Episode 10: Reflections with the Retiring Chief Fire Officer

In this heartfelt episode of Out of the Ashes: Stories from Lancashire, we sit down with Chief Fire Officer Justin Johnston as he prepares for retirement after an extraordinary 30-year career in the fire service. 
 
Justin discusses the challenges of modern firefighting, including responding to climate-driven emergencies, adopting cutting-edge technology like drones and AI, responding to the COVID-19 pandemic, and championing equality, diversity, and inclusion within the service.

He also shares leadership insights, career-defining moments, and plans for the future, including supporting fire service research and spending more time with family—and his dog, Milo. 

And remember if you liked our episode, please like and subscribe and let’s make Lancashire safer together.

Transcript

[00:00:07.520] - Host (Lucinda)
Welcome to Lancashire and Rescue Service's podcast series, Out of the Ashes:Stories from Lancashire. Today, we have a very special episode for you. We're joined by a remarkable individual who's dedicated their life to keeping us safe. The retiring Chief Fire Officer, Justin Johnston. In this episode, we have the unique opportunity to hear from him at a key moment in time before he starts his retirement. We're gonna reflect on Justin's impressive career, his challenges, his accomplishments, and the mark he's left on the service. The conversation will cover topics of leadership, service, the ongoing evolution of Lancashire Fire and Rescue Service, and the people who make it all possible.

[00:00:46.730] - Host (Lucinda)
So I'm here with Chief, Justin. So we're just gonna start off with some fun, quick fire questions that the staff sent in. So do you have any hidden talents or hobbies that the public might not know about?

[00:01:01.080] - Chief Fire Officer Justin Johnston
I definitely don't have any hidden talents. I like writing. And I quite enjoy the process of writing, but it's not so much a talent I don't think. Things I enjoy doing that people won't know about. I don't know I quite, I live quite a lot of my normal life, a little bit on social media as well so people can see that you're a real person and that you live a normal ish life like everybody else.

[00:01:29.450] - Chief Fire Officer Justin Johnston
And so the things I put on there tend to be the things I like doing so you know being out in the countryside, being out with my dog, got a new puppy.

[00:01:38.360] - Host (Lucinda)
He's very cute.

[00:01:39.400] - Chief Fire Officer Justin Johnston
Yeah. I'm looking forward to, spending some time with him as he develops, you know, do more of those type of things.

[00:01:47.880] - Host (Lucinda)
If money was no limit within reason, what would you do with your life?

[00:01:52.050] - Chief Fire Officer Justin Johnston
With my life? Oh, wow. I would probably live between here and Italy. My mum lives in Italy. We spent a fair bit of time there and, my wife and I got married there. My mum arranged, she did all the work and we got married in a in a castle in in Italy. Wow. And so, you know, as you get more time to spend with family especially when you make a lot of sacrifices for your job, you know, and you're constantly available and you're constantly rushing around, till you have a bit more time. So if money was no object, I'd have a nice house out there near my mum, and spend some more time with her And, I'd probably have a 1 of those, you know, those Omaze houses.

[00:02:40.790] - Host (Lucinda)
Yes.

[00:02:41.110] - Chief Fire Officer Justin Johnston
I wanna win the one in the Lake District. I feel like that's that's that should that should be mine.

[00:02:47.110] - Host (Lucinda)
Yeah. I saw the advert last night for the one in the Wirral, and I have to say it looked gorgeous.

[00:02:52.100] - Chief Fire Officer Justin Johnston
Yeah. I I suppose that's what everybody thinks, isn't it, when they watch those adverts? Somebody's gotta win it. It could be me. But yeah.

[00:02:58.420] - Chief Fire Officer Justin Johnston
So if money was no object, I'd probably spend my time between those two things.

[00:03:01.700] - Host (Lucinda)
This one's a bit of a funny one. Would you rather only ever rescue cats every day for the rest of your life or attend one protracted major incident once a year?

[00:03:11.330] - Chief Fire Officer Justin Johnston
Oh, definitely one protracted major incident. And if there's something to get your brain going and, you know, always remember why you joined, it's for those big events. Yeah. And those big events I think are the things that really sort of hone your skills and you know make sure that you're on top of your game and they last for quite a while, they last for a number of days. And you you go through I suppose a full range of skills and experiences that you've built up over what is three decades of being in the Fire and Rescue Service and for me 15 years of being as a principal officer. And so those big incidents they're fairly rare, but they probably are once a year.

