Mid and West Wales Fire & Rescue switches to DAVIS compliance platform

Mid and West Wales Fire and Rescue Service (MAWWFRS) has switched to Licence Check’s DAVIS compliance platform.

MAWWFRS is responsible for providing public safety information, prevention and protection programmes, and emergency response cover for mid and west Wales – an area covering almost 4,500 square miles or around two-thirds of Wales.

The Service runs 58 fire stations with 1,350 staff comprising 400 full-time firefighters, 709 on-call firefighters, 22 joint fire control staff and a further 220 support staff, operating a fleet of fire engines, light goods vehicles (LGVs) plus company and pool cars.

Sarah Davies, health and safety officer at MAWWFRS, said: “Via DAVIS and the e-Permission method, we were able to email every staff member with a link to the driving licence check mandate which they then could sign electronically and allowed a licence check to be carried out immediately.

“The fact that DAVIS is a real-time digital checking service is very important to us as it allows us to check and verify the status of our drivers’ licences in a matter of seconds.

“This is vital to us as we have so many operational staff who may be called out on urgent driving tasks 24 hours a day, seven days a week, across a huge area of Wales.

“So, it is very important that we know that those staff are entitled to drive the class of vehicle they have to drive as quickly as possible in what are often emergency situations.”

Licence Check said the Service was able to take advantage of a new tender award by the Welsh Government Commercial Procurement team for automated fleet compliance services, which had been awarded to Licence Check as sole provider in late 2022.

“Our training delivery instructors really rate the new automated service as they are able to instantly check the status of staff they are training, whether they have a Category C licence which entitles them to drive a fire engine on a public road, for example. It makes their lives so much easier,” Davies added.

She also said a benefit of DAVIS was the report summaries it could generate on-demand.

Davies said: “Now it is very easy to see the number of HGV and other classes of drivers we have, who they are and their licence status. Our previous system couldn’t produce these very useful summaries.

“And with new recruits, every new driver must undergo a driving assessment and submit to licence checking before they join the Service to speed up the recruitment process.”