Agenda item

To receive a verbal update

The Deputy Chief Fire Officer advised that Members would be aware of the tragic events that occurred on the 22 May 2017 when an attack took place at the Manchester Arena. A suicide bomber detonated his device in a publicly assessable area, adjacent to the arena bowl, as a concert by the singer Ariana Grande came to an end. The bomb killed 22 people who had attended the concert, or were waiting outside for those who had, and injured many more.

Following these tragic events, an independent public inquiry was established by the Home Secretary, on 22 October 2019, to investigate the deaths of the victims of the Arena attack. Thit was chaired by The Honourable Sir John Saunders.

The Deputy Chief Fire Officer advised Members that Volume 2 of the public inquiry report was published on 3 November 2022 and covered the emergency response element. Volume 1 covered Security for the Arena which was published previously in June 2021.

A number of recommendations had been made following the issues around the emergency response on the night. Many of the Volume 2 recommendations were in respect of national learning for police, ambulance, fire services and wider partners to consider, and to be considered by a number of bodies including the National Fire Chiefs Council (NFCC), National Police Chiefs Council (NPCC), Association of Ambulance Chief Executives (AACE), His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire and Rescue Services (HMICFRS), National Operational Learning (NOL) and Joint Operational Learning (JOL) and wider partners.

There were also specific recommendations made in respect of Greater Manchester Fire and Rescue Service and Northwest Fire Control as well as for Local Resilience Forums.

Any national learning would feed back through the National Operations Committee and via the Local Resilience Forums structure of which the Service was embedded at all levels, and was well sighted and involved from both a strategic and operational perspective in respect of any national on more local changes.

The Deputy Chief Fire Officer advised Members that there was an existing National Co-ordination and Advisory Framework for the Fire Service in England that supports fire and rescue services in dealing with major incidents. Within this framework, there were a number of National Resilience capabilities forged to deal with large scale incidents termed as ‘new dimensions’ incidents, for example Urban Search and Rescue (USAR) which was hosted here in Buckinghamshire, High Volume Pumping, Mass Decontamination and Detection Identification & Monitoring of Hazmat. In addition to these, Marauding Terrorist Attack (MTA) capabilities were located strategically across the country within fire and rescue services to support a national response to these types of events.

Whilst the Service does not host a specialist MTA response capability here in Buckinghamshire, all its responders had guidance and training on MTA at the appropriate level and were aligned across the Thames Valley, fully in compliance with the current Joint Operating Principles.

The Service had already identified and closed a number of gaps identified by Lord Kerslake’s earlier report into the MEN Arena attack. The learning from this report fed into the Operational Assurance Improvement Plan as per normal practice, and in the same way the learning from the Grenfell Tower inquiry did.

The TVLRF executive was also sighted on the findings and were coordinating activity through the delivery and training, exercising and operational learning groups and via the Joint Emergency Services Interoperability Principal Leads.

A Member asked if there would be advice given to commercial and large venues across Buckinghamshire and Milton Keynes.

The Deputy Chief Fire Officer advised that Volume 1 published back in 2021 made recommendations for the people who run Arenas and other big events. Those organisations should have taken the recommendations on board and implemented them. Also, when the Service was risk assessing those venues, those recommendations form part of that risk assessment.