[00:03:58.360] - Host (Lucinda)
Yeah they definitely are and they're always different aren't they? They're not the same type of incident when its a major incident.

[00:04:03.370] - Chief Fire Officer Justin Johnston
Absolutely, yeah I mean one large scale flooding is not the same as another large scale flooding you know or up on the moorlands and wherever it may be they they are different in their own ways and actually we're having to evolve the way we respond to them as well and try to learn from each one so we can invest in equipment that's going to make it easier for the next set of responders to be able to do their roles or do their roles more safely or you know utilise new technology that's going to help them have better situational awareness. So many things that you can learn from each one provided you've got you know good support to be able to invest in those type of things.

[00:04:44.230] - Host (Lucinda)
So as you've mentioned you've had 30 years of service in the fire service. Can you tell us what first inspired you to join the fire service?

[00:04:53.670] - Chief Fire Officer Justin Johnston
My father, my adoptive father, was in the fire service. And I remember probably being, I'm gonna guess about three years old, something like that, when, the fire engine stopped by the house. And I remember not being able to get my shoes on quick enough to be able to go out and see the fire engine. And, I think that that sort of plants a bit of a memory that you return to later on in life.

[00:05:23.810] - Host (Lucinda)
Yeah.

[00:05:24.440] - Chief Fire Officer Justin Johnston
And the fire service were recruiting. I think it took me three attempts to get in.

[00:05:31.490] - Host (Lucinda)
Alright. So it wasn't your first time getting in?

[00:05:33.490] - Chief Fire Officer Justin Johnston
It wasn't my first time. I was 21, so I'd applied first when I was 18. Yeah. A couple of un unsuccessful attempts, and then I did get in. So I I think being around it, you know, the Christmas parties on fire stations and stuff like that is part of you growing up.

[00:05:51.460] - Chief Fire Officer Justin Johnston
You have a level of familiarity with it and I suppose probably a broader understanding what the job actually is as opposed to what most members of the public think it is.

[00:06:02.260] - Host (Lucinda)
Yeah because it's completely different to what people assume a firefighter is to

[00:06:07.010] - Chief Fire Officer Justin Johnston
Yes.

[00:06:07.330] - Host (Lucinda)
What a daily life of a firefighter is. Yeah. So once you join the service, what what led you to being Chief Fire Officer? Did you always want to be that role?

[00:06:20.010] - Chief Fire Officer Justin Johnston
Actually it's interesting because my best friend, who passed away sadly during COVID, we joined a very similar time and took slightly different paths and he will always say that I was always gonna be a chief.

[00:06:37.880] - Host (Lucinda)
Really?

[00:06:38.520] - Chief Fire Officer Justin Johnston
Yeah. But I never had that view. My view was that I wanted to be a rider station officer as it was, back then. So a watch manager on a large multi pump station.

[00:06:51.350] - Host (Lucinda)
Yep.

[00:06:52.790] - Chief Fire Officer Justin Johnston
And I did that and I really enjoyed it. I got to the point where you knew everybody's characters and you knew, how to get the shift running effectively but also how you could support and develop people and encourage them to go forward and you know make their own journeys. And I enjoyed that so much I probably could have stopped there and, I remember somebody saying to me because you have views and opinions like we all do, I think it was an Assistant Chief that said to me, you know, when are you gonna get off the watch and start having an influence in the way the services run then? And,

[00:07:33.060] - Host (Lucinda)
What a statement to be told. That's such nice compliment.

[00:07:37.220] - Chief Fire Officer Justin Johnston
But it does make you think doesn't it? You know if you want to see change you've got to be part of it yourself and help make the change. And so once you start to do, you know, come away from the from the watch and you step into the world of being a flexi officer and then you end up with a sort of new cohort of people, but also a lot of autonomy, individual personal responsibility and the incidents that you go to tend to be the more dynamic or more interesting incidents, you're just getting there slightly later. Yeah. But you do get to cover a much larger patch, You get to understand more around how the whole organisation fits together and works.

[00:08:25.120] - Chief Fire Officer Justin Johnston
And then from then, well again how much influence do you want to be able to have? Yeah. You tend to look at or the next level up will give you that opportunity to have a little bit more influence and so on and so forth. And so it wasn't for me, I've got an end goal.

[00:08:43.010] - Chief Fire Officer Justin Johnston
When I came to Lancashire as the dep, you know, it's strange. I've I've only done two ranks here, Dep and Chief.

[00:08:51.060] - Host (Lucinda)
Yeah.

