Innovative comms system will save vital time in multi-agency emergency responses

Emergency services will be better able to communicate with each other during an incident as an innovative communications system is rolled out to fire and rescue services (FRS) in England. It is expected that this will save vital minutes in emergency response times in the event of multi-agency incidents. Following a recommendation from the Grenfell Tower Inquiry, the system – supported by Ordnance Survey (OS) data – has been developed for FRS in England in collaboration with British APCO, the country’s leading public safety organisation.

The Multi-Agency Incident Transfer (MAIT) standard is a system designed for emergency services, which reduces the time it takes to respond to an incident by allowing emergency services to send incident information to one or multiple control rooms instantly through a shared digital communications system. MAIT also presents incident information in a standard form, and makes sure the shared information is secure and accurate.

Implementation and some initial running costs for MAIT were funded for FRS in England by government. The National Fire Chiefs Council (NFCC) has been overseeing the roll-out of MAIT to all 44 FRS (served by 34 fire control rooms) in England; 27 services (served by 19 fire control rooms) are already using the system and it is expected that the majority will be online by the end of March.

Keith Donnelly, Head of Fire Service Operational Communications at the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, said:

“One of the Grenfell Tower Inquiry Phase 1 recommendations was to investigate methods for assisting control rooms to obtain access to information available to host control rooms. MAIT is one of the tools that enables fire control rooms to share critical information in fast time with other fire control rooms, and once onboarded, with other emergency services. Since ‘go live’, MAIT has been used in a number of operational scenarios, and the feedback from fire and rescue services has been very positive.”