West Midlands firefighters attend more false alarms than fires

Home Office data shows West Midlands Fire and Rescue Service responded to 24,909 call-outs in the year to September.

Of those, 42 per cent were a result of false alarms, while just 35 per cent were for actual fires.

The false alarms to the service last year included 430 deemed ‘malicious’ – such as fake or hoax calls.

Unnecessary callouts can be costly and time-consuming for emergency services.

While malicious callers accounted for 5,473 calls to fire services across England last year, the largest proportion of false alarms occurred due to faulty equipment, such as broken fire alarms and smoke detectors.

In the West Midlands, 5,667 callouts were made for this reason, accounting for nearly a quarter of all incidents attended by the area’s firefighters last year.

A further 2,753 false-alarm calls were made in good faith – where the public believed that a fire may have genuinely been taking place.

West Midlands Fire Service said many of the automatic fire alarm activations it attends are false alarms, and it is looking at how it categorises them and how to ensure the service only responds when necessary.

A spokesman said: "When our fire control is told by an Alarm Receiving Centre that an AFA’s going off, they’ll use the information provided to decide whether or not to send a response and, if we do, what level of resources.

"In 2015, we introduced business support vehicles. One aspect of their work is responding to AFAs, which gives our business support officers opportunity to work with businesses to reduce the impact of AFAs and to provide business safety advice.

"Nearly 90 per cent of the 11,000 people who responded to our 2020 public consultation supported us developing new ways of responding to AFAs.

"Hoax callers can be fined and jailed. They can mean we mobilise fire engines in ‘response’ mode when we don’t need to, putting the lives of firefighters and members of the public at risk.

"They also mean that our life-saving resources can be tied-up without reason, denying people in genuine need. They disrupt our crucial community fire safety work and training, and place an extra financial burden on us and our communities.

"Our highly-trained fire control operators do challenge apparent hoaxers if their suspicions are raised. Their professional skills are backed up with one of the most advanced ‘command and control’ and mapping systems available, which allows them to look back at call history and the origin of calls."

The National Fire Chiefs Council said a false alarm is attended to almost every 90 seconds in the UK and can cost up to £450, taking resources away from genuine emergencies and increasing the service's carbon footprint.

The number of callouts for West Midlands Fire and Rescue Service dropped three per cent this year, compared to 25,658 in the year to September 2020.

Across England, fire services also saw a decrease in the number of incidents they attended - there were 537,039 callouts in the 12 months to September 2021, a slight drop on the 539,418 made the previous year.

Andy Dark, assistant general secretary at the Fire Brigades Union, which represents firefighters, says that fire brigades need better funding to handle false callouts.

He said: “It is vital that fire and rescue services have enough resources to deal with all callouts – even where later down the line it is found that it was a false alarm.”

Mr Dark added that cuts to staff numbers and equipment since 2010, increasing response times and fewer crews being sent to fires have made dealing with actual fires more difficult.

A Home Office spokesperson said the Government has ensured that fire departments have "the appropriate resources and funding to do the job."