[00:08:51.460] - Chief Fire Officer Justin Johnston
In the last, 13 years. You I realised that I didn't really wanna go anywhere else, that this would be the last fire and rescue service for me.

[00:09:02.150] - Host (Lucinda)
Because how many have you been?

[00:09:03.510] - Chief Fire Officer Justin Johnston
Three.

[00:09:04.070] - Host (Lucinda)
Three.

[00:09:04.470] - Chief Fire Officer Justin Johnston
So I started, started in Essex, did 13 years there, then four years in Cumbria which was very much about lifestyle, it's the stuff I love and it's a great place to bring up my boys, and then 13 years here. So when I got to Lancashire I thought well I said I don't want to move anymore, I never applied for another Chiefs job. I did look at some, but didn't apply for them in the end, and knew that I wanted to stay here because it's, the journey that we were on as a service and the people that I met in the service that I didn't really want to look at anything else other than that.

[00:09:47.920] - Host (Lucinda)
So you mentioned about your lessons that you learned in your leadership as your Chief Officer what do you consider your greatest achievement here in Lancashire?

[00:09:58.950] - Chief Fire Officer Justin Johnston
It's difficult to say, like, something that's my greatest achievement because it's not, it's ours, it's what we achieve together as a service. I think the pandemic taught us quite a lot. It said actually when you don't have policies and procedures to follow in the same ways you normally do and you've got to think differently, you can be unchained a little bit by patterns and systems, you know, that happen in any large organisation that sometimes slow things down.


[00:10:34.700] - Chief Fire Officer Justin Johnston
But I think our biggest achievement during my time as Chief has been how we responded to the pandemic. We, as we know, were the 1st Fire and Rescue Service to really step forward into the vaccination programme to get fire service staff from all different roles vaccinating the public, running the vaccination centres, doing the coordination activities, being right at the very forefront of that at a time when, because it was difficult to understand the scale of risk and what was really going to materialise. We didn't know whether we shouldn't be putting anybody anywhere and we should be all protective of what we've got by looking into an environment that really needed support.


[00:11:23.330] - Chief Fire Officer Justin Johnston
And when you try and look at things strategically you'd say there's no way the NHS on their own were going to be able to do that level of service at the same time as trying to manage the effects of the pandemic on the general public as well. So they're going to have to change the rules. They're going to have to come up with different ways. And if you can see that they're going to have to do that and you can work with them very early on, you know, our staff become honorary employees of the NHS. They did all the courses that would normally be done within the health care system to become vaccinators or to do to understand how to do all the coordination work at the vaccination centres. And it put green book staff and grey book staff that didn't know each other's roles particularly well or didn't perhaps know each other particularly well right next to each other for a long period of time.

[00:12:21.910] - Chief Fire Officer Justin Johnston
And I think it really helped that broader understanding but it also was about the collective endeavour. Yeah. You know in a time when nobody knew what the absolute solutions were for everything but we all knew that by volunteering together, by doing something we were contributing in an environment where sometimes most other people felt helpless.

[00:12:48.000] - Host (Lucinda)
Well, you completely answered my next section of the podcast because one  member of staff wanted to reflect on the COVID 19 pandemic and wanted to hear how you felt it went. And like you say, as a service we completely changed and adapted to serve the community in a completely different way. And we were 1st of the first fire and rescue services to help the NHS, like you said, which is just a fantastic achievement. So I don't have any further questions on that bit because

[00:13:17.240] - Chief Fire Officer Justin Johnston
But, from a staff perspective and you know going around during that time visiting the vaccination centres, you know supporting them directly myself, talking to staff that are involved in it, It's probably 1 of those times where you you find yourself difficult to hold on to your emotions and keep your, you know, when your voice starts to break a little bit as you.

[00:13:40.180] - Host (Lucinda)
A little bit of a wobble.

[00:13:41.220] - Chief Fire Officer Justin Johnston
Yeah. But, and I'd find that with staff as well because it was a scary time but we all thought we were doing the right thing and when you look back on it it really feels like we did and we were there for Lancashire in its moment of need and I think that kind of thinking needs to be there in the future. So if we look at, the National Risk Register of things that can happen to the UK that would destabilise us even like the loss of power. Yeah. Loss of power for three days you could end up with civil disturbances.

[00:14:19.920] - Chief Fire Officer Justin Johnston
So we know that that would have an impact on us in terms of how we responded but actually what do we do in the lead up to that, what do we do around community tensions, what do we do about visibility, what do we do about working with the communities that we know and understand or with partner agencies, what's our role in all of those things and to step into that in a way where you're not having to, you know, think about it washed, you're having to deal with it, that you've thought about it beforehand and planned where you think you're best able to support the public in that moment of need. We are still one of the only organisations in the country that can put thousands of pairs of feet on the ground in every community within five minutes.

