Kent Fire and Rescue Service
Rural Plan

Most of the countryside communities in Kent rely on our on-call firefighters. They ae often people who live in your local area and have other full-time jobs. They volunteer to be firefighters in their spare time, which means they have limited time available for training.

At the same time, firefighting is becoming more specialised. New technologies bring new risks. We want to make sure our on-call firefighters are well-equipped and highly trained to respond to incidents in their community as effectively and safely as possible.

Challenges and solutions

Like other fire services across the country, we've had a tough time recruiting and keeping on-call firefighters. It's especially hard to find on-call firefighters who can work during the day. This means we often have to send fire engines from urban areas to rural areas when there's an incident during the day, which leads to longer response times.

New actions to deliver our plan:

• We've started a project to look at how to get more on-call firefighters available during the day.
• We're also looking at whether we should train them in fewer areas, but make sure they're extremely skilled in the tasks they continue to do.
• Since on-call firefighters are part of the local community, we want to explore new ways they can support their community. This could include leading safety activities, doing home fire safety visits, attending local events, and even running fitness activities. They're also in a great position to gather information about local risks and help address them.