Charge of the Fire Brigade

10 January 2014 | Updated 01 January 1970

The London Fire Brigade has become the first fire service in the country to recover costs from buildings such as hospitals, airports and student halls with a poor false alarm record.

The Brigade hopes the charging scheme will encourage those responsible for buildings to improve the maintenance of their fire alarms in order to reduce the number of times they go off unnecessarily. Time spent at unnecessary calls has a knock-on effect on the amount of time fire crews can spend on training, community safety and could delay attendances at real emergencies.

New figures released today show that if charging was in place last year hospitals alone would have faced a bill of £500,000 for the excessive number of times firefighters were called to a fire alarm sounding. Hospitals are responsible for the vast majority of the false alarms that the capital’s firefighters are called out to.

In a bid to highlight the extent of the problem, the Brigade has released the names of London hospitals that called the Brigade over 70 times to false alarms last year. They are: St. Georges Hospital – 136, Kings College Hospital – 129, Chase Farm Hospital – 128, Royal London Hospital – 98, Hillingdon Hospital – 94, Ealing Hospital – 94, Homerton Hospital – 87, Royal Free Hospital – 79.

£800,000

Firefighters were called out to 403 locations more than ten times last financial year and had the charge been in place the Brigade would have recovered around £800,000.

False alarms from automatic systems account for around 40,000 call outs every year, making up a third of all incidents for fire crews in London. Over the last two years there has been a 15 per cent reduction in the number of false alarms at non-residential buildings but the Brigade said that the figures are still too high.

Chairman of the London Fire and Emergency Planning Authority, James Cleverly, said: “The public deserve and expect firefighters to be available to attend genuine emergencies rather than attending thousands of false alarms. The vast bulk of automatic fire alarm calls turn out not to be fires, these are often caused by poor management or maintenance of alarm systems.

“This is not a money making exercise but we are leading the way in recovering our spend on unwanted call outs and educating building managers to properly maintain their fire alarm systems.”

The Brigade will recover the cost from those responsible for the fire alarm systems where firefighters are called out to false alarms ten times or more in a 12 month period. The £290 plus VAT penalty applies to buildings across the capital but not domestic properties or care homes.

As well as being time consuming for firefighters, false alarms are also costly - in London, it is estimated that false alarms cost the Brigade around £37 million each year - and the cost to the UK economy in lost productivity is estimated at around a billion pounds per year.

Article written by Brian Shillibeer | Published 10 January 2014