[00:15:11.730] - Host (Lucinda)
Which is just amazing, the quick response we can have to help and keep Lancashire safe.

[00:15:17.810] - Chief Fire Officer Justin Johnston
I think we've just seen it with the flooding over the weekend and we're going to see more of these things happen in the future with climate change, that we need to support communities to become more resilient for themselves, which we're doing, but we also need to think about how do we prepare a community for for a known event, flooding, and then how do we respond. So we've got different roles in different stages and I think we're going to just have to get better and better at that as these events become more frequent and more severe.

[00:15:57.260] - Host (Lucinda)
Over the course of your career, how have the challenges faced by the fire service evolved?

[00:16:04.050] - Chief Fire Officer Justin Johnston
I think we've always struggled. I mean I spent the last 4 years as Vice Chair of the National Fire Chiefs Council (NFCC) which again, it's about that influence thing isn't it? If if you're in that environment you're able to influence and I think sometimes people see the NFCC as some sort of corporate body and it's not, it's just a collection of all of us, in every fire service coming together to work together to solve problems once hopefully at a UK wide level or a

[00:16:34.610] - Host (Lucinda)
Yeah.

[00:16:35.810] - Chief Fire Officer Justin Johnston
Or a England level so that we're not reinventing the wheel all the time and having to come up with it ourselves. But the challenge we have with government sometimes is because we are we're a risk, and almost sometimes you hear it talked about as an insurance policy, you know, you don't want to have to use us but you do want to make sure that we're there in case you do, whereas the other two blue light emergency services are much more of a demand model.

[00:17:05.170] - Host (Lucinda)
Yeah.

[00:17:05.730] - Chief Fire Officer Justin Johnston
And so therefore it's very easy for them to make their case for funding and future funding based on their increasing demands.

[00:17:18.480] - Host (Lucinda)
That they're always needed.

[00:17:19.840] - Chief Fire Officer Justin Johnston
Ours might not actually go up, but when it happens we need to make sure we're as best prepared as we can be. But being able to influence in that environment, being right in with central government every 2 weeks, regularly spending time down in London with, the people that make decisions, if you're in that environment and being able to influence and if you're getting Lancashire's voice in there it enables us to be in a better position, where we're looking for funding and lobbying for funding and writing to MPs locally, doing that jointly, has put us in Lancashire over time in over the last 5 years in a much better position. And so much so that we have been able to invest in order to be able to prepare for the things that we think are coming down the road in relation to climate change and stuff like that. So you know being ahead of the game if we can be, you know thinking about the equipment and training and PPE that we give people now in many cases has got to last 10 to 15 years. Yeah. So what's that environment going to be like in 10 to 15 years?

[00:18:34.000] - Chief Fire Officer Justin Johnston
It's a lot of predicting isn't it? And working out what we think may happen based on trends that have happened.

[00:18:41.380] - Chief Fire Officer Justin Johnston
Which is where we want to be. We want to be able to pair ourselves for the future rather than keep reacting to what's just happened. And if you can't get the right level of funding or your head's always down or your head's looking backwards at the things you need to fix, you don't get the opportunity to say, look, what's coming in the future and how do we best ensure the organisation's in the right place.

[00:19:05.020] - Host (Lucinda)
So a member of staff did wanna talk about funding constraints which we've just covered, but they also wanted to talk about how has the service evolved during your time in the service with things like modernisation or public expectations?

[00:19:19.550] - Chief Fire Officer Justin Johnston
Yeah. I don't think public expectations changed massively. I think we've been in the spotlight a little bit more than we normally are and, you know, that's something we've always got to keep improving. I think if you talk to the general public they want a really good response when they need it. The rest of the time they're happy that you're training for that response, that you're making sure that you're properly equipped and that you're ready.

[00:19:48.290] - Chief Fire Officer Justin Johnston
And they probably don't understand as well as we'd like them to, the range of other things we do as a service to hopefully prevent it from ever happening through doing education and, you know, visits in local communities or working with business communities to look after their businesses to ensure they're safe for people to go into. That whole broad range of things that we do has elevated because of Grenfell.

[00:20:18.300] - Host (Lucinda)
Yeah.

