is an entirely false assertion.  The number of incidents attended by officers is remaining steady with modest variations up and down for the previous eight years. 

11.The union is not sure of what the planning assumptions are.  I.e. what scenarios will the planned number of officers designed to address?  The union suggests the following: based on actual historic incidents, RBFRS should plan for the minimum number of officers in order to cater for the reasonable expectations of the following:

1. One six pump incident with reliefs without recourse to recall or Thames Valley resilience.
2. Two concurrent six pump incidents with recourse to recall and Thames Valley resilience for reliefs.
3. One ten or twelve pump incident with recourse to recall and Thames Valley resilience for reliefs.

12.The union has still not seen the calculations that derive the proposed ridership factor of 1.3.

Workloads

13.The union believes that the Chief Fire Officer has a clear responsibility to report to the Fire Authority how he believes the proposals would affect workloads.  The union would be surprised if the Chief Fire Officer did not believe the impact would be adverse.

14.The union calculates that more than 27,000 hours of officer managerial time will be lost each year as a result of these proposals.  The union believes that it is completely inappropriate to propose such changes without looking at the full effect of the proposals i.e. the day job.  However, this is outside the terms of reference for the project manager. 

15.The union is concerned that workloads for remaining officers will increase.  RBFRS has, in the view of the FBU officers, been historically poor at controlling the increase in workloads for officers and does not see credible plans to address this as part of the proposals on the reduction of the officer numbers.

16.Officers are already working to capacity or in many cases beyond.  With a reduced number of officers there is real concern that the workloads will increase further and adversely affect wellbeing. 

17.If there is to be a reduction in the number of officers to the levels proposed, the union believes the service should research this in more depth before proceeding.  Given the more positive financial position and given the risks to officer wellbeing, the union advises that the service has the time to proceed more cautiously than the current plans identify. 

18.The union believes that with the proposed number of officers that will be lost, the service will suffer the results of increased ‘reactive management’ at the expense of ‘proactive management’.  The union assumes that if the service had the choice it would choose a proactive management culture.  The union believes that given the indicative finance settlements for 2011 and 2012 the service does currently have that choice.

19.The union has concerns that with thirty-three officers undertaking the work currently done by forty-seven (i.e. the current ­de facto number), there will be an increasing likelihood of fatigue affecting decision making

Individual Needs & Family Friendly

The agreed Conditions of Service are clear in relation to the officers’ rota in this area: ‘It should have regard to the special circumstances of individual employees and be family friendly.’ 

20.The union does not believe these conditions have been appropriately considered to date and indeed given the parameters of the project can not be appropriately addressed.

21.The leave arrangements for the proposed rota are rigid and will not facilitate sufficient time for leave when officers with families would like to take that leave.  For example school summer holidays.  With a little effort the current rota affords each officer with family needs the ability to take two weeks leave during the school summer holiday.  The proposed rota does not afford that.  The union believes that if the constraints of the project were relaxed, then a rota could be developed that is acceptable to the officers in terms of leave in school Summer holidays.

22.The union insists that officers’ with school age children are able to take their main leave periods during times the schools are on holiday.  This will facilitate caring arrangements if the other parent is working and will also facilitate taking holidays.

23.One group of officers likely to be hit the most with the proposed rota comprises those who live outside the county or provide cover in an area other than where they live.  In the proposed three week cycle there are two long periods where these officers would be away from their families.  One of these periods is for approx. 82 hours and the other approx. 74 hours. Comparing this to the existing rota introduces a clear increase in the proportion of the rota cycle away from home for more than a consecutive forty-eight hours.  The union refer to this as a Continuous Absence Factor.  For the current rota this factor is 0.23.  For the proposed rota it is more than a third higher at 0.31.  The union officials can demonstrate to the project manager how these figures have been derived.  Whilst the current rota arrangements are acceptable to these officers and the FBU, the proposed rota is not.

24.It is entirely foreseeable that due to the inflexibility of the leave selection as well as the increased frequency of seventy plus hours per week continuous duty in the proposed rota, that there will be increased strain on families and relationships as a result of its introduction.

25.The ability to take leave at weekends in the proposed rota is not a compensating factor to the officers.  The union can work with the service to create a leave system that is likely to be acceptable to its members in terms of being family friendly but the current proposals are not agreeable to the union.

26.Some officers have partners who work at weekends.  Given that the current rota has four out of five weekends free from duty, this is the best period for some of these partners to make themselves available for work.  Additionally the current rota has more rota leave days than the proposed rota which again are days that can be utilised by the partners of officers to make themselves available for work.  Decreasing these frequencies will adversely affect the work-life balance for these families and is likely to directly affect their household income in a high cost part of the country. 

27.The proposed rota with longer periods away from home will seemingly increase costs for families.

28.The proposals seem likely to be less attractive for single parent families than the existing rota given the increase in long continuous periods of duty and the increased frequency of weekends.

The Rota (other than family and individual needs)

29.The proposed rota does not account for absences other than planned leave such as training courses, compensatory time off, sickness absences, pre and post-course leave, ADCs, PDIs, disciplines, court attendances.

