The financial resilience of public services in England is increasingly important in the context of continuing cuts to public expenditure anticipated by the Chancellor’s economic strategy. An understanding of how effectively public services manage their operational performance and financial resilience will be a key to ensure they remain resilient and sustainable in the ongoing era of austerity. The aim of this paper is to explore these issues by focusing on the fire and rescue services.
Fire and rescue services have been explored in international contexts (e.g. Kloot 2009, Pileman et al. 2014; Launder and Perry, 2014) but there have been few cross jurisdictional comparative studies (one exception being Carvalho et al. 2006). This paper is based on an international comparison of the fire and rescue services provided in England and Scotland. The governance and performance management regimes in these two countries have changed and diverged since devolution to Scotland. These changes have both snowballed and accelerated since the Coalition Government was elected in England (2010) and the Scottish National Party achieved overall majority rule in Scotland (2011). This paper is one of a series of interlinked papers arising out of case study research by the three authors. This particular paper seeks to explore and contrast the development, effectiveness and role of the respective performance management and financial assurance regimes in the two countries.
Key words. Fire and Rescue, Performance Management, Public Assurance, Accountability and Transparency.
References
Carvalho, J., Fernandes, M., Lambert, V., and Lapsley,I., (2006), Measuring fire service performance: a comparative study, International Journal of Public Sector Management, 19( 2) pp. 165-179.
Kloot, L., (2009),Performance measurement and accountability in an Australian fire service, International Journal of Public Sector Management, 22 (2) pp. 128 – 145
Pileman, S., Andersson, D., and Mojr, K., (2014), Enabling Organizational learning from rescue operations – the Swedish rescue services incident reporting system, International Journal of Emergency Services, 3 (2) pp. 101-117.
Launder and Perry, 2014 A study identifying factors influencing decision making in dynamic emergencies like urban fire and rescue settings, International Journal of Emergency Services , 3 (2) pp. 144-161.
Corresponding Author: Dr Lynda Taylor, Nottingham University Business School, University of Nottingham. 0115 8467431. Lynda.taylor@nottingham.ac.uk