[00:20:19.090] - Chief Fire Officer Justin Johnston
That's still going on. So we've just had the Grenfell Phase 2 report with a raft, more recommendations for us to look at the implications of. But Grenfell was a product of the building safety crisis, the deregulation that's happened over the last 20 years and has put a lot of the building stock in that same situation that we can't have confidence that it's going to perform in a fire the way we would have expected it to according to building regulations.

[00:20:54.410] - Chief Fire Officer Justin Johnston
So we've got to train differently as well. We need to recognise the signs and the symptoms of something that's not behaving how we would expect it to. In terms of modernising or looking at our role, the climate change agenda I'd go back to as well. So how do we deal with something like Winter Hill again but without having the ability to be able to call upon others in the way that we did, we were on a wall on fire there for 42 days, with fire services from all over the country including London up here, people from London that had never been in moorland and never seen the scale of countryside were up in Lancashire. Whereas what we saw when we had the really high temperatures a few years ago is that those type of low frequency, high impact events can be happening

[00:21:49.590] - Host (Lucinda)
Anywhere?

[00:21:50.150] - Chief Fire Officer Justin Johnston
Anywhere simultaneously. So how do we deal with that incident, with more internal resilience, you know, how do we deal with it with better equipment, with better, better foresight, you know, good use of drones and our ability to be able to capture something early and, you know, reduce the overall impact of the incident, reduce the overall scale of the incident. And so that's why we're changing so much of the equipment, the training and the specialisms that we've got in the organisation to be able to say actually we've got much more chance of looking after this ourselves as an incident, because it could be that when we're going through that and we're wanting a bit of support, well no surprise so's Manchester, you know so's West Yorkshire and so on and so forth.

[00:22:39.430] - Host (Lucinda)
So you've just mentioned little bits of advancements of technology but obviously it's an evolving field of firefighting technology As through your career, we've seen the introduction of drones, specific PPE for climate change emergency, and even a firefighting robot. So what technological advancements have made the biggest impact in your time?

[00:23:01.880] - Chief Fire Officer Justin Johnston
I think drones have been really significant for us and unless you keep an eye on it you don't realise how quickly that's evolving. Yeah. So the ability of our drones now they're half the price and twice as good. You know, we've got drones for indoor collapse structures so you're not having to put firefighters into that environment. You'll be able to make a better scene assessment.

[00:23:25.970] - Chief Fire Officer Justin Johnston
You are able to, you know, judge the risk as to what environment you would put firefighters into because you're able to get that better situational awareness. But the technology that's in them and how you use them is evolving all the time so the ability from our sky drones now to be able to track vehicles, to track movements of people, to understand that when they go under, say the coverage of trees, to predict where they're going to come out if they follow the same trajectory. It's really clever stuff that can almost be sort of just left up in the sky with the cameras doing all the work. If you add in AI to that Yeah. AIs will start to learn and will start to flag up areas of interest for you. So think, if you cover a search pattern for a missing person, so and we've had them haven't we?

[00:24:25.960] - Chief Fire Officer Justin Johnston
We've had very high risk, very national cases of high risk missing persons that have turned out to be latterly murder investigations, but were able to fly the drone over that scene in a search pattern way that you can then hand over the SD card to the police and people who are able to look at that imagery. And it's a bit like when you can go and scan Google Maps yourself and start zooming to look to see whether there are clues or disturbances of the earth or whatever that may be that they are trained to look for, but if you add AI into that, AI is able to scan that information much quicker and flag areas that you might want to draw your attention to. And you can see that that's what's happening within other areas now. So AI is not replacing anybody, what it's doing is helping you find the needle in the haystack and that's what you want to use it for. So you wanna use your highly trained intelligent specialist person, to focus on the key areas.

[00:25:41.430] - Host (Lucinda)
It's not replacing people is it? It's enhancing the skills of people and like you say honing in on key details that may make a massive impact.

[00:25:49.750] - Chief Fire Officer Justin Johnston
One of the other areas that I think well, actually I'm really comfortable for as a sector that Lancashire lead on has been the use of dogs and, you know, building up the variety of use of dogs to be able to give us, say, assurance that, a scene is clear. Yeah. You know, so we could spend days, trying to assure ourselves that there wasn't anybody in an incident, you know running a dog over that incident when it's cooled down and being able to say no we put a dog over it, we've done all the things we reasonably could to ensure that we can leave that scene without something, you know, being found at a later point. But dogs that can do so many other things too and now we're even getting to the point where the dogs and the drones, indoor drones, can work together. So the dog is following the drone in terms of areas that you want the dog to focus on.

