Part 1: Emergency Services Collaboration Chapter 1: Collaboration Agreements Section 2: Duties in relation to collaboration agreements
This section introduces a new statutory duty on police, fire and rescue and emergency ambulance services to keep under consideration opportunities to collaborate with one another, and further, where it would be in the interests of efficiency or effectiveness of at least two of the services, for those services to give effect to such collaboration. This new duty will ensure that all opportunities for collaboration to improve efficiency or effectiveness are fully explored. This duty is intentionally high level and non-prescriptive to allow for local innovation in how collaboration is implemented, recognising that local areas are best placed to determine what form of collaboration will improve local services. We would expect consideration to include examples of existing collaborations set out within the Emergency Services Collaboration Working Group's National Overview Report1 (for example, sharing of estates, corporate services, procurement, co-responding etc.).
	Where an emergency service identifies an opportunity to collaborate they are required to notify the other relevant emergency services of the proposed collaboration and those other services are required to consider whether such a collaboration would be in the interests of efficiency or effectiveness of the proposed parties. Subsections (2) and (3) are not prescriptive about how this consideration is undertaken.
	Where two or more of the emergency services consider it would be in the interests of their efficiency or effectiveness to collaborate and it is within their power to do so, then subsections (4) and (5) require those services to enter into a collaboration agreement. These provisions do not prevent an emergency service from entering into a collaborative agreement on a voluntary basis where they would not benefit – they may still enter the collaboration if doing so has the potential to improve the efficiency or effectiveness of the other services, or the impact of the collaboration would be neutral, but there would be no duty to do so. Where a collaboration agreement is in the interests of efficiency but would adversely affect effectiveness (or vice versa), the service wouldn’t be required to collaborate as a result of section 3(1) – but again, could choose to do so.
	The duty requires the services to evaluate the impact of a proposal on efficiency or effectiveness. Collaboration can lead to service improvements through both of these channels. Consequently it should not be a pre-condition of a collaboration agreement that it should improve both. If a collaboration initiative would improve the quality of the service but not save any money, for instance, we would still want the emergency services to give effect to that project.
	The duties as set out in section 2 are all subject to the restrictions set out in section 3.