Our firefighters play a vital role in helping make Kent and Medway a safer place for everyone. As well as responding to fires they deal with a range of emergencies including rescue operations, road crashes, collapsed buildings and floods. They also play an important role in promoting fire and road safety in the area.

When you call 999 and ask for the fire service, the person at the other end of the line will be a member of our control team. Control deals with calls about rescues and burning buildings, to road traffic collisions and floods. At times, the advice they give over the phone really can save lives. They decide what fire crews and equipment to send to the incident, and are a central communication point between our crews and agencies such as police and ambulance.

Preventing fires or road crashes happening in the first place is the very best way of ensuring the safety of local people. Kent Fire and Rescue Service has a team dedicated to this preventative work. Jobs in this team include visiting people in their homes to put up smoke alarms and provide essential safety advice, giving talks at schools and other groups, public engagement at events, working alongside partners in local authorities and police, a call centre to make home safety visit appointments and a variety of administrative roles.

Whether you are at home, at work, out shopping or enjoying a night out, a KFRS’s business safety team advisor or inspector is likely to have played a part in ensuring you and your family are safe.

They have a range of ways to ensure people and places are safe from fire, from the provision of advice and guidance to businesses and landlords, consulting on the safety of new building designs during building regulation approval; and using formal enforcement powers to ensure neglectful businesses comply with fire safety law.

They will also engage with local authorities to ensure large events are planned and advise on emergency procedures and access for emergency services, they are committed to ensuring accidental fires are prevented and if it does go wrong people are able to escape safely at all times.

Kent Fire and Rescue Service employs service support staff in from a host of different professional backgrounds - from engineers to IT specialists, accountants to HR officers. Though it might not be immediately apparent from their job titles, all play their part in supporting the front line services to make Kent and Medway a safer place for local people. They include:

• Risk management
  • Planning for the future and ensuring we adapt our service to the changing needs of the community are key to providing the best possible fire and rescue service for the people of Kent and Medway. Our risk management team analyse a huge range of local data that includes everything from housing density to changes to roads and traffic. This is vital to inform the development of the service. It identifies the areas of the county where risk of fire is greatest, so we can plan fire cover and focus our community safety efforts.
• Information systems
  • This department supports the life-critical systems that we use 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. These can range from navigation units in fire engines to communications and mapping equipment in the emergency control room and systems that record vital data.
• Human resources
  • The Human Resources team provides a comprehensive support service to the organisation in areas such as salary and contract administration, performance management, transfer, welfare, retirement, and resignation. They ensure these are carried out efficiently and in accordance with relevant legislation, KMFRA policy and procedures and good practice.

At Kent Fire and Rescue Service, we’re fortunate to have the support and commitment of our volunteers.

Dedication, motivation, collaboration and compassion sum up the spirit of volunteering at KFRS. They lie at the very heart of our volunteers, and are reflected in everything they do in their role as part of the wider KFRS family.

Our volunteers take on a range of important roles within KFRS, including supporting our teams with tasks, such as research and organising resources, and customer-facing responsibilities.

Their invaluable contributions help to ensure we deliver a high quality service to all of our customers, in a variety of situations and scenarios.

Find out more about our volunteers.