AVON Fire & Rescue Service (AFRS) has been taken out of special measures by government inspectors after making a series of improvements.

More work is needed however across a range of areas despite the downgrading of the ‘enhanced monitoring’ imposed in November 2023.

The report published Wednesday, June 24 by His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire & Rescue Services (HMICFRS) praised the service for making significant improvements in how it gathered and shared up-to-date risk information, the reliability of its mobilisation system, and its culture grading. It rated four areas of performance as adequate and six requiring improvement.

None were judged to be outstanding or good but the findings are positive compared to the previous inspection in 2023 when two areas were found to be adequate, five requiring improvement and four as inadequate.

An area previously deemed inadequate was the promotion of values and culture with staff not having the confidence to report sexist and inappropriate behaviour disguised as banter.

HMICFRS now says the service has worked hard to improve this, with employees saying they felt senior leaders communicated, listened and promoted a positive culture.

The report stated: “The service effectively deals with unacceptable behaviour.

“There is a positive working culture throughout the service, and staff feel empowered and willing to challenge unacceptable behaviours when they come across them.

“Leaders are active in challenging misconduct, including bullying, harassment and discrimination.

“And staff trust them to take their concerns seriously.”

However, the report said AFRS did not effectively monitor working hours to make sure staff were not on shift for excessive hours and that it needed to improve training and developing the right people with the right skills.

It said: “The service needs to do more to fairly recruit a diverse range of talented staff.

“There has been little progress to improve ethnic and gender diversity.

“In 2024/25, zero out of 45 new joiners (where ethnicity is known) were from an ethnic minority background.”

The 2023 report also rated AFRS as inadequate at responding to emergencies and that its mobilisation system, which records information and dispatches crews to incidents, was ‘not reliable and crashes during 999 calls, which results in the public receiving a slower response to emergencies’.

The inspectorate is now satisfied that the system has been fixed, however said AFRS required improvement at responding to emergencies.

The report said: “The service doesn’t make sure that incident commanders consistently command incidents in line with operational guidance.”

It said despite leaders being trained in using a messaging protocol giving essential information from the scene, some were still using an old method.

The report said: “Some incident commanders told us that they only logged decisions using messages to fire control.

“For one incident we reviewed, the incident commander had logged their decisions using the notes application on their mobile phone.

“There was no knowledge of where these logs went following the incident or where they should have gone.”

The HMICFRS report added that the service had ineffective internal governance and scrutiny to hold senior officers to account.