Case Studies

You have served in the fire service for over 29 years, what inspired you to join and when did you know it was the right career for you?

The firefighter role always looked interesting to me; it looked like something I could genuinely do well. Growing up, I was always part of a team, whether that was football or athletics, and I think that grounding is the real reason the job appealed to me. Since joining, I have never looked back. It's been a genuinely rewarding career, and while teamwork has remained at its core, the job has also given me the skills and confidence to work independently under pressure when it counts. 

Throughout my career I have benefited from being in response, prevention and protection, and have seen the excellent preventative and protective work carried out by the fire service within communities. My first-hand experience of seeing the devastating impact of when things go wrong has provided me with great insight into educating business holders and responsible persons on the importance of effective fire safety arrangements. 

Knowing it was the right career wasn't one single moment so much as realising, incident after incident, that I could rely on both the team around me and my own judgement when it mattered most. The fact that I am still enjoying it nearly 30 years on means I made a great choice.

You recently completed the NEBOSH Certificate in Fire Safety, which you studied with NEBOSH Gold Learning Partner Coleg Cambria, and for which you were named a 2026 Best Candidate. Congratulations! Why did you choose this qualification and how has achieving it helped you so far?

I currently lead a compliance team enforcing the Fire Safety Order, and the NEBOSH Certificate in Fire Safety is an industry-recognised qualification that the team and I worked towards. We wanted to ensure we maintained the same standard of knowledge that responsible and competent persons are expected to have in the industry, and the NEBOSH Certificate in Fire Safety helped us do that. Studying it with Coleg Cambria was a real benefit, and being named a 2026 Best Candidate was a nice recognition of that work. The course helped consolidate everything I'd learned through other fire safety qualifications, but the real value was that it pushed me to think like a responsible person, rather than staying in my usual auditing and compliance mindset.

What is the most valuable thing you learned through your NEBOSH studies?

That anyone with responsibility for fire safety compliance needs some formal grounding and knowledge. There is so much information out there; knowing what to use and how to use it can be a minefield to navigate without it.

Tell me about your employer and your current role. What would you say is the best thing about your job?

I work for North Wales Fire & Rescue Service, and next year marks my 30th year with them. I've stayed operational throughout that time, performing incident command roles at various levels. My current role is East Area Compliance Manager, leading a team of Compliance and Senior Compliance Officers who enforce the Fire Safety Order. It's a fascinating area, covering heavy and light industry, Lower and Upper Tier COMAH sites on some of Europe's largest industrial estates, residential high-rise buildings, and smaller premises such as offices, hotels, purpose-built flats, and House in Multiple Occupation (HMOs). The best thing about the job is the variety, combined with knowing the work genuinely protects people.

What are the key health and safety issues that need to be considered in the fire safety industry?

A few stand out: the competence of fire risk assessors and the quality of the assessments they produce given how much fire safety compliance depends on the person carrying them out, the continued scrutiny of high-rise and cladding issues following Grenfell and the Building Safety Act, the ongoing maintenance and testing of passive and active fire safety systems, and ensuring responsible persons and duty holders keep pace with changing regulation rather than relying on outdated guidance. Martyn's Law is also on the horizon, bringing counter-terrorism protective security into the same conversation as fire safety for many premises.

Pulling all that together, the common thread is competence. Fire and Rescue Authorities are increasingly looking for evidence that fire safety is properly planned, controlled, monitored and reviewed over time, rather than treated as a box-ticking exercise or a risk assessment left sitting in a drawer. That's exactly why formal, recognised training matters more than ever. The pace of regulatory change makes it increasingly difficult for responsible persons to keep up without it.

Looking back on your career to date, what achievement are you most proud of?

The NEBOSH Best Candidate award is right up there, but most recently, I'm proud of building an effective compliance team protecting the eastern area of North Wales. It's been a challenging few years, but the team can take great credit for their professionalism and dedication in securing the qualifications needed for the role. The amount of work they've put in is a testament to their commitment to protecting people, not just through enforcement, but by genuinely helping businesses understand and develop their own fire safety responsibilities.

On a personal level, the achievement I'm most proud of in nearly 30 years in the service is seeing that team come together and watching individuals develop into confident, qualified compliance officers who can hold their own in front of duty holders running some of the most complex sites in the area. It's one thing to aim for consistency and to do the job to one’s best abilities; it's quite another to help build a team that will keep doing it well, long after you've moved on.

Can you tell us about your ambitions for the future?

As a team, we want to build on our partnership working and find more ways to be proactive in delivering the Fire Safety Order message, rather than primarily being reactive. Part of that ambition is making sure that as new tools, AI included, become part of how people access fire safety information, we help embed proper grounded knowledge alongside them, so businesses and responsible persons are using technology to support good decision-making rather than as a substitute for real understanding.

Having spent nearly 30 years on the operational side and now also in fire safety compliance management, I'd like to spend the years ahead passing my knowledge and experience on, helping develop the next generation of officers the way others helped develop me.

What do you see as the biggest challenge facing health and safety professionals today?

The rise of AI. It's a genuinely useful tool, but there's a real risk that it gets treated by some as a substitute for grounded base knowledge rather than a support for it. Unfortunately, we do see some fire risk assessments and fire strategies that simply do not reflect the actual risk and/or building. For me, fire safety compliance isn't something you can shortcut. Formal training and preferably experience are important because the consequences of getting it wrong are too serious. The challenge for us as professionals is ensuring AI complements both sound judgement and qualifications such as NEBOSH, rather than being used in place of them.

What would your advice be to anyone looking to start a career in fire safety?

Get a genuinely broad grounding in health and safety. Although there is an element of picking things up as you go, don't rely on that too heavily. Qualifications like the NEBOSH Certificate in Fire Safety provide a solid foundation and teach you to think from the perspective of the responsible person. Value the teamwork side of the job because it will carry you a long way, but also be ready to build the confidence to work independently under pressure; that combination is what the job demands. And keep learning. Fire safety doesn't stand still, neither should you.