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What we do now

Fire alarms are vital tools in alerting people that smoke or fire is present within a building. Some alarms, commonly in domestic properties, sound to alert people in the vicinity, while others - more likely properties managed by businesses or occupied by people who are vulnerable - trigger a response from the Service.

We have four main categories for mobilisation:

A1 commercial or industrial

Low and medium rise commercial buildings, portable office accommodation, offices, abattoir, commercial garage, factory, filling station, police station, pumping station, agricultural storage buildings that may contain livestock, straw, hay, agrochemicals and farm machinery, etc.

A2 retail and public assembly

Theatres, cinemas, shopping complexes, shops, schools, colleges, sports stadia, night clubs, churches and other places of worship, community centres, libraries, marquees, museums, public houses, etc. 

A3 residential

Prisons, residential care homes, hotels, boarding houses, residential schools, hospitals, portable accommodation with sleeping risk, heritage buildings, low and medium residential, etc., where under The Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005 an employee refers to this property as their place of work e.g. warden, member of staff.

A4 domestic

Domestic properties where according to The Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005 this premises is occupied as a private dwelling.

The 'responsible person'

Under the Fire Safety Order, businesses and other non-domestic premises should have a designated ‘responsible person’. Their role is to:

  • carry out a fire risk assessment of the premises and review it regularly
  • tell staff or their representatives about the risks they’ve identified
  • put in place, and maintain, appropriate fire safety measures
  • plan for an emergency
  • provide staff information, fire safety instruction and training.

Unwanted fire alarm signals

Any automatic fire alarm that we are alerted to that is not a genuine emergency is considered in terms such as an ‘unwanted fire alarm signal’ or ‘false alarm’.

The Service currently has measures in place to reduce the impact of unwanted fire alarm signals. These include:

  • only attending automatic fire alarms at commercial and industrial and retail and public assembly premises during night-times (6pm-8am) and weekends, unless there is a confirmed sign of fire. During weekday daytimes, we will only attend if there is a confirmed sign of fire.
  • Fire Control ‘call challenging’ to confirm sight of fire before mobilising
  • business safety teams working with businesses
  • charging for repeat offenders
  • communications messaging on the best ways to maintain alarms.

Call challenging

When a call is challenged it means that fire control will ask questions to confirm whether there is an actual fire before sending resources. If Control are unable to get confirmation either way then we will send a response depending on the time and type of premises. For instance, if it's a commercial premises overnight we would send a response, or if it's during weekday daytime hours we would not as we'd expect someone to be there to confirm. We would always attend a domestic premises. We would only not respond if Control is fully satisfied that there is no genuine emergency.