Update

UFBA successfully advocates for progress on payments for long-duration incidents

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National news

On behalf of members, UFBA’s Peter Dunne and Bill Butzbach have been successful in getting FENZ to make progress on resolving how volunteer payments for long-duration firefighting in the natural environment, and legacy payments to former voluntary rural fire forces are to be managed.

 

UFBA is pleased that the FENZ Project Indicative Business Case (IBC) relating to this and other related issues was approved by Fire and Emergency’s Executive Leadership team in June 2022. The UFBA was instrumental in this achievement. 

 

Background:

  • Fire and Emergency must always have FENZ personnel available for all event types, including those for large, complex, or long duration incidents. This includes circa 12,000 volunteers and 1,800 paid personnel.
  • Prior to the establishment of Fire and Emergency in 2017, local fire authorities engaged personnel directly under arrangements with varying payment entitlements. These payment arrangements were put in place at a regional level to enable adequate service delivery, particularly in rural areas where access to the people resources is limited. These arrangements became the responsibility of Fire and Emergency on 1 July 2017 with the expectation that they would bring consistency to how this was to be managed going forward.
  • With these arrangements unresolved, it conflicted with the FENZ strategic goal to unify arrangements affecting FENZ personnel delivering services in rural, complex, and long-duration environments.

 

Summary:

The Incident Capability and Payments Alignment (ICPA) project is tasked to review and align the way FENZ responds to complex and long-duration incidents. This includes capacity requirements for these incidents and implementing improved mechanisms to attract the right capability. This includes payment policies to make sure FENZ volunteers are engaged in ways that reflect the FENZ volunteer strategy and principles. 

 

UFBA is committed to continue working with FENZ in all phases of this project and will call for Member participation as the project continues.  Watch this space. 

 

If you have a view on this matter, please do connect with the UFBA on email:  connect@ufba.org.nz