There is a moment, Liana Selecka-Jones said, that happens at almost every inspection. A member of staff – a firefighter, a watch manager, someone with no direct experience of HMICFRS – sits down for an interview and immediately tenses up. They are waiting to be caught out.

“I understand that being interviewed can feel personal and intense,” she added. “We have to consider people’s welfare and try to put them at ease, so we can get the best out of them. Part of my role is helping people feel comfortable and reminding them that we are assessing the service’s performance, not judging their individual knowledge or competency.”

It is a distinction that matters to Liana, and one she wants to share more widely. Inspections, she argues, are widely misunderstood. Not because services are poorly informed, but because much of the work that goes into them is invisible from the outside.

A Role Built on Relationships

As a service liaison lead in the fire portfolio at HMICFRS, Liana is assigned three services: “It helps us build strong professional relationships and understand the context each service operates in.

“Services may face different governance arrangements, resourcing pressures or local challenges, and understanding those factors helps us carry out more informed inspections.”

The relationship begins long before any formal inspection activity. Between inspections, she carries out engagement with services, which may take place in person or virtually. This can include visiting the service, observing key meetings, receiving updates, checking progress against areas for improvement and holding regular catch-up calls with the service liaison officer, who acts as the main point of contact between the service and HMICFRS. The purpose is not to formally assess the service at this stage, but to build knowledge, observe aspects of its day-to-day running first-hand and understand how it has developed, so HMICFRS can approach the next inspection with a fuller picture.

When an inspection does get under way, the communication becomes more frequent. She holds regular planning and briefing meetings with the service’s liaison officer, maps out timetables, identifies who the team needs to speak to and works through any practical considerations. This could include reasonable adjustments, welfare needs, logistical arrangements or anything else that might affect how the process runs for staff. She also briefs the HMICFRS inspection team, sharing relevant information about the service to support their preparation and help them understand the context before fieldwork begins.

“Some of the communication is logistical, but it is also about building trust, answering questions and making sure both sides are prepared.”

She also uses tools such as the monitoring portal to support transparency between inspections. The portal is a live online system that brings together HMICFRS reports, causes of concern, follow-up letters, recommendations and areas for improvement for fire and rescue services. It shows the follow-up activity level assigned to each recommendation or area for improvement, and allows services to update progress or mark work as completed.

“It allows services to show progress against previous areas for improvement,” she said. “It helps demonstrate that inspection is not about catching people out. It is about understanding performance over time.”

What Inspection Weeks Actually Look Like

Fieldwork weeks are busy. Liana leads the inspection team – a group drawn from across HMICFRS, bringing together expertise in areas such as HR, prevention and protection – while also keeping close communication with the Service at every stage.

Before fieldwork begins, she makes time to understand the people she is working with. “I try to understand colleagues’ backgrounds, whether that is operational experience, HR, prevention or protection, so I can allocate activity in a way that makes best use of their expertise,” she said. There are practical considerations too: some staff are on secondment, some are permanent, and fieldwork can involve long days and a significant amount of travel. She also considers the inspection team’s welfare, making sure workloads, travel and daily plans are manageable wherever possible. “Understanding those details helps me build a team plan that is both effective and supportive.”

Each day starts with a briefing for the team and ends with a debrief. She also keeps the Service liaison officer up to date and where needed the wider Service team. “Those regular check-ins help answer questions, resolve issues quickly and keep everyone clear on what is happening,” she said. “They also help reduce some of the anxiety that inspections can create. Sometimes it is simply about explaining what we are doing and why. That transparency makes a real difference.”

Behind the scenes, question scripts continue to evolve as evidence emerges. End-of-day debriefs help inspectors identify new lines of inquiry, so later interviews and focus groups can test emerging themes further. “That is one of the ways triangulation happens in real time during fieldwork,” she added.

Triangulation is the cornerstone of the process. Nothing is treated as robust evidence based on a single source. “If something appears in documents or data, we test it through interviews, focus groups and on-site activity,” Liana said. “We then reality test it with frontline staff and other parts of the Service. Usually, we are looking for several sources that point in the same direction before we treat something as solid.”

That applies equally to promising and innovative practice. “If we see that a Service is doing something really well, we want to highlight it and evidence it properly,” Liana said. “We also benchmark it against other services, so we can understand how it compares and make sure the same rigour applies.”

Encouraging People to Speak Freely

Focus groups are among the most important tools in an inspection, and among the most delicate. Getting honest contributions from a room of people who may be nervous or unsure of what they can say requires careful facilitation.

Liana starts with the briefing. Participants are told they will not be identified personally in the report, that different perspectives are welcome and that it is fine if people do not all agree. “Facilitating a good focus group is about reading the room and making sure everyone has the opportunity to contribute,” she said. “Sometimes that means directing a question to a quieter person, and sometimes it means adjusting the format to help the discussion flow.”

Participants are also reminded throughout the inspection that, if they think of something afterwards, there are other ways to provide information. This includes the independent inspection reporting line, which allows fire and rescue service staff to confidentially share information with HMICFRS to help inform the inspection process. It is not a route for individual complaints, but a way to highlight issues, concerns or potential solutions that staff think inspectors should consider.

More Than The Report

One of the things Liana most wants services to understand is what happens after fieldwork ends, and how much work continues before the report is published.
A full inspection programme can run for around 25 weeks from initial requests to a publication-ready report. After fieldwork, HMICFRS holds an end-of-fieldwork debrief with the Chief Fire Officer, sharing headline findings – both positive and critical – while making clear the report has further scrutiny ahead. “Although the formal judgment meeting may happen relatively early, there is still a significant amount of work to go through,” she said.

That work includes consolidating evidence, report drafting, internal review and factual accuracy checks. The service receives a draft report to check factual points such as names of teams, titles and data references. “That stage is not about submitting new evidence or challenging judgments,” Liana is clear, “but it is an important part of making sure the report is accurate before publication.” Shortly before publication, the Service receives an embargoed version so it can prepare its internal and external communications.

And then perhaps the thing that surprises people most, the relationship does not stop.

“The report itself can only contain headline statements,” she noted. “Part of the follow-up work is helping services understand the wider narrative and detail that sits behind those findings.” There is usually a short period after publication when a service needs time to absorb the report and share it internally, but HMICFRS remains in contact throughout. Ongoing engagement continues through regular conversations and through the monitoring portal, which supports a two-way dialogue on progress. “We can discuss progress, provide context and talk through how recommendations relate to the evidence we gathered,” she said.

One thing that may not be widely understood is the pace at which inspection work continues on HMICFRS’s side. “By the time one report is published, we may already be supporting another inspection as part of a relatively small but very committed team,” she said. “The work moves quickly.”

Setting The Record Straight

When Liana is asked about misconceptions around HMICFRS inspections, two come up straight away.
The first is that judgments are made quickly. “In reality, the process is very robust. Evidence is scrutinised at multiple stages, involving question leads, service liaison leads, chiefs of staff, His Majesty’s Inspectors, data analysts, editors and moderation processes. Judgments are based on triangulated evidence, not on one conversation or one document.”

The second is that inspections are a search for faults. “We...

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