The Home Office has taken on Rowe IT to support its development of a National Fire Data Collection System.

They have agreed a two-year, £2.4m million contract to work on a replacement to the existing Incident Recording System for recording details of incidents attended by fire and rescue services in Great Britain.

The new system will be used to collect and securely transmit relevant datasets between the Home Office and fire and rescue services, along with producing reports and supporting quality assurance workflows and analytics.

The solution will be based on open source software and will be available to other government departments and all fire services for tailored implementations.

The Home Office has indicated it will use the system for analysis and to publish datasets, and expects around a third of fires services to use the system, with others to use third party systems that interface with the new one.

Anticipated numbers

It anticipates up to 20,000 users and for the system to capture about two million records in the first year then add at least 10% annually.

When publishing the tender notice last November the Home Office indicated that it was aiming to launch the new system within 12 months. The plan is to follow this up in the second year with the addition of extra datasets.

Contractor Rowe IT is a technology service provider that claims the Ministry of Defence, Met Office, UK Hydrographic Office and Forestry Commission among its clients.

image courtesy by stock.com/Ricky Deacon