£309,000 cost of 1,100 false calls to automatic fire alarms in Shropshire
Firefighters in Shropshire were called nearly 1,500 times in one year to automatic fire alarms, costing taxpayers almost £380,000 – and in the majority of cases it was a false alarm.
Between July 2014 and July this year Shropshire Fire and Rescue Service attended 1,347 incidents triggered by automatic fire alarms (AFAs).
With the cost of sending one fire appliance to an incident being £281.46, this meant the fire service spent at least £379,126.62 on attending the incidents.
And it has been revealed that each year around 1,100 of those callouts are false alarms - equating to a cost of £309,606.
While AFAs are most commonly fitted to business premises, alarm calls came from many different types of properties, including schools, hospitals and supermarkets, sheltered accommodation, nursing homes, retirement complexes and offices.
A spokesman for Shropshire Fire & Rescue Service said: "Every year, we attend around 1,100 unwanted fire signals generated from these systems. Clearly the need for systems to provide early detection and warnings of a fire situation are imperative, but we also need to encourage a reduction of the incidence of unwanted fire signals.
"The impacts of unwanted fire signals on businesses, the fire and rescue service and the public are enormous.
"They can include lost production time and associated costs, disruption of services provided by the affected business, associated costs to businesses of retained firefighters being released to respond, the diversion of operational crews from emergencies, potentially putting life and property at risk, and the drain on public finances.
"We attend all AFAs but we have different responses depending on the premises type. If we believe it's got sleeping risk– so if people are asleep inside at night – then we would send two appliances. In normal office hours we would normally send one.
"Occasionally we do have cases where a premises alarm may keep going off because of a fault, and we have policies to deal with things like that. Generally we would request that they get the alarm serviced.
"But we don't charge businesses for false alarms and we always attend AFAs."
Of the callouts in the last year, 494, (37 per cent) lasted less than 20 minutes while just 45 (three per cent) took longer than an hour to deal with.
