JESIP Newsletter – Winter 2024 Edition

Welcome to the Winter JESIP Newsletter. Read on for a message from Chief Superintendent David Boyle, an introduction to some of our new team members, and a roundup of news from across the JESIP world.

As always, if you wish to comment on anything or get in touch, please contact the JESIP team via contact@jesip.org.uk

Message from Chief Superintendent David Boyle, Head of the National JESIP Team

It’s been a busy three months for us in the JESIP Team as I’m sure it has been for all of you. Below you will find just some of the news of what we have been up to, including our new team members, new LinkedIn page and new research. And we’re increasingly keen to hear from you about what’s going on with JESIP in your teams and your areas, so do please get in touch with us with any news we can share.

One of the highlights of the past few months was our attendance at the Emergency Services Show in Birmingham in September. It was fantastic to meet and see so many of you there, and in many cases that has just been the start of conversations with you that have been continuing since. We were blown away by the interest in our JESIP stand, which demonstrated incredibly clearly how much demand there is out there for JESIP products and services, and how much desire there is across the whole sector to do JESIP better.

Emergency Services Show 2024, Birmingham

I also found time to have a quick chat with the Emergency Services Times to talk about our ambitions for JESIP transformation in the next few months and years. We hope to attend more such events in 2025 and very much hope to meet more of you there.

More recently I’ve also been on a visit to Scotland to meet the SMARTEU team there and talk about the partnership work we can do together. The team and I will be doing lots more of those kind of visits across the next year, including in Northern Ireland early in the new year, and undertaking more assurance visits in different parts of the country. We will also be holding a JESIP research symposium in Liverpool in the new year. So let us know if there are meetings, conferences or events that we can come and speak at or learn from and help spread the JESIP message.

I also want to say a personal thank you, and a thank you on behalf of all of us in JESIP, to Chief Constable Charlie Hall, who is retiring from his role at Hertfordshire Police this Christmas. Charlie was one of the founding fathers of JESIP in its first inception, and has been the biggest possible champion of it ever since, both locally and in his national roles as SRO and Chair of the NPCC Operations Committee. It is in this case very true to say that none of what we have achieved in JESIP would have been possible without him. I wish him well in his retirement and thank him on behalf of all of us. Chief Constable BJ Harrington from Essex Police will be taking on the JESIP SRO role from Charlie. We very much welcome him to this post, and I know he will want to say more about his ambitions for the role as he takes it on next year.

I hope you are also able to get some rest and friends and family time over the festive period coming up, but I also appreciate that many of us in the world of JESIP and emergency response will be required to work and respond to incidents, for which I am very grateful. However you are able to spend it, I wish you well and look forward to working together in further partnership in the new year.

Are you a JESIP Social Media Star?

We are looking for frontline police, fire and ambulance colleagues to help present some new JESIP video content.

Are you a YouTuber, TikToker or simply someone who is comfortable in front of a camera?

Are you keen to help spread the JESIP message of working together and saving lives?

Or do you know someone who is?

Get in touch via contact@jesip.org.uk and we can let you know more about this exciting project.

Meet our new team members...

Katie McCallum

Katie joins us from Hertfordshire Constabulary as Business Support Officer. Katie has been in policing since 2011, having joined as an apprentice at the age of 16. She has worked within Human Resources and as a PA for a number of Senior Leaders, including Gold Commanders working on major incidents. As Business Support Officer Katie will play a central role in our programme management, resource planning, risk register and governance, as well as several other crucial roles.

Malcolm Landells

Malcolm joins us from the Scottish Ambulance Service as our ambulance specialist service practitioner. He has recent experience working as a Special Operations Response Team (SORT) Paramedic in the East of Scotland and in the last two years as a Resilience Advisor for the Scottish Ambulance Service. Malcolm is a huge advocate for both the importance and the potential of JESIP, not just for our blue light partners but across the whole responder network.

