The Home Office is planning to develop a new National Fire Data Collection System for data on incidents attended by fire and rescue services (FRSs).
It wants to replace the existing Incident Recording System that has been in use for the past 15 years in supporting the 48 FRSs in Great Britain, with an aim of launching the new system within 12 months.
The department has published a market notice for support in a two-year programme with a budget of £2 million, which will cover the system build without hosting and support charges. It specifies the need for specially written software that will operate as open source and be freely available to all FSRs and other departments.
Initially the new system will include data on incidents and there are plans to add extra datasets after it goes live. It will be used in the production of national statistics, in policy development, research and in response to parliamentary questions.
The Home Office is anticipating that approximately a third of FRSs will transition to the new system, and that others will have to interface with it while continuing to use third party systems.
It expects up to 20,000 users, with 250 on the system at any given time, and that around two million records will be captured per year. The latter figure is expected to increase by 10% per year.
