Fire Cover

The Fire and Rescue Services Act has given us the flexibility to provide emergency cover which better reflects the patterns of risks across the capital. New attendance standards have been set, which will improve our performance.

Improving emergency cover

We have worked together with specialist consultants to develop a better understanding of the patterns of demand for our emergency response than we had before. Together we have built a model which reflects our historical patterns of incidents, the locations of fire engines, changing traffic speeds in different places and at different times of day and how quickly fire engines arrive at incidents. It also enables us to look at how changes in the way we might provide our emergency cover would affect attendance times.

Until recently, that knowledge would not have been of much use to us because of the constraints of recommended standards of fire cover (now removed). Under the old rules the standards for how quickly fire engines should get to fires concentrated on dangers to property, rather than people. The highest risk category was 'A' (which included major commercial centres such as the City and West End of London, but which covered only two per cent of the total area of Greater London), moving down to category 'D', mostly residential areas.

Recommended standards were then set nationally for the number of fire engines which should be sent to reported fires, and how quickly they should get there. These standards meant that the 'A' and 'B' risk areas got the best response, with more fire engines attending more quickly than in, say, the outer suburbs. And while we sent two fire engines to every reported fire in a building, in those parts of London which used to be classed as 'A' risk we were required to send a third fire engine as part of the initial response.

These standards were criticised, for many years, for their failure to take into account explicitly the risk of death or injury from fire or the very different risks which may be present in properties in the same location; even the same street. The standards also ignored any protection or prevention measures.

In addition, the way performance was measured against the old national standards did not provide a full picture of the services we provided. They did not cover road traffic accidents or other emergencies for example. So when we reported that we met those standards in 'A' risk parts of London on 77.5 per cent of occasions, that really only referred to much less than half of the calls we were responding to. Our new standards will provide a much more reliable indicator of how we are performing as it will include all calls we respond to.

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Setting our new standards for London

As part of modernising the service, the government has now withdrawn the old recommended national standards, which gives us the flexibility to propose a new set of standards which we think are right for London.

We have used our improved understanding of risk and our new ability to examine what happens if we make changes. We intend to:

• Maintain our current performance for how long it will take for the first fire engine to arrive at an incident. This equates to getting the first fire engine there within approximately five minutes on 65 per cent of occasions and within approximately eight minutes on 90 per cent of occasions. But we will also review whether we should seek to move to a more even attendance standard for the first fire engine.
• Continue to send at least two fire engines to all property fires, except when responding to an automatic fire alarm in non-residential buildings, when (as now) we will normally send only one fire engine.
• Stop automatically sending a third fire engine as part of the initial response in the old 'A' risk areas.
• Set a new standard for how long a second fire engine will take to arrive at calls for help. This will reflect our starting a process of reducing the differences in attendance times across London from the very uneven provision which arose from the old national standards. We can set the standard that a second fire engine will arrive at incidents within approximately eight minutes on 75 per cent of occasions and within approximately 10 minutes on 90 per cent of occasions.
• Continue to send extra fire engines or specialist vehicles as part of the first attendance where our local borough commander, who knows the area, has identified good reasons to do so.
• Maintain the arrangements where any incident commander can call for whatever additional support (extra fire engines, specialist fire engines or equipment, extra officers, or relief crews at protected incidents) they consider to be necessary.

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