Durham and Darlington fire service issues hoax calls appeal

New figures show County Durham and Darlington Fire and Rescue Service responded to 7,150 call-outs in the year to September.

Of those, a third were a result of false alarms, including 40 deemed ‘malicious’ – such as fake or hoax calls.

Unnecessary callouts can be costly and time-consuming for emergency services.

While malicious callers accounted for 5,473 calls to fire services across England last year, the largest proportion of false alarms occurred due to faulty equipment, such as broken fire alarms and smoke detectors.

In County Durham and Darlington, 1,113 callouts were made for this reason, accounting for 16 per cent of all incidents attended by the area’s firefighters last year.

A further 1,193 false-alarm calls were made in good faith – where the public believed that a fire may have genuinely been taking place.

Read more: County Durham and Darlington is 'UK Fire and Rescue Service of the Year'

The National Fire Chiefs Council said a false alarm is attended to almost every 90 seconds in the UK and can cost up to £450, taking resources away from genuine emergencies and increasing the service's carbon footprint.

Some local services charge if they are repeatedly called out for false alarms — even if they are the result of equipment failure — with bills for the worst offenders running into hundreds of pounds.

The number of callouts for County Durham and Darlington Fire and Rescue Service increased 4 per cent this year, compared to 6,874 in the year to September 2020.

Meanwhile, 50 per cent of all incidents attended by firefighters in the region were for the purpose of dealing with an actual fire.

The fire service issued a stark warning with a simple message: “Hoax calls cost lives.”

A spokeswoman for the service added: “Our service has limited resources available and if we are responding to a hoax call, the fire engine is not available to attend a real emergency where someone genuinely does need us.

“Every minute, every second counts in an emergency and if the nearest resource is dealing with a hoax call it’s going to take longer to get an available resource to the real emergency. Please consider how you would feel if someone died because the fire service couldn’t get there quickly enough because you had sent the fire engine to unnecessary location due to hoax call? It could be someone you know, a loved one, a family member, a friend that needs us.

“All emergency calls taken by our control room are recorded, this includes the caller’s number. Any call we determine as a hoax call will be passed to the police for prosecution and we will contact the phone supplier to disconnect the phone”.

Across England, fire services also saw a decrease in the number of incidents they attended - there were 537,039 callouts in the 12 months to September 2021, a slight drop on the 539,418 made the previous year.

A Home Office spokesperson said the Government has ensured that fire departments have "the appropriate resources and funding to do the job."