Fire crews to cut the 1,000 false calls a week from faulty alarms

12 April 2012

Firefighters may no longer respond to automatic alarms unless they can be sure a blaze has started.

Radical proposals are being considered to cut the 1,000 false alarm calls the London Fire Brigade receives each week. Most are due to poorly-maintained equipment. It comes after the brigade announced that it would begin charging £260 a time for releasing people stuck in lifts if it is called to the same building more than three times a year.

Fire authority leaders believe many councils and businesses use the brigade as a cheap fall-back rather than paying for regular maintenance of automatic alarms or lifts. Nearly 40 per cent of all calls attended by

London firefighters are the result of faulty alarms. Under the new policy, firefighters would only respond if a phone call is also received - a rule that applied during last year's fire strikes.

The brigade estimates it has saved £1 million in call-out costs since introducing charges in 2009 for attending lift break-downs more than 10 times a year in the same building. But it decided to toughen the rules on non-emergency situations after figures showed that firefighters were called to nearly 10,000 lift incidents last year, of which only 67 were medical emergencies.

The largest number of "chargeable" calls up to last December was in Southwark (126), followed by Tower Hamlets (71) and Camden (68) out of a London-wide total of 412. The new rules will come into effect on April 1.

Brian Coleman, Tory chairman of the London fire authority, said: "Firefighters will always attend a call-out where it is a real emergency and people need help. However, if it is not an emergency, it should be up to the lift company, whose product has broken down, to fix the problem."

Create a FREE account to continue reading

eros

Registration is a free and easy way to support our journalism.

Join our community where you can: comment on stories; sign up to newsletters; enter competitions and access content on our app.

Your email address

Must be at least 6 characters, include an upper and lower case character and a number

You must be at least 18 years old to create an account

* Required fields

Already have an account? SIGN IN

By clicking Create Account you confirm that your data has been entered correctly and you have read and agree to our Terms of use , Cookie policy and Privacy policy .

This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply.

Thank you for registering

Please refresh the page or navigate to another page on the site to be automatically logged in