Explaining the steep decline in the frequency of fires

This morning’s brief strike by the Fire Brigades Union, like the one last Friday evening, will, I suspect, mostly serve to remind those who work in the private sector just how well remunerated many in the public sector still are. The union objects to the raising of the retirement age from 55 to 60, on a generous final-salary pension scheme, with good job security. These are conditions few of those who work for private firms or for themselves can even dream of.

In my case, as somebody always on the look-out for under-reported good news stories, it also served to alert me to just how dramatic the fall in “demand” for firefighters has been. Intrigued by the strike, I looked up the numbers and found to my amazement that in 2011, compared with just a decade before, firefighters attended 48 per cent fewer fires overall; 39 per cent fewer building fires; 44 per cent fewer minor outdoor fires; 24 per cent fewer road-traffic collisions; 8 per cent fewer floods — and 40 per cent fewer incidents overall. The decline has if anything accelerated since 2011.

That is to say, during a period when the population and the number of buildings grew, we needed to call the fire brigade much, much less. Most important of all, the number of people dying in fires in the home has fallen by 60 per cent compared with the 1980s. The credit for these benign changes goes at least partly to technology — fire-retardant materials, self-extinguishing cigarettes, smoke alarms, sprinklers, alarms on cookers — much of which was driven by sensible regulation. Fewer open fires and fewer people smoking, especially indoors, must have helped too. There is little doubt that rules about such things have saved lives, as even most libertarians must concede.

But this is not the whole story. I was stunned to find that the number of deliberate fires has been falling much faster than the number of accidental fires. The steepest fall has been in