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We have collaborated with Buckinghamshire and Oxfordshire County Council Fire and Rescue services, to provide a joint control room, Thames Valley Fire Control Service. Our state-of-the-art control room receives 999 calls and maintains a borderless mobilising system that send the nearest available fire appliance, irrespective of borders across Thames Valley.

When an incident occurs we provide lifesaving interventions as quickly as possible to reduce the impact of the incident to individuals and the community. We have a single response standard for our first attending fire appliance at all incidents, this helps us to monitor our performance.

Our response standard is that the time from a call being received until the first fire appliance arrives at the incident should be within 10 minutes. We aim to achieve this standard on 75% of occasions.

To ensure that we can sustain our commitments to the communities of Berkshire, we have national and local agreements in place to support large scale incidents such as flooding and wildfire. These arrangements are co-ordinated nationally by the Fire and Rescue Service Coordination and Advisory Framework (NCAF) and locally with signed agreements between our neighbouring Fire and Rescue Services.

We are an active member of the Thames Valley Local Resilience Forum (LRF), which brings together a variety of agencies under the Civil Contingencies act 2004. The forum assesses the risk of an emergency occurring and develops plans for dealing with the emergency.

We have business continuity arrangements in place to ensure the continued operation of the Service in the event of local disruptions such as loss of power.

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