Role and responsibilities of Suffolk Fire and Rescue Service

Our responsibility for delivering a fire and rescue service to the people and communities of Suffolk.

We operate from 35 stations across Suffolk, many of them shared with Suffolk Police and East of England Ambulance Service. Our stations vary in status from being staffed 24/7, 365 days a year, to being completely on-call, which means firefighters are on call day and night and are alerted to incidents by a pager. The Fire Service Headquarters is based at Endeavour House in Ipswich and we share a combined fire control room with Cambridgeshire Fire and Rescue Service.

Suffolk Fire and Rescue Service provides a 24 hour, 7 days a week emergency response service to deal with fires, road traffic collisions and a wide range of emergencies. Our responsibilities as an emergency service are set out in the Fire and Rescue Services Act 2004 and the Civil Contingencies Act 2004.

Read:

What we do

We have four areas of focus in our service:

  1. prevention and protection
  2. risk and resilience
  3. response
  4. people

Prevention

Our aim is to stop fires from happening in the first place. Our community safety work is prioritised so that we help those most at risk of a fire in the home (link to Fire safety in the home page).

We offer advice on how you can stay safe from fire. A free Safe and Well visit may be available to you - requests are prioritised according to an individual's risk. We also do a lot of work with partner agencies to reduce arson and the number of collisions on the roads. Read more about fire and rescue safety advice in the community and road safety initiatives.

Protection

It's not just in the home where fire safety is important. All non-domestic premises by law must have fire risk assessments carried out by the owners or responsible person to ensure people using the premises are as protected as they can be from fire and they could evacuate safely.

This is part of the Fire Safety Order and our role is to offer advice, ensure premises abide by the legislation and do all they can to limit the risk of fire. We focus on offering education, but we do take enforcement action if we have to and people's lives are at risk. Read fire safety for businesses, landlords, charities and schools.

Response

Our crews of highly trained firefighters are ready to respond in an instant. But it's not just fires and road traffic collisions we get called to, we also attend 'special services calls' which can be anything including flooding, animal rescues, chemical spills, water rescues and freeing people, usually stuck in or down something.

Firefighters are trained to deal with all sorts of emergencies and have the specialist equipment needed to undertake the variety of incidents we attend.

Risk and resilience

We focus on utilising risk and performance data to improve ways of working across all service areas, improving transparency in our performance ensuring SFRS looks for continual improvement.

We build strong relationships with internal and external partners to plan for and react to a broad range of emergencies. We aim to further enhance those partnership arrangements and relationships to ensure that the Service, at every level understands the key role they play in delivering improved outcomes.

People

This includes serving our own people by creating an inclusive and equitable workplace where we provide our teams with the most efficient and effective tools to safely deliver our statutory functions. Our people are at the heart of what we do as a Fire and Rescue Service.

Leave feedback

Use our feedback from if you would like to make a comment about our service.