Fire alarms and preventing false alarms
More than one in every three incidents we respond to are false, or ‘unwanted’ alarms.
Unwanted alarms affect you and can be a risk to the lives of others because they divert resources away from real emergencies.
What is an unwanted or false fire alarm?
An unwanted alarm is a fire alarm (signal) resulting from a cause other than fire. Any Automatic Fire Alarm (AFA) that we attend that is not actually a fire is considered to be an ‘unwanted’ alarm.
How false or unwanted alarms impact the fire service
- Unwanted alarms divert the fire service away from attending real emergencies.
- Responding to unwanted alarms creates unnecessary risk to fire crews and members of the public when fire engines are driven under ‘blue light’ conditions.
- Occupants of buildings that have frequent unwanted alarms get used to them and may delay their response or worse - not respond at all - to a real emergency.
- Unwanted alarms disrupt fire service prevention activities, arson reduction and training.
- They cost the fire service money unnecessarily by sending vehicles and firefighters to attend.
How false alarms impact businesses
Every time the alarm sounds, everyone has to stop what they are doing and evacuate the building. This may prove to be very costly not only in productivity and financial terms, but also because staff will become complacent and will lose faith in the fire alarm system if they are constantly required to leave the building due to a false alarm.
How to prevent false alarms
You can prevent many unwanted alarms by being aware of the potential causes.
Your legal obligations
If your premises have an automatic fire alarm (AFA) system, you are legally obliged to ensure that your building is suitably managed to avoid unwanted alarms.
Many false alarms can easily be identified by people at the premises and so do not require a call to us.
If you have unwanted alarms you are obliged to take appropriate steps to reduce them and record your actions.
We strongly recommend that where your alarm monitoring company passes a call to the fire service, designated key holders are also alerted at the same time as the initial call, and are requested to attend the site within 20 minutes.
If the fire service has been called and you discover it is a false alarm, call the fire service back (999) to confirm it is an unwanted alarm. This will allow fire service resources to be released for confirmed emergencies.
Please help us to reduce false or unwanted alarms.
Charges for false or unwanted alarms
We can recover costs from responsible persons for attendance by the fire and rescue service for repeated unwanted fire alarms.
See our standard charges.