Health and Safety

Government responsibility for the fire and rescue service moved from the Home Office to the Ministry of Housing, Communities & Local Government on 1 April 2025. The FBU welcomed this as an important first step to repairing the damage done to the fire and rescue service by recent governments. In a...

The cover story of this edition of Firefighter will be familiar to many FBU members. In many areas, it is no longer guaranteed that there will be enough firefighters on a fire engine to safely tackle an incident. As we report in this issue, firefighters attending incidents as part of a crew of four...

Steve Wright, FBU general secretary, has written to the department of health and the home office calling for urgent health checks for firefighters following the latest research into the impact of exposure to fire contaminants. In January, the University of Central Lancashire found that 136 of the...

Steve Wright, the union’s newly elected general secretary, sat down with Francis Beckett to discuss his fire service background, politics, and what’s next Last year Steve Wright’s son became a third generation operational firefighter. “For all my early life we lived in the shadow of a fire station...