London fires

well, at the risk of this being read by anyone else, I'll cover a couple of things, playing nicely.
The latest IRMP (integrated risk management plan) has just been released, two years late and after severe threats from Her Majesty's inspectorate.
It implies that reducing the average amount of firefighters on an appliance, from 5 (which is regarded as 'confidence') to four, removing fire appliances from certain stations, downgrading some shift systems from wholetime to 'on call'(part time, members of the public) and various other cuts, will have no effect on turn out times, levels of fire cover and the service's ability to save life, save property and to render humanitarian services.
Obviously, the councillors agreed and passed the draft plan......that's where I had better stop with that one.
With regards to the fire safety/education side of the job, that has increased massively in recent years, with the implementation of installing free detectors etc, and the responsibility of enforcing the Regulatory Reform Act being passed from the fire safety department, to the frontline operational personnel.
Now, I have yet to meet a firefighter who doesn't feel passionately about fire safety education. Thats a given.
I do, however, have a problem with the way we carry out home fire safety visits. They are never targeted at th type of people who need them most (people with English as a second language, for example, or who are unemployed, and struggling to make ends meet), and we end up fitting free detectors for people who are very aware of fire safety, and who are unlikely to be the demographic that need them most. Or scumbag landlords.
I really don't want to go into details about the inspection side of things....suffice to say, that it echos somewhat the above thoughts, and the responsibility has been handed over from inspectors who have had a minimum 6 weeks training at the fire service college, to people who had a quick chat with a bloke and were given some books.
A Good analogy of what we have to do ....imagine you deliver for a bakery. Now imagine that you have to know where every loaf is on your truck, what type it is, what the Ingredients are, how much it weighs, how many you have, how many you would need for a certain type of event, the laws regarding it, where to get another one, within two minutes, if one your loaves breaks or gets stolen etc, etc......

But yeah......a fucking big spaceship!😂