30.The union believes that the review should consider the benefits of planning a rota with positive hours that straddle the busiest periods of operational activity for the officers and amend as appropriate. 

31.Officers currently undertake work outside their rostered days to help make things work.  The quid pro quo being that they are afforded compensatory time off generally at a time of convenience to the officer.  The proposed rota is extremely tight and doesn’t currently incorporate this demand.  The union’s concerns being that if the quid pro quo is not there then the officer will not do this work over and above rostered hours.

32.The proposed rota will be extremely difficult to manage and seems to be unnecessarily rigid.  It is difficult to see a structure in the leave selection criteria.  In the words of the project manager it is ‘extremely tight’, which the FBU assumes to equate to inflexible.  At this point of design it doesn’t incorporate all the foreseeable absences so the rigidity will enhance as other factors are incorporated.  The union believe it should be simplified to be workable and acceptable.

33.The problems with leave selection in the current rota are made worse in the proposed rota.  For example, the current rota does not provide the ability to always have a level 3 or a level 4 officer available.  The proposed rota seems to make this worse.  The union can think of simple solutions that would guarantee one level 4 and two level 3 officers at all times (other than sickness and courses).  However, the constraints of the rota prevent these being explored by the service.

34.The union believes that a tight rota such as the one proposed may detract from the maintenance of competence due to increased likelihood of disrupted training and development activities.

35.With the proposed rota some officers are likely to see the people they manage less frequently. 

Officer Cover & Resilience

36.If the Chief Fire Officer aspires for a minimum of eleven officers on duty at any one time and can not achieve it, he should not be recommending an increase in the number of non-operational managers at the same time as losing operational managers.

37.The rota does not provide a minimum of eleven officers at all times that the IRMP report identified would occur. 

38.The proposed rota is deeply unpopular with the officers and the voluntary recall facility for resilience would need to be tested in relation to the new rota, if introduced.  Given what some members have communicated to the union this is a potential area of vulnerability in terms of resilience.

39.The average figures calculated by the project manager for the minimum number of officers on duty during the evenings and nights (10.64) are skewed by the effect of ‘doubling-up’ on Mondays.  If this is taken into account it reduces to 9.46.

40.Typically, the number of officers available for the sixty-six weekend hours will increase from the current planned nine to a future planned nine or ten.  For every other evening and night period (Monday 1700 hrs to Friday 0900 hrs), the numbers will decrease.

41.The planning criteria should be clear.  The union believed that they were when the IRMP plan was drafted but as the project has progressed it has become unclear.  For example, at the recent Principal Officer briefing of officers there were a variety of planning assumptions proposed by the Principal Officers from a minimum of seven to an aspiration of eleven.  The union believes the service should determine the number of officers it wants and then plan to employ the correct number of people to achieve this at all foreseeable times. 

42.The union believes that if the officers’ rota is to be changed then it would be an opportunity to correct some of the anomalies of the current rota.  However, it seems these anomalies are being compounded.  The constraints of the project are preventing these being appropriately explored.

43.The proposed rota does not guarantee a level 4 officer at all times.  The planning assumptions, as far as the union is aware, requires a level 4 officer.

44.The proposed rota does not guarantee two level 3 officers at all times.  Again the union believes this is required from the planning assumptions.

45.Currently the minimum planned number of officers is two in the West, two in the Central and three in the East. The proposed rota reduces this to one in the West, two in the Central and two in the East.

46.The union obviously accepts that operational cover is the priority.  However, the proposed rota is so tight that officers are less likely to be allowed to come off-the-run or be on last call whilst undertaking a training session.  The current practice being that this does happen.  This will impact on costs if the training is disrupted and needs to be rescheduled and also on the maintenance of competence for any affected officers with the consequent effect on safety management.  There are presumably some courses, such as driving and breathing apparatus courses, which would be very difficult to disrupt except in the most extreme circumstances.

47.When the project started the union was informed by ACFO Southern that it would determine what is needed in terms of operational cover and then plan how many officers needed to be employed to achieve this.  The day job would not come into it – the service would look at operational requirements before fitting operational posts to managerial roles.  This has not happened in this review.  The proposed rota identifies an under-provision of level 3 and 4 officers to ensure their availability against the planning assumptions.  It is proposed that the deficiencies would be made up by an over-provision of Principal Officers.  The union proposes that the review should identify the correct number of officers at each particular level.

48.Although the union is aware that the Principal Officers have said they will ‘act down’ to fill the gaps in the rota, the union believes it is entirely inappropriate for this to be a part of planned activity.  The Principal Officers do not undertake the same skills-based development activities as other officers and are also often out of the county.  

49.The union can not see resilience in relation to Fire Safety complaints and enforcement.

Intangibles

The union believes that the proposals, if implemented as they currently are, would be objectionable to 100% of the officer membership.  The union is concerned that the service has not fully considered the implications of this such as:

50.Reduction in loyalty to the organisation that would be manifested in not giving over and above contractual minima such as not staying on to get work done.  Indeed, individual officers are informing the union officials that goodwill will stop if this rota is implemented.

51.Reduced motivation leading to reduced excellence and innovation.

52.The proposals will involve a complete overhaul of what is expected of officers and the amount of work that they can undertake.

ENDS