Across the last financial year the London Fire Brigade has improved its recruitment of women and Black, Asian and minority ethnic firefighters and has reported that it has hit its targets for the first time since targets were set in 2017. However top earning female operational staff in the Brigade rose by only 0.5% in the first three quarters of 2021/22 to 7.3% and Black, Asian and minority ethnic top earning operational staff dropped overall by 0.3% to 8.9%. How will you be ensuring more women and Black, Asian and minority ethnic firefighters are able to work through the ranks and reach their potential within the London Fire Brigade?

It is essential that the London Fire Brigade (LFB) is representative of the communities it serves. As well as improving trust with those communities, having a workforce with diverse experience, skills and thinking is the only way to achieve inclusive and properly informed decision making. The LFB has successfully improved recruitment of women and BAME firefighters through its outreach work and the implementation of its togetherness strategy. The outreach team has established links with employment partners and attended events across London to generate interest in becoming a firefighter. Targeted digital marketing and virtual information days have also helped to widen the recruitment pool. Activities are also underway to provide leadership training to aspiring leaders from under-represented groups.

While it will take time for improved recruitment practices to filter up to the most senior levels of the LFB, work has also been commissioned to look at the barriers to progression for under-represented groups. A new recruitment strategy is being developed which will explore the introduction of a talent development scheme, aiming to identify future talent in the lower ranks and supporting them to progress. We hope to have this up and running within the next 12 months.

The LFB also has equality support groups, providing staff networks for women and BAME staff, who support their members to prepare for promotion opportunities. This has been valuable in encouraging talent to progress. Earlier this year, the London Fire Commissioner announced an external review of the LFB’s culture, which, when underway will add additional important scrutiny to this programme of work.

Thank you, Mr Mayor. You have answered most of my follow-ups.  I appreciate that the LFB needs to look more like our city. I am just wondering, how is the LFB getting that message across to all Londoners, that heroes look like them and live like them?

Yes, it is a really important issue. When I was growing up, I had in my mind what a firefighter should look like and what their role entailed. The role of a modern firefighter is very different to what it was 20 or 30 years ago, so it is important to challenge outdated perceptions of what a firefighter’s role is in 2021 in a global city like London. The team is going out and speaking and engaging and listening, busting some of those myths, but also trying to reach underserved communities, who previously have had no contact with the LFB, except for what they see on television.

There is a disproportionality between the number of people from diverse religious and ethnic backgrounds in the LFB and the number of them achieving promotion or becoming top earners. Does the LFB need to set new targets to ensure that people of diverse religious and ethnic heritage are not overlooked when opportunities to move up the career ladder arise across all three strands of work?

One of the reasons why I think the Commissioner was right to bring somebody in from outside to look at the culture of the LFB is to ensure that there were not things happening that were indirectly, inadvertently, stopping talent going up, particularly those from diverse backgrounds.

One of the things that I think we have got to do better is manage our talent, give them the support, give them the skills; not just retaining them once we get them in, but helping them progress and making sure they have got a mentor or support buddy, somebody who can give them the skills they need to make progression up the LFB. By the way, the same applies to the MPS, TfL, City Hall and other good employers who want to see their talent progress, but also their organisations looking more like their customers or people across the city.