National resilience: where will firefighters be needed most over the next decade?

Wildfire leads the votes supplied from UK Firefighter Hub’s Facebook community poll on the future of national resilience, with 424 votes. Flood response and water rescue follows with 187.

Those responses offer a starting point for discussion, rather than a forecast of future incidents. They raise a practical question: how will services maintain the people, training and equipment needed as demands change?

We are now asking website readers to cast their own vote and explain their choice. The website poll starts at zero; its results will be reported separately from Facebook.

What national resilience means in practice

National resilience is the term used for the shared pool of specialist people and resources that fire and rescue services can call on when an emergency is too serious or too sustained for any single service to manage alone. It is not a separate brigade, and it is not a national stockpile of vehicles sitting in a depot. It is an arrangement: capability held by host services, funded nationally, and mobilised when the need arises.

Since 2016 Merseyside Fire & Rescue Service has acted as the lead authority for the National Resilience programme on behalf of the Home Office, responsible for its mobilisation and coordination. National Resilience Fire Control, training, equipment management and assurance sit alongside that role. The practical effect is straightforward: when a service needs additional specialist help, there is a route to get it (GOV.UK).

Not every station holds every capability, and it is worth being clear about that. The programme is a national layer of specialist assets and the competence to use them, held at designated sites and deployed where they are needed.

The capabilities already in place

The published programme covers a defined set of functions: high volume pumping to move large quantities of water over distance, urban search and rescue, detection, identification and monitoring, mass decontamination, enhanced logistics, and the specialist multi-agency response to a terrorist attack (GOV.UK).

Beyond that formal core, the England framework also recognises locally hosted specialist skills including wildfire response, bulk foam and drones. Flood rescue is managed through separate asset-register arrangements rather than as one of the programme's fixed capabilities.

The distinction matters when the conversation turns to funding and to who trains for what. The options used in the poll below are not identical formal categories, and they should not be read as a like-for-like list of national assets.

Where firefighters expect demand to grow

The question put to our Facebook community was direct: which area of national resilience do you expect to play a greater role in over the next ten years? The counts supplied total 763 votes. Wildfire took 424 of them; flood response and water rescue took 187.

The discussion question was developed with Dräger, a Strategic Partner of UK Firefighter Hub. The vote counts are reproduced exactly as supplied, in the order they were given.

Recalculated from those counts and rounded to one decimal place, wildfire accounts for 55.6% of the votes, flood response and water rescue for 24.5%, terrorist incident response for 9.8%, the combined hazardous materials and specialist rescue option for 5.1%, major-incident coordination and logistics for 2.8%, and another area or unsure for 2.2%.

Two cautions are worth stating plainly. This is a snapshot of a self-selected Facebook community poll, not a representative survey of UK firefighters, and the 763 figure counts votes rather than individual or verified respondents. The hazardous materials, CBRN and decontamination option arrived combined with building collapse and specialist rescue on 39 votes; it is reproduced as supplied rather than split.

Read as opinion rather than forecast, the ranking is still informative. Wildfire and flooding both appear among the serious risks in the government's National Risk Register, the Cabinet Office assessment of the most significant risks facing the UK. A workforce that expects to see more of both is describing the direction it believes its role is already travelling in.

What the votes cannot tell us is how much of that expectation is driven by recent experience, by training exposure, or by the equipment crews happen to have seen. Those are the questions we will put to people who hold the capability, rather than to a poll.

Cyber disruption and essential services

Cyber appears in the National Risk Register as a cross-cutting threat to infrastructure and essential services, rather than as a single scenario (National Risk Register 2026). For fire and rescue, the useful question is not whether firefighters would become cyber investigators. They would not. It is what happens to the service when the systems around an incident are degraded.

Consider a disruption that generates calls while affecting the information and communications that responders rely on: call handling, mobilisation, availability of premises information, or the link between control rooms and crews. The scenario is uncomfortable because it removes the assumption that the picture is complete.

How often do services rehearse continuity of call handling, mobilisation and crew communications under those conditions? It is a fair question for any service, and it does not require naming a specific network or system to be worth asking.

More than equipment

Capability is usually discussed as a list of vehicles and kit, because vehicles and kit are visible. A high volume pump that no one has drilled with this year is a lorry with a large hose on it. The difference between the two is competence, and competence is expensive in a way that hardware is not, because it has to be renewed continuously.

That means refresher training on the specialist skills, relief crews to release people for it, maintenance of equipment that may sit unused for months, welfare arrangements for deployments that run for days, and the ability to sustain a national deployment while still providing cover at home. Each of those is a cost, and each is a choice.

It also means working with other agencies as a matter of routine rather than as an exception. JESIP provides the joint doctrine that allows control rooms and responders from different services to coordinate around a common framework at a major incident (JESIP). Doctrines do not train themselves.

Where a service or a government believes a shortfall exists, it is usually stated publicly rather than discovered. In its absence, the honest position is a question: is the balance right between buying capability and sustaining it, and who is accountable for the answer?

Have your say

Below is the same question, put to website readers. Every count starts at zero, and the Facebook snapshot above will not be added to them; the two sets of results will be reported separately.

Choose one option, then leave a comment explaining your choice: what you are seeing in your role or area, what training, staffing or equipment you think crews will need, and whether there is an area the poll has missed. Comments are optional and separate from the vote. Results reflect participating readers, and they will shape our follow-up reporting.