Emergency Response Standards Survey 2025

Overview

Welcome to West Sussex Fire & Rescue Service’s Emergency Response Standards public consultation.

Our Emergency Response Standards are our commitment to the time it takes us to attend critical incidents that endanger people or property, such as a building fire or road traffic collision.

The proposed change we would like your views on would bring the way the service measures its performance in line with other fire and rescue services around the country to allow for greater transparency.

These standards measure the time taken from us receiving a 999 call to the time that our first (and when relevant, second) fire engine arrives at the scene of an incident. We will continue to measure this timeframe, and will not be changing this parameter.

The changes we are proposing in this consultation will also not affect the location of any fire stations or fire engines within West Sussex or change the time it takes for a fire engine to attend an incident.

We believe that the proposed changes to our Emergency Response Standards will make it easier to benchmark West Sussex Fire & Rescue Service's performance against other UK fire and rescue services.

For residents, it will also make it easier to understand what the expected response time is for a fire engine in their area.

Current response standards

Our current Emergency Response Standards (ERS), which came into effect on 1 April 2009, are based on assessing levels of critical fire risk within the county into very high, high, medium and low categories and prioritising the fastest response to critical incidents in the areas of greatest community risk.

For critical incidents we have a 13 minute response standard for all areas of the county.

At the moment we use a statistical measure to identify the percentage of incidents we reach with a set time rather than a mean average time, which is the more common measurement used by other fire and rescue services. You can read more about our existing Emergency Response Standards in our Community Risk Management Plan. You can also read more about national Emergency Response Standards on the Office For National Statistics’ website.

Proposed changes

Under our proposal we would move to a model that assesses our response standards by mean average time. We would also like to introduce the following new standards across all critical incidents:

• 10 minutes average first appliance response time to all critical incidents
• 15 minutes average second appliance response time to all critical incidents
• 16 minutes first appliance response time to all incidents 90 percent of the time

The survey closes on 27 February 2025.

Alternate formats and accessibility

If you require any of this information in an alternative format, then please contact us via email at FRSMedia@westsussex.gov.uk or by telephone on 0330 222 3884 and we will do our best to assist you. If you are deaf or hard of hearing and have an NGT texting app installed on your computer, laptop or smartphone, you can contact us on 18001 0330 222 2884.

For more information about the accessibility of this website, please see our Accessibility tab (opens in new window) at the foot of the page.

Survey web browser compatibility

Please use one of the browsers below when completing the survey to ensure it looks and works as it should. These are:

· Microsoft Edge version 86 and above

· Chrome version 86 and above

· Firefox version 78 and above

· Safari version 14 and above