[00:26:56.730] - Chief Fire Officer Justin Johnston
So it's always evolving, but the use of dogs and even dogs for well-being.

[00:27:03.450] - Host (Lucinda)
Yeah.

[00:27:04.280] - Chief Fire Officer Justin Johnston
As you know I'm a dog lover and I appreciate that that's not necessarily the case for everyone but I do think that, that environment that has animals in it that you like and that you spend a bit of time with is very good for people's mental health and well-being.

[00:27:20.780] - Host (Lucinda)
Like you say, we've got two very well equipped crews of dogs for very different needs, but both very well trained and very cute when they come in and visit, whether they're the fire search dogs or the well-being dogs. I want to look at equality, diversity, and inclusion, which obviously is very important in the fire service. It's been historically male dominated, and though things have been changing, what steps did you take or maybe what challenges did you face in trying to make the service more inclusive?

[00:27:53.630] - Chief Fire Officer Justin Johnston
I think sometimes we we end up, because we say equality, diversity, and inclusion, thinking that it's about other people. And I think the challenge is getting people comfortable with the fact it's about all of us, and really the eye of it is probably the most important part for me: it's inclusion so everybody feels included. If we look at community safety and prevention work, that is inclusion. It's understanding your communities, the fact that they're diverse and therefore may have, not always but may have, different needs, and tailoring our services to reduce the risk to different people is all about making sure that everybody's included. Everybody's included in the way that we do our work with the public, with partner agencies.

[00:28:45.220] - Chief Fire Officer Justin Johnston
And then you've got the internal side of that. It says how do we ensure that everybody in the workplace feels that they're able to feel that they're bringing their full self to work, that they don't have to deny a part of themselves to the workforce, keep it away from the workforce in case that for them causes them, like, a psychological safety risk. So I wouldn't want anyone in our organisation to not feel comfortable in sharing their sexuality. Of course, they're absolutely fine with not sharing their sexuality, but I wouldn't want them to be in an environment where they thought, oh, I don't wanna share that because I'm a little bit uncomfortable with how I may be treated. You know, we've got different backgrounds, different life experiences, different, ages.

[00:29:42.370] - Chief Fire Officer Justin Johnston
You know, we're brought up with different sets of expectations, and we're 1200 to 1300 people. I believe most people don't intend to cause harm to somebody else. But when you've got 1200 to 1300 people, it's gonna happen every now and then. And if most of it's falling into that sort of the careless or the the lack of awareness bit, we can all be doing our bit to educate, support, inform, and look after people so that people aren't at risk of feeling uncomfortable, you know, feeling that they're not valued or feeling intimidated. I remember when you're a new recruit sometimes, first thing that can happen is people want to road test the new recruit, see how good they are and I know that if you, if everybody wants to look intently about my performance then I'm likely, more likely to make a mistake.

[00:30:50.600] - Chief Fire Officer Justin Johnston
And then if I make a mistake, if everybody then's saying, oh, you're making a mistake and the recruits are coming out of training centre and they're not, you know, fully excellent at everything, that could make me a self fulfilling prophecy, you know, I might become more and more uncomfortable, more and more nervous and make more and more mistakes. And actually I don't think that's what people would want for me, I think they would want to support me and they would want to help me develop. And so we've got to make sure we've got an environment that does that and I think by and large we do. We just need to make sure that we're on top of it all the time, that we keep going all the time and that, you know, but occasionally where behaviour is poor we need to be comfortable to be able to say so, so that we can think of the victim first and make sure that that person feels supported.

 
[00:31:51.170] - Host (Lucinda)
And we've got stuff like the employee voice groups to help with that area of understanding everyone's different needs.

[00:31:58.620] - Chief Fire Officer Justin Johnston
I mean, when I was saying that sometimes it feels like it's about other people, well actually everybody fits in, you know, we all have protected characteristics, we all have age, we all have gender, we all have sexuality, we all have ethnicity, we all have a freedom to follow a religion or not to follow a religion. It's about all of us. And so the voice groups give us our ability to be able to tap into and help us understand the impacts on the people that are in the organisation more holistically and they're really growing and developing. It's one of the things that, it's one of the groups I really enjoy chairing because we can make stuff happen relatively quickly.

[00:32:49.090] - Host (Lucinda)
So as we move into the last section of the podcast, you officially retire at the end of this year. What was the hardest thing that you had to come to terms with in making this decision?

