Firefighter response times are at an all-time high – despite there being fewer blazes than ever before.
Laying bare the ’emergency’ facing 999 crews, statistics show teams took 8m 1s on average to attend home fires in 2023/24.
This was nearly 40s slower than when records began in 2010, before a funding crisis tore apart services across the country.
Seconds can prove the difference between life and death with blazes.
A fire can rip through a home and be fully engulfed in flames within just five minutes, although there are no central response time targets.
In Cornwall, England’s worst-performing service, crews took an average of 10m 59s to attend 230 house fires.
Hereford and Worcester did not fare much better, with an average of 10m 41s across 440 incidents.
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Three other services had an average response time above ten seconds: Staffordshire (10m 25s), Oxfordshire (10m 19s) and North Yorkshire (10m 18s).
For contrast, responses times were just 6m 4s in Tyne and Wear, the country’s best-performing service, which attended 582 blazes.
Home Office statistics show similarly low times were recorded by the West Midlands (6m 31s) and London (6m 32s).
Over the last decade, MailOnline can reveal that three-quarters of fire services saw a rise in average response times.
Kent’s jumped the most, by more than two minutes from 7m 19s to 9m 41s.
In the same decade there was a huge fall in house and flat fires.
Fire services in England responded to 24,430 incidents in the year to June 2024, a 20 per cent drop from the 30,660 in 2013/14.
The National Fire Chiefs Council (NFCC) blamed reduced funding, warning that it was ‘concerned’ by its impact on public safety.
Union bosses say one in five firefighter jobs have been cut since 2010. Dozens of fire stations have also shut.
The number of ‘wholetime’ fire stations – staffed by crews ready to take action 24/7 – fell by more than a third from 2011 to 2021, from 663 to 423.
These have mostly been replaced with fire stations which are only manned part of the time and at other times work on an on-call system.
On-call firefighters – who work other full-time jobs – are only paged in response to an incident.
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Typically, it takes them longer to respond to 999 calls because they’re based at home or work and must reach the fire station before they are able to head out.
Wholetime firefighters, on the other hand, are already working in the station.
An NFCC spokesperson said: ‘Many factors determine the time it takes a fire and rescue service to respond to an incident, which includes population density, local road conditions and firefighter crewing arrangements.
‘The Home Office figures confirm the time it takes to drive to an incident is almost always the reason for the largest proportion of the increase in response times from one year to the next.
‘A correlation should not be drawn between a fall in the number of dwelling fires and an increase in response times.
This is because it is unusual for a fire and rescue service to have two incidents running at the same time in the same fire station area, in which there could then be an impact on the response time to the second incident if crews are already committed to the first.’
A Home Office spokesperson said: ‘Throughout the country, our firefighters operate in uniquely challenging and high-risk environments, constantly responding to the call of duty to protect our communities.
‘The provisional Local Government settlement sets proposed funding allocations which will mean standalone Fire and Rescue Authorities receiving a 3% increase in core spending power in 2025-26.’
The most recent data relates to the 12 months until June 2024. In previous years the financial calendar (April to March) was used to report statistics.
The Fire Brigades Union has previously branded the situation an ’emergency’, saying Government funding has plunged from £1.2billion a decade ago to just £935m now.
As such, services have had to make savings to keep afloat.
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Firefighters at the worst performing service, Cornwall, took an average of 10m 59s to respond to 230 house fires. Pictured: Firefighters putting out a building fire in St Ives, Cornwall
It warned the UK is ‘dangerously underprepared’ for tackling blazes and demanded Sir Keir Starmer invested in the sector when he entered No10.
The FBU claimed several fire and rescue services across the UK have now adopted a new policy of sending firefighters out in crews of three instead of the minimum of five needed to respond to incidents where lives are at risk.
In serious incidents, they’re forced to wait for additional crews to arrive before acting, wasting crucial time needed to save lives.
It also warned that the ‘climate emergency is resulting in more frequent and extreme weather events and wildfires’.
Matt Wrack, FBU general secretary said: ‘The fire and rescue service is in crisis after years of austerity and fragmentation. While we face the flooding, wildfires and extreme weather of the climate emergency, we have lost one in five firefighters to cuts.
‘Fewer resources mean that fire engines take far longer to arrive at a fire than in the 1990s, and fire services’ capacity varies wildly by region.
‘Last years’ response times, the slowest in recent records, should have been a wake-up call.
‘The government must deliver on promises to end the fire cover post-code lottery through a statutory advisory body, and provide the urgent investment needed to protect homes and lives.’
A Home Office spokesperson said: ‘Throughout the country, our firefighters operate in uniquely challenging and high-risk environments, constantly responding to the call of duty to protect our communities.
‘The provisional Local Government settlement sets proposed funding allocations which will mean standalone Fire and Rescue Authorities receiving a 3 per cent increase in core spending power in 2025-26.’