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.

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 existing club (you need to be signed in to view it).

If you would be interested in taking part in this benchmarking club please email lginform@local.gov.uk and we can send you more information.

Dates collection

Q3 2019/20 - collection window opens 6 January 2020 and closes 7 February 2020
Q4 2019/20 - collection window opens 6 April 2020 and closes 8 May 2020

Metrics

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.