London Fire Brigade (LFB) has announced that it will now fine firms if they have more than ten false alarm callouts in a year. The charge will be £290 plus VAT, but will not apply to care homes or domestic properties.
LFB was called out to 403 locations more than ten times in the last financial year, which cost the brigade £800,000. False alarms from automatic systems resulted in 40,000 callouts last year – one third of all incidents for fire crews in London. If the charge had been in place, LFB would have recouped £500,000 alone from false alarms at hospitals, the most frequent source of the unnecessary callouts.
James Cleverly, Chairman of the London Fire and Emergency Planning Authority, said: “The public deserve and expect fire-fighters 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."
Mr Cleverly added that this was not a money-making exercise, but a way to recover money and properly educate building managers about how to maintain their fire alarm systems.
Time spent dealing with hoax calls limits the time fire crews could spend on training and community safety – and could delay attendances at actual emergencies.
In addition to wasting fire-fighters’ time, unnecessary callouts are costly – they cost London alone £37 million annually and the economy approximately £1 billion a year in terms of lost productivity
See FIA ‘s infographic and microsite for ways to cut false fire alarm callouts, which are largely preventable.
Commercial buildings, non-domestic and multi-occupancy premises in England and Wales are already forced to undertake a ‘suitable and sufficient’ fire risk assessment carried out under the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005.
While the overwhelming majority of premises do this, if the assessment is thought to have been carried out to an insufficient extent, the Responsible Person can face an unlimited fine or up to two years in prison.
