Case study
How Essex County Fire and Rescue Service use Acorn data to transform risk assessment & support their community
Summary
Essex Fire and Rescue Service (FRS) is one of the largest fire services in the UK, with a highly complex geography and associated demographics right across Essex. The Service covers the most rural areas to the most urban, from airports, motorways and tiny back roads to industrial estates and bodies of water including reservoirs and lakes. This makes Essex FRS no stranger to every conceivable risk for fire services while being one of the fastest-growing UK counties.
Essex FRS has seen a lot of change, with its risk-response strategy being reassessed to better act on and support the county by:
- Conducting 100k home safety visits in the next five years, with 80% targeted to the county’s most vulnerable
- Targeted prevention activity, from hosting events to traditional door-knocking and scheduled home safety visits
- Revisiting fire engine placement to better engage with historically challenging communities and support Essex FRS’ core prevention team and marketing team’s campaigns.
Industry
Non-Profit
Products used
Challenge
To meet with their legal obligations, Essex FRS produce a Community Risk Management Plan (CRMP) that outlines current and future risks which must be tackled to safeguard the community. The CRMP is underpinned by a variety of data, including Service data, the national CRMP fire standards, National Operational Guidance, service learning and Essex FRS’ ongoing strategic assessment of risk. However, solely using these data sources, Essex FRS struggled to understand fire risks or determine what constituted and influenced vulnerability in their communities. It was unclear whether vulnerability stemmed from socioeconomic challenges or demographic variables such as age or living arrangements, which affected Essex FRS’ approach to providing safety. The necessity to fill this data gap and understand how best to address risks against these emerging behaviours is what compelled Essex FRS to partner with CACI.
Solution
A combination of CACI’s geodemographic segmentation Acorn, Household Acorn, Wellbeing Acorn (Acorn Datasets) and the associated pen portraits and supporting materials have been adopted to support Essex FRS’ Community Risk Management Plan. The pen portraits provide demographic, lifestyle, behavioural and health insights about specific community groups that enable the service to better assess risks and their potential impact, essential components for decision-making associated with their prevention, protection and response activities.
The plan leveraged CACI’s Acorn Datasets alongside their own insights to assess risk and prioritise outreach, particularly home safety visits, to help mitigate risks within communities.
This also ensured firefighters could work more closely within their communities and increase time spent in disengaged areas.
Through these geodemographic insights, Essex FRS also learned that social media was less likely to be used in certain areas of the county due to some community groups not being digitally connected. This prompted a change to their safety enforcement outreach, driving communication through the distribution of leaflets and face-to-face conversations. With more urbanised and densely populated areas, the data suggested these communities were more coupon-led, which would deem a one-size-fits-all outreach strategy impractical.
Outcomes
Essex FRS is proud of its achievements using this data-led approach, as it has helped the service evidence its transformative risk assessment journey. While the executive board, prevention teams and communications & engagement teams have seen the greatest benefits of using Acorn, Household Acorn and Wellbeing Acorn, firefighters, station managers and group managers have also reaped its benefits. PowerBI has helped simplify analysis and encouraged a positive shift in the culture of digital use and confidence in using data to support important decisions. The public perception survey and setting up community panels has also encouraged a deeper dive into how best to spend time and engage with the community.
As the service has increased their data investment and recognised the benefits of doing so, their aim is to encourage other Essex partners to adopt the same approach. The realisation of needing to increase budget towards understanding the community to strengthen efforts and campaigns was a massive takeaway. Essex FRS endeavours to be nationally recognised for their work and see further reductions in incidents, injuries and fire and road-related fatalities. They also intend to reshape their recruitment and evolve firefighters’ roles in working with the community. At a time where the public sector is being asked to do more with less, these aims can only be achieved through an increased use of data to inform essential decision-making.
Diving deeper into geodemographic insights to understand more specific risks will continue to play a crucial role, especially considering the county’s rapid growth. Essex FRS anticipates merging CACI’s data with their own public perception insights in one cohesive dataset to do so. Following the local government reorganisation that takes place over the next few years and the establishing of a combined mayoral authority in May of 2026, continued ease of data sharing and an improved understanding their communities will also remain a key priority area.