[00:33:00.450] - Chief Fire Officer Justin Johnston
I suppose it's it's it's not a hard thing to come to terms with because it's always been about the organisation, but it's making sure that I planned it as effectively as I could to give ourselves enough time as an organisation to make it as seamless as possible.

[00:33:17.420] - Host (Lucinda)
Yeah.

[00:33:18.540] - Chief Fire Officer Justin Johnston
So you want to give stability. So I always knew I'd go at 30 years, 30 years service. You know when that date is and you start to warm up the Chair and the Vice Chair of the Fire Authority early on that that's gonna be the case, nothing's official, you start to think about what's the timeline going to look like backwards from January.

[00:33:41.260] - Host (Lucinda)
From that date?

[00:33:42.060] - Chief Fire Officer Justin Johnston
So what needs to be done before then in order to put the organisation in a position that there isn't a sort of no opportunity for handover or there is a gap where you've got temporaries running throughout the organisation. And then forming it, firming it up at a later point in time. So if you run the time line backwards, you say, right, January, that's gonna be the date that somebody else steps into the role, so what needs to happen before then? Now if that appointment went external then that person coming in may need to serve three months' notice. So very carefully worked out that time line running and that's why I had my announcement when I did. So all those things can start to happen.

[00:34:29.290] - Chief Fire Officer Justin Johnston
You know, it takes a long time to do an external recruitment process for a Chief Fire Officer. Now fortuitous in some ways that Jon picks up the role in its internal because it allows me some handover time as well. If it hadn't been, I still would have managed handover time with that other person because that person would have been identified.

[00:34:49.930] - Host (Lucinda)
Yeah.

[00:34:50.250] - Chief Fire Officer Justin Johnston
They wouldn't be here yet. But, of course, what you do is you start working with them, and spending time together in order to support a smooth handover. So I think that's probably been, the most difficult thing to come to terms with because it's it's like it's it's dealing with the fact that you're moving on and telling the organisation that you're moving on in order to be able to happen and all of a sudden once you tell people that you're moving on, you're going to be retiring, there is a bit there where people there could be a little bit of organising, organisational inertia whereas, well, do we wanna carry on with doing that because we don't know what the next person might want? Yeah. But you can plan your way through that as well, keep everything going, make sure that, the narrative isn't going to change.

[00:35:38.960] - Chief Fire Officer Justin Johnston
It's all in the background. It's stuff that people wouldn't see, but that requires a lot of planning. But then you put yourself out there, you say that you're going and you get that organisational inertia or we start to look to I wonder what the new person's gonna want and I wonder what what direction they might take us in. And that's a conversation you'll be able to have with Jon.

[00:35:58.240] - Host (Lucinda)
Do you have any advice for Jon?

[00:36:01.050] - Chief Fire Officer Justin Johnston
Try and take the moments where things are going good to enjoy it and enjoy the role. It's relentless. It's a privilege. And it will come at a cost, on not just your time but your emotional investment in it. And you've got to try and make sure that you're building in enough to effectively look after you.

[00:36:34.960] - Chief Fire Officer Justin Johnston
The other thing is trust your team. Let them do the things that they're employed to do at the level they're employed to do it and try to be there to support them in doing it and develop and guide where you can, but it's not all on you. There is a team there and that team then extends further down and further out. And that's the 1 of the hardest parts about the STR1VE values is getting everybody in the organisation feeling appropriately empowered and responsible and able to do their role at their level and you don't have to do that. That's, that's for them.

[00:37:22.760] - Host (Lucinda)
So I've got two last questions. What do you think you'll miss most about the job?

[00:37:28.680] - Chief Fire Officer Justin Johnston
Definitely it's people. I really enjoy supporting people in the organisation, seeing people develop. I've seen a lot of people in my time in Lancashire in 13 years really sort of flourish and in some ways being able to support them in there and help them develop, I'll miss that. I'll miss not being part of your future achievements. So when I'm looking from afar and Lancashire is off doing x,y,z I'll miss, I'll miss that for sure.

[00:38:06.180] - Host (Lucinda)
I'm sure you'll be missed by many people in the organisation. You'll leave a big gap. I'm assuming you've got exciting plans for your retirement. Do you know what you're going to be doing, and are you gonna stay connected to the fire service?

