Fire benchmarking club in LG Inform

Please find some details below about a new benchmarking club for Fire and Rescue Service colleagues who use LG Inform.

Over the years we have worked with individual fire authorities, various Family Groups and CFOA to make LG Inform more useful to fire authorities. This included increasing the number of metrics published by the Home Office (and formerly by DCLG) relating to incidents and operational statistics as well as providing aggregated metric types at the fire authority level for other contextual metrics like population, household and business metrics.

Most recently we have been working with the South West Fire Performance and Benchmarking Group to develop a voluntary benchmarking club for fire related metrics. This is an entirely voluntarily exercise, the purpose is to provide members with an opportunity to share data for a basket of metrics prior to formal publication.

Reports

The club is a quarterly collection and has been designed to be very quick and easy, and involves simply entering your authority's figure into an online form. Data provided is then loaded into LG Inform at the end of the quarter, you can then create your own reports benchmarking yourself against other participants or you can simply view your data in one of the benchmarking reports created by the LGA Research team; here is the report that we produced for the South West Fire Performance and Benchmarking Group (you need to be signed in to view it) and here is the equivalent report for all benchmarking participants (sign in needed).

Further information

This is a Word version of the form, so you can see what it looks like http://e-sd.org/SlyzO
To view our most recent benchmarking reports, please visit http://lginform.local.gov.uk/about-lg-inform/fire-benchmarking-club

Quarter 2 2017/18 collection window is now open and closes Friday 3^rd November. If you are interested in taking part in the Benchmarking club, you do not have to supply all the data just the areas you are interested in and you can provide pervious quarters data, please email and we can send a link.

Metrics included in the club

The current basket of metrics is a mix of:

Provisional: i.e. a pre-existing collection which has a significant time lag between submission and publication and users would like to see it in LG Inform as provisional data prior to official publication.
Local: this could include new metric types, for which there is currently no existing collection facility but the sector has agreed a definition and committed to submitting data against it.

All data provided are available six to eight weeks after the end of the quarter to registered, sign in users. Data remain restricted like this for a year after the period for which the data relate or in the case of provisional data until such time as it is formally published by the Home Office; currently the Home Office has moved to a bi-annual publication of the fire statistics monitor data which means that outside the club is not available for 6-9 months after the end of the period.

Given the myriad of ways that individual fire authorities prefer to benchmark their data e.g. per 1,000 population, per million population, per household, per dwelling, per non-domestic property etc. it was decided that the club would simply collect the raw count for each metric and we developed an extra feature within the reporting tool to allow users to choose the denominator (population, dwelling, non-domestic property) and the multiplier whichever meets their particular needs at that time.

The current basket of metrics are:

1. Total fires (primary, secondary, chimney)

2. Primary fires

3. Fatalities in primary fires

4. Fatalities in accidental primary fires

5. Casualties (exc. pre-cautionary checks) in primary fires

6. Casualties (exc. pre-cautionary checks) in accidental primary fires

7. Fires in non-domestic premises

8. Secondary fires

9. Accidental dwelling fires

10. Deaths arising from accidental dwelling fires

11. Injuries (excluding pre-cautionary checks) arising from accidental dwelling fires