Fire and rescue

The suppliers, products and customers in this chapter are in the landscape database, filtered to fire and rescue, with known spend and sources. The graph shows how they connect.

Sector overview

Fire and Rescue Services (FRSs) in the UK are organised at a sub-national level: 44 in England, plus single services in Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland. They sit under varying governance: some county-level, some combined-authority, some standalone fire authorities, with Scottish Fire and Rescue Service operating nationally. Funding is a mix of council-tax precept and central grant.

The fire-and-rescue digital estate is small relative to health or local government, and centres on two functions: reliable mobilising (taking 999 calls and dispatching pumps) and operational asset management (where are the appliances, what are their service states, where is the equipment). Outside those two functions, FRSs use largely the same back-office systems as their host authorities.

Major systems

Lock-in and concentration

Mobilising is a small market dominated by Frequentis (Austrian), NEC Software Solutions (which owns Vision, formerly Capita’s) and a handful of competing systems. Each contract renewal involves a high switching cost, although no single supplier holds a national monopoly. Mobilising is graded C in this survey: it is a real-time safety-of-life system, with replacement risks similar to police 999 dispatch.

Outside mobilising, FRS digital is unusually fragmented: a long tail of small specialist suppliers, plus locally-developed tools. This is a different lock-in profile from health or local government: less national vendor concentration, more service-by-service variability and bespoke maintenance burden.

Replaceability

Mobilising / dispatch C

As with police dispatch, the operational risk rules out replacement in the near term. Only procurement work is in scope.

Station and asset management A

Servicing schedules for breathing apparatus, hydrant testing, appliance maintenance, and equipment audits are all well-suited to a generic asset-management platform with a fire-specific configuration layer. This is one of the strongest small-scale CIC opportunities in the survey. The risk is low, several FRSs are likely to be willing partners, and there is no regulatory regime equivalent to clinical safety.

Risk information and pre-planning A

Premises risk records (familiarisation visits, site-specific risk plans, hazardous-substance flags) are operationally important but technically simple. Open alternatives do not exist as turnkey products, but the build cost is small and within CIC scale.

In-cab tooling B

Mobile applications that show appliance crews live risk information, dynamic routing, and incident detail. This is tractable, but it depends on integration with the mobilising system, which is the difficult part.

The human dimension

FRSs report similar issues to other emergency services: too many systems, double-keying, mobile experiences that are not fit for cab use. The smaller scale of FRSs means that, where capability exists internally, services have built useful local tools. These local tools show what staff want from their systems more directly than in most sectors.

Hands-off

Sector summary