A medium-term financial plan, and £4.3m of savings found

The situation

A fire and rescue service has to plan years ahead on budgets that never sit still. Essex County Fire & Rescue Service needed to understand where money was actually going across departments, where the real priorities sat, and how to forecast properly — then turn all of that into a plan the people holding the purse strings could sign off with confidence.

This wasn’t our usual line of work. It was our usual way of thinking, pointed at a much bigger machine.

What we did

Following the money

We worked across departments to understand the genuine spend — not the spreadsheet version, the actual picture. Where the pressures were, where priorities clashed, and where the existing forecasting structures held up versus where they quietly didn’t.

Building the plan with the people who own it

We sat alongside the senior leadership team and wrote the medium-term financial plan with them, not at them. A plan nobody believes in is just a document; a plan the leadership team helped shape is something they’ll actually run the service by.

Designing the plan people actually read

A financial plan only works if people understand it. So we didn’t just hand over a spreadsheet — we designed and produced the plan itself, as a branded document in print and as a digital version published on the service’s own website. The figures and the strategy, laid out to read clearly in the room and out in public. This is where our creative side and our commercial side do their best work together.

The result

The plan was signed off by the Police, Fire and Crime Commissioner, with £4.3 million of efficiency savings identified. Real money, found by understanding the organisation properly before anyone reached for the red pen.

Most agencies stop at the logo. Sometimes the most valuable thing we do is help an organisation understand its own numbers — and then make them make sense to everyone else.