Surrey Fire and Rescue Service Community Risk Profile

Our Community Risk Profile (CRP) has been created to demonstrate our understanding and assessment of the risks facing all of our communities, those who live and work in Surrey and the people who visit Surrey. Within this, we also look at the national risk profiles and emerging risks.

To help us, we look at our risks based on four categories:

  • People: those fire risks that are associated, on average, with specific characteristics that people may have such as the age group which they fall into, or their level of mobility, or other factors such as whether they smoke.
  • Places: risks that are associated with the certain features in the built and non-built environment. For example, some roads are more likely to be the scene of road traffic collisions, or some areas of land with housing developments are more prone to flooding.
  • Premises: those fire risks that are associated with certain features within premises, or because of the special value of those sites. For example, some non-domestic premises will attract a higher risk if they include facilities for sleeping on site. High-rise developments are associated with different risks that come from safe exit and building access. Heritage sites may hold a higher value than non-heritage buildings in both fabric and contents.
  • Products: those fire risks that occur as the result of new product developments with a unique profile of risk, or specific makes of a product being recalled due to known occurrences of incidents (for example, mobile phones or chargers overheating, faulty tumble dryers, and electric vehicles). Existing products which can cause risk if not used with proper care (for example, candles or cigarettes).

We do this using risk assessments which are based on a range of information and the collection of both historical incident data and evidence of other factors which can contribute to known risks. In doing this we can analyse the patterns which will give us an understanding of the likelihood these events in the future.

We know that currently the greatest threats to life come from:

  • Accidents on the roads with under 25s being most at risk.
  • Fires in people's homes, which has shown us that certain people are more at risk from a fire and its affects. The number of vulnerable residents in Surrey is expected to grow as the population increases.
  • Water related incidents, although fewer than fire incidents the number of fatalities is about the same.

Surrey Fire and Rescue Service want to do all we can to prevent loss of life and our CRP identifies the risk. By understanding what these are we can plan on how best to use our assets (including our people, equipment) to mitigate the likelihood of incidents occurring and the impact that these have on all our communities across Surrey.

As with any data, this will change over time as risks become less apparent and changes to buildings, roads and new technologies are realised, as such we review our CRP annually using newer data as it becomes available to ensure we understand our communities.

What the CRP does not do is identify how we are going to manage the risks; this will be done in our Community Risk Management plan which is currently being developed using the risk data from our CRP and will be consulted on in 2024.

Our Community Risk Profile document, is available to download and read below.


Files available to download

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