Resilience is defined as the ability to manage major disruptive challenges, such as terrorist attacks, major flooding, or accidents that can lead to, or result in, national crises.
The Scottish Government has been working with the Scottish Fire and Rescue Services since 2002 to build resilience capacity at a national level in Scotland. The Government's aim is to secure public safety by taking practical steps to reduce the likelihood of such incidents occurring, but also building in appropriate capacity such that it can respond quickly and effectively if and when they do. The specification of national resilience has been made against an assessment of national threats and risks which has been undertaken by the Scottish Government.
Emergency control rooms
The Fire and Rescue Services Unit has a key responsibility in working with the Scottish Fire and Rescue services to ensure that Fire control rooms in Scotland (the teams who respond to fire emergency calls) are flexible enough to ensure a proper response service 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, no matter the severity of the emergency.
Investment
Funding Arrangements
Most direct funding for Fire and Rescue Authorities (FRAs) is channelled via the Local Authority block grant. The purpose of this funding is to provide revenue support for staff and other operating costs, including pension costs. However, as well as being able to access the prudential borrowing arrangements, FRAs also have access to the Fire Local Authority Capital Grant to support their investment in capital assets.
Fire Local Authority Capital Grant
Since the reorganisation of local government in 1996, a separate fire capital budget has existed where both the total and individual allocation to each FRA has been determined by Ministers. The investment priorities which Ministers are keen to support are as follows:
National resilience
Invest to save initiatives
Investment in training facilities
Initiatives to support and develop the use of the Retained Duty System
Firelink
Scottish Government is investing £100 million through its Fire and Resilience Programme to increase resilience, enhance capability and contribute to the delivery of a Safer Stronger Scotland.
Our Fire and Rescue Authorities rely on a high quality and resilient radio communications system in order to provide the standard of service we expect. Firelink will deliver a new single digital wide-area radio communication system for the Fire and Rescue Services (FRSs) in Scotland which interfaces with the other blue light services.
The single radio network will mean that firefighters will be able to communicate across Fire and Rescue Service boundaries within Great Britain and to other blue lights services. The lessons of the terrorist attacks of 11 September 2001 highlighted the need for such a system if we are to be able to be resilient to any such emergencies in the future.