Hi Chris
This is more to do with internal disciplinary action within the fire service rather than any cases which have necessarily gone forward to a court of law.
It has always been the case that if a bad decision is made, and someone gets hurt (or worse) an incident commander would be investigated and possibly disciplined as a result of their actions.
But the perception these days is that an individual is guilty until proven innocent, that the employer washes their hands of the employee and keeps them at arms length whilst any investigation takes place, that there is generally no support for officers who sometimes have to make very difficult decisions, when things go wrong.
There is little room to be flexible and dynamic where policy and procedures are concerned within the UK fire & rescue service and this means that when an Officer chooses to deviate slightly from a policy or procedure to suit an incident using dynamic risk assessment, his or her actions are picked over and scrutinised to the 'Nth' degree, even when such a deviation has succesfully and safely led to an incident being resolved.
Some brigades are using this as an excuse / reason to discipline someone or get rid of employees which is most concerning.
And as with any "perception" nobody wants to be the first to test the theory and establish if the perception is genuine or unfounded, so it becomes a viscous circle.
In my opinion by principal officers could do moree to reassure front line staff. But the behaviour of chief officers is perhaps not too suprising given that they dance to the tune of their political masters - fire authorities made up of councillors!.