[00:38:20.140] - Chief Fire Officer Justin Johnston
I did think I'd apply for the role of chair of the National Fire Chiefs Council and the timing on that would have been quite good, but having spent some time in Italy with my mum and, you know, a bit of reflection, you think, well, actually, how long do you want to keep pushing cortisol into your system, how long do you want to be in the dynamic operating environment that it's like to be a Chief Fire Officer and a Vice Chair of NFCC where things come into every weekend, things come into every evening and you feel responsible for everything because whilst it's not your job to do everything you are ultimately responsible. So to get to be in an environment where actually I'm not responsible but I can support, I would like to do some work around, supporting and some work with academia as well which I've always been involved in. I I look after organisational learning for the sector and academic collaboration for the sector. I've just become a visiting professor from for the University of Chester.

[00:39:34.350] - Host (Lucinda)
Congratulations.

[00:39:35.310] - Chief Fire Officer Justin Johnston
Yeah. Thank you. So I said it's a nice it's it's an honorary position, but it will enable me to do some sector work with the university

[00:39:43.790] - Host (Lucinda)
Yeah.

[00:39:44.430] - Chief Fire Officer Justin Johnston
Because a lot of the challenges we have when we get to government and being able to be persuasive is to have the right data and research to support the direction that you want things to go in. Yeah. So I'm gonna try and do some of that in the background now so that people of the future are better equipped to have really strong data with academic rigour and research to be really persuasive in those environments where people are controlling the pursee strings for us to be able to continue to develop as a sector. So I still want to be there in some some way

[00:40:19.920] - Host (Lucinda)
Yeah.

[00:40:20.560] - Chief Fire Officer Justin Johnston
But I want to focus what I've learned over the last four years of working with government, the last few years of working with academia, the universities more broadly, to try and put us in a better position to ensure that we evolve and we're more resilient and we're better funded as a sector for the challenges that we'll face in the future. And I think I'll find myself naturally doing some of that.

[00:40:48.460] - Host (Lucinda)
So, you're not switching off just yet?

[00:40:50.860] - Chief Fire Officer Justin Johnston
No, hopefully some, you know, some long walks and running and that with Milo, my new Labrador in the fells and,

[00:41:00.800] - Host (Lucinda)
Any holidays?

[00:41:03.360] - Chief Fire Officer Justin Johnston
We always go long haul in January. I think that's a good opportunity for me to, you know, sit and reflect in the sun, stop. It'll be the first holiday I've had where I've not been, you know, taking the occasional phone call

[00:41:20.210] - Host (Lucinda)
Yeah.

[00:41:20.610] - Chief Fire Officer Justin Johnston
Reading emails, text messages, and stuff like that. That that will be strange for me, I think, to not find myself checking in with the workplace.

[00:41:32.870] - Host (Lucinda)
Yeah. It definitely will be strange to not have to come back and sift through emails, but I guess it's a nice chance to switch off, enjoy it, and hopefully get used to it for a bit.

[00:41:46.130] - Chief Fire Officer Justin Johnston
Yeah. Yeah. I I it's it's strange because I do, I do a lot of interviews where cup of tea is all it actually is. I have a cup of tea with people if they want to at the end of their careers And they sit in my office with me and we recount some of the highs and lows or challenges of their careers and things they've been most proud of, a bit like our conversation today.

[00:42:12.100] - Chief Fire Officer Justin Johnston
And one of the things I wanna do is I always wanna ensure that they are prepared for what can be a really significant change for them, the loss of identity almost. Some people have described it as a bit of a cliff edge where you're very much part of something and then you are no longer part of something at all. And I'm always keen to make sure that they maintain a connection somehow, whether they're part of WhatsApp groups, a walk in group, whether they join the Sports and Athletics Association, whether they're part of the Retired Members Association, whether they've got friendship groups that they're going to maintain, so that it's not like that.

[00:42:50.770] - Chief Fire Officer Justin Johnston
And it's weird to get to the end of my 30 years and those conversations that I've had with other people, I'm now having with myself.

[00:43:00.530] - Host (Lucinda)
Yeah.

[00:43:01.010] - Chief Fire Officer Justin Johnston
But actually it's kind of nice to sit here with you and, have that conversation with you and sort of reflect on it, from my perspective.

[00:43:09.420] - Host (Lucinda)
Well, thank you for sharing all of your insights today. It's been extremely interesting for myself, so it's nice to hear your whole career reflection, and I'm showing it's a great listen for others. We wish you all the best with your retirement and hope you enjoy every minute. And I'm sure many people in the organisation will keep in touch.

[00:43:30.970] - Chief Fire Officer Justin Johnston
Thank you.

[00:43:31.530] - Host (Lucinda)
And remember, if you liked our episodes, please like and subscribe. And let's make Lancashire safer together.