Inclusion -
everyone together
Providing excellent services to all our customers, whoever they are, is core to who we are. We strive to ensure equality of access to our services for everyone, including people living here temporarily and anyone who travels through Kent and Medway.
We are also committed to the principle of equality for everyone who works and volunteers for us. We do this by ensuring inclusion, supporting and representing all our teams. Valuing diversity is not just a moral obligation, it is essential to what we do and our success. Without diversity and difference, including people who think differently, we would not be Kent Fire and Rescue Service.
Through our experience and research, we know the importance of giving support to customers at greater risk of fire, including people living with dementia, with mobility challenges or mental health concerns. We also recognise, however, that barriers such as language, beliefs, societal factors, and perceived prejudices may prevent customers from accessing our services such as safe and well home visits or from reporting small fires in the home. Through targeted engagement and using different approaches, we aim to reach specific groups who may be unaware of, or choose not to access, our services. By doing this, we can ensure we provide equality of access.
As a public service, we recognise the legal duty we have to everyone in Kent and Medway. As well as this duty however, the commitment of everyone who works and volunteers here in helping and protecting all our customers goes to the very heart of who we are and what we do.
We are determined to eliminate discrimination, advance equality of opportunity, and foster good relations with everyone. In recent years society has progressed in terms of inclusion and greater recognition of the benefits of a more diverse community. We recognise, however, that we need to do more and are working to:
- improve access and remove barriers to all of our services for every one of our customers.
- ensure all of our customers’ experiences of our service is excellent.
- become an employer of choice and a great place to volunteer, where people feel a sense of belonging and can thrive.
We aim to do this by:
- Embracing difference – when designing or reviewing services we will make sure everyone can access them whenever they need to. Everyone is different and as an organisation embracing difference, we will strive to remove the barriers that customers experience, whether they are tangible such as language or mobility challenges, or perceptual, including fear or cultural barriers.
- Diversity in decision-making - there is a positive link between organisational diversity and innovative performance. This means that when teams involve people from different backgrounds – whether demographic or functional – creativity and problem solving increases. We aim to make decisions by working with, and gathering information, from diverse teams with different backgrounds, abilities and a difference in thinking.
- Inclusive recruitment - We actively encourage people from under-represented groups to join us. We focus on the strengths and needs of every one of our colleagues including our volunteers, supporting and encouraging them to thrive and perform at their best. All colleagues from different backgrounds with specific needs or support will be fully consulted and where possible lead conversations, discussions and developments relating to any changes in policy that may affect them.
Incorporating intersectionality into our work
Everyone has multiple identities and can be affected by a number of discriminations and disadvantages. This led to the concept of intersectionality and the acknowledgement that everyone has their own unique experiences of discrimination.
For us this means acknowledging and understanding that we all have multiple identities that intersect to make us who we are. These can include race, class, gender, sexuality, disability, age and ethnicity. Intersectionality helps us to understand about oppressions and privileges that overlap and reinforce each other. Allowing us to understand and accept that life is not the same for everyone – even for people who share identity characteristics. By acknowledging and embracing intersectionality we have a better opportunity to understand the importance of these differences and how they overlap. This in turn influences areas of our organisation, services and behaviours that may help or harm us, based on who we and our customers are.
As a public service we must be aware of anything that can marginalise people and understand that it is the voices of the most marginalised that are often silenced.
We purposefully aim for greater diversity in leadership and in our teams, while working with partners and charities who focus on marginalised groups across Kent and Medway.
For example:
- in Thanet and Medway we partner with other public services as part of a ‘task force’ with the shared aim of improving the lives of diverse communities living together, making customers safer and reducing crime in the area.
- throughout Kent and Medway we partner with the ‘BeYou Project’ providing safe and non-judgemental spaces to connect young lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, non-binary or questioning people to meet, socialise and help each other.
Each of our projects and service developments must consider issues of intersectionality. We strive for an inclusive customer experience, which involves listening so that we can match services to the needs of all our customers.
Making accessibility ‘our business’
It is important to us and what we do that we ensure equality of access to services and employment. To enable this we must continue to prioritise our engagement with customers across Kent and Medway to build up a comprehensive customer risk profile. We need to identify and assess current, emerging and future changes around risk. We also need to recognise that people have very different issues and needs. Building grassroots engagement with our customer groups through our collaboration team, our building safety team, and fire station is key to helping people in their homes, where they work, and in places of education to help keep them safe.
Examples of how we are doing this include:
- ensuring our prevention activity, such as work and research with Gypsy and traveller communities and the Roma hubs, is conducted with pride in terms of care and addressing our accessibility.
- ensuring home fire safety visits are focused on the people most at risk. It is vital that we increase access to safe and well home visits and home fire safety visits so everyone feels comfortable accessing these life-saving services.
- we will enhance the work around operational response ensuring we consider and meet the needs of different people.
- to ensure that the training we provide has inclusive considerations both in the delivery and content of the training.
- we are triangulating real time activity at incidents with progressing our learning through our ops assurance model.
Inclusion is something we all care about – together.
