Reducing dwelling fires across the county is driven mainly by strong central communication, information, and education campaigns both targeted and general, supported significantly by the council's communications team. The Service supports the national 'Fire Kills' campaign plan and local GFRS priority campaigns throughout the year, with social media posts, articles in the media, radio/TV interviews, awareness raising videos on social media and websites, printed literature and campaigns material and supporting community events with operational crews and community safety advisors at hot spot areas.
Reducing the risk to people at risk of having a serious or fatal fire is more targeted. This work is a collaborative effort with all agencies across the county, identifying people who fall into one or more of the risk factors previously mentioned to offer Home Fire Safety Visits (HFSVs). Our HFSV is comprehensive, including checks for health and mobility to support people to live safely at home, know how to avoid a fire starting, how to escape it or avoid injury if one does start. We use trained staff to carry out the HFSV, and the NFCC Person Centred Framework sets the standard for such work, enabling us to focus on the personal, behavioural and home factors that may lead to an increased risk of fire injury.
Reaching people who may be at high risk of fire is an intensive activity, requiring extensive partnership work, and a Service-wide understanding and application of risk data. We achieve this by working with other partners such as social prescribers, social workers, housing officers and family members to make people aware of the risk and how we can mitigate it. Our crews understand who may be most vulnerable to injury and are trained to use risk mapping to carry out prevention activity. We strive for a visible presence in targeted areas to knock on doors offering home fire safety advice, delivering leaflets or giving fire safety talks to community groups. This means we use our resources efficiently; using universal communications, advice and education where appropriate and intensive face to face work where needed.
As a member of the Gloucestershire Road Safety Partnership, we take a lead for road safety education as part of the Safe Systems Approach, and we use both national and local trends to prioritise our prevention activity. The Department for Transport's (DfT) local authority road traffic series indicates that traffic on Gloucestershire's roads has risen each year since 2022, reaching 4,408 million vehicle miles in 2024, demonstrating sustained growth in road use beyond immediate post-pandemic recovery. Gloucestershire's strategic transport planning recognises the ongoing drivers of travel demand (including growth pressures and wider activity patterns), reinforcing that, without sustained demand-management and mode-shift interventions, traffic pressure is likely to persist and increase over the period of this CRMP and beyond.
The Service is planning for sustained or rising road traffic collision (RTC) demand, ensuring capability keeps pace through targeted prevention with partners, skills/equipment adaptation for evolving vehicle technology, and performance monitoring that is sensitive to rurality, peak-period demand, and strategic network changes. Along with many smaller scale road works, strategic network change is ongoing at the A417 Missing Link scheme, and UK government funding has been recently secured for Junction 10 of the M5.
In line with the national data, males are more likely to be a casualty in an RTC, accounting for 60% of all casualties between 2019 and 2023, with many incidents occurring on A roads or unclassified roads. We also use data about collisions involving young car drivers to approach local schools, colleges, universities and employers in key areas for road safety interventions. Information regarding pedestrians is used to plan education programmes in SkillZONE. We use data about motorcycle collisions to enable targeting of Biker Down workshops, and we apply feedback from drink and drug drive campaigns to run events and campaigns in support of the enforcement efforts by Gloucestershire Constabulary.