Alex Perks

Alex is an experienced police officer who joins as our policing specialist service practitioner. He joined the City of London Police in 1996 and transferred to Hertfordshire Constabulary in 1999, where he was worked on operations planning, including for several major events, and as an Eastern regional training lead. Alex has also worked as a CBRN tactical adviser and loves working in partnership with counterparts from other services.

Ben Wooders

Ben joins as our fire service specialist practitioner from the London Fire Brigade. He is a Level One Incident Commander in the LFB and most recently served as a Command Unit Team Leader in the borough of Lewisham. He regularly chairs multi-agency meetings at high profile incidents and is passionate about multi-agency working.  Prior to joining the Brigade he previously served in the British Army for 15 years, including as a Search and Counter IED specialist.

New LinkedIn Page

Please follow and share news of our new JESIP LinkedIn page which you can find at www.linkedin.com/company/jesipteam

As well as this newsletter, we will use the LinkedIn page to regularly share news, updates and information on what we're up to in the national JESIP Team, as well as sharing posts from our partners across the sector. This will be the main social media channel we use going forward to communicate with all of our professional and voluntary partners, so we’re keen to build as big an audience as possible among all those who might have an interest in JESIP.

New JESIP Research

Across 2023-2024, the Homeland Security Group (HSG) at the Home Office, together with Ipsos UK, carried out a programme of research to further strengthen the evidence base around JESIP. Fieldwork, consisting of a quantitative survey of more than 3,140 emergency services staff from police, fire and ambulance services in England and Wales and a series of focus groups and individual interviews, was conducted. We were really pleased with the level of response, as well as the different type of people who responded. Nearly 40% of survey responses were from those in non-commander/non-manager roles, while more than 20% of responses were from control room staff, providing a wider perspective of how responders experience and practise JESIP.

The research found good levels of knowledge of the key principles of JESIP, including M/ETHANE and the Joint Decision Model. And generally high levels of completion of JESIP-related training, participation in multi-agency exercising, and satisfaction with training and exercising.

However, the research also uncovered much lower levels of actual usage of the key JESIP models in response to incidents. Moreover, while the research found high levels of agreement when respondents were asked about their application of JESIP on an individual level, levels of agreement were lower when they were asked about their service.

Finally, the research highlighted three groups with generally lower levels of engagement with JESIP across all the areas that were explored – namely, control room staff, police officers and staff, and non-commanders/non-managers. Survey respondents identified insufficient frequency of joint training and exercising, lack of knowledge of capabilities, roles and responsibilities of other services, and insufficient quality of joint training and exercising, as the greatest barriers to interoperability, providing some pointers for areas of focus in the future.

HSG will continue to work closely with the JESIP Team to further refine our understanding of the research findings and consider how best to turn them into meaningful interventions to further improve and embed JESIP across all of our agencies.

New Emergency Planning College Paper

Last month the fifth UK Resilience Lessons Digest was published by the Emergency Planning College. ‘Learning to Manage Lessons’ synthesises findings from a range of reports and inquiries including, in this edition, the Covid-19 Inquiry Module 1 report and the final Grenfell Tower Inquiry report.

It looked at more than 1,000 lessons, grouping them under five key themes: lesson implementation, lesson identification; lessons system, strategy and storage; lessons embedding; and a learning culture.

The Digest also notes that our resilience system needs to move further from ‘learning lessons’ to ‘lessons management’ through from the experience of incidents to implementing improvements learned from them.

These are all areas that we will be looking at progressing in JESIP across the next year in our policy, training, assurance and communications work.

Happy Christmas and Holiday Period

Finally, we want to wish all of our partners a Happy Christmas and restful holiday period across the next few weeks, however you celebrate. We are of course aware that many of our readers will be in roles that will require you to work over the festive period. We wish you well and thank you for that, as we appreciate all the work you do across the year!

Please ensure your colleagues have subscribed to the newsletter so they can receive it directly into their inbox.

If you are interested in having an article in the JESIP news or have any comments, please let us know by emailing contact@jesip.org