Although there has been unprecedented co-operation between the fire and rescue services and the fire industry, the revised joint policy on false alarms will not actually come into force yet. Terry Martiny calls for a consistent, national adoption of the policy.

Anybody who works in fire detection and alarms is only too aware of the problem of false alarms. The most recent UK fire statistics report that in 2006, the fire and rescue service attended 862,100 fires incidents, with false alarms accounting for 435,900 of these. While the debate inevitably continues on what constitutes an actual false alarm, a figure of over 50 percent, whatever the definition, is certainly unacceptable.

When this is considered in monetary terms, with the average cost of attending estimated to be in the region of £400 per call, it is easy to see why the annual cost is thought to be in excess of £100million. In addition, this also results in a significant number of hours lost by the fire service – time which could be better spent in community activities aimed at fire prevention education. When you also throw into the pot an estimate from a major supermarket chain that every minute lost through a store evacuation equates to £16,000 in lost revenue, the message is clear – doing nothing is not an option.

Time for action

It is against this backdrop that CFOA (the Chief Fire Officers' Association) developed their Policy for the Reduction of False Alarms and Unwanted Fire Signals. A great deal of work has gone into this policy, not only from CFOA themselves but also from the FIA (Fire Industry Association), the BSIA (British Security Industry Association) and TSA (Telecare Services Association). Given the size of the problem and the importance of the issue, it is a shame that it will not be introduced until 2010. Even more of a concern is that its adoption is at the discretion of individual brigades – surely an issue of such national importance would benefit from a nationwide policy?

When you consider the success of a similar initiative in the security industry the ACPO (the Association of Chief Police Officers) policy, the potential benefits are clear. There are many parallels to be drawn between the security and fire industries, including the fact that the false alarms in the security industry were also known to be caused by only a small percentage of systems. In the case of fire, false alarms are largely attributable to an estimated 10 percent of ‘rogue' systems and this has been a focus in the development of the CFOA policy. The premise of the ACPO policy was to closely monitor the companies who were generating the false alarms, and enforce a system whereby police response was withdrawn on an incremental level, dependent on the number of false alarms received by the Alarm Receiving Centres (ARCs). This is very much the model on which the CFOA policy has been constructed, which offers three levels of response:

Attendance Level One: an immediate emergency response, resulting in an initial attendance based on a risk assessment of the firefighting requirements that will be not less than one fire appliance.

Attendance Level Two: in the absence of a confirmation call via the 999 system, the fire and rescue service will make an attendance, based on a risk assessment of the firefighting requirements. The attendance may be made under non-emergency conditions, thereby maintaining the availability of the resources for other confirmed emergencies and protecting the public from the risk that arises from fire engines responding under emergency conditions.

Attendance Level Three: no emergency response, until a confirmation of fire is received from the premises via the 999 system, or from some other acceptable source. Such confirmation will result in a full or enhanced emergency response, dependant on the information received.

Tough approach

A tough approach, certainly, and not without an element of controversy. While recognising the similarities between the ACPO and CFOA policies, it is also important to recognise a fundamental difference: a non-attendance by the police to what proves to be an actual break-in could result in a loss of property; a non-attendance by the fire brigade to a fire could result in a loss of life. However, with the majority of responses to automatic fire alarm systems made by the fire and rescue service requiring no fire fighting action (partly a testament here to the vital role played by portable extinguishers), the CFOA approach is a very necessary one.

The UK statistics I alluded to earlier do suggest that the initiatives already taken to address false alarms are starting to work – false alarms for 2006 actually fell by one percent. But this is obviously not enough. As Iain Cox, chief fire officer for the Royal Berkshire Fire & Rescue Service and chair of the CFOA National Fire Safety Committee stated at the FIA annual conference in March: "We cannot erode users' confidence in the value and reliability of automatic fire detection systems and discourage people from taking these systems seriously."

We must appreciate and indeed commend the independence of the individual fire and rescue services, and their need to adapt their policies to the needs of the region which they protect. On such an important issue, however, the FIA view is that the policy should be implemented on a mandatory basis. The CFOA policy is the way forward and the FIA position is that a nationwide and consistent approach is the only sensible route to take, if we are to make inroads into what is a very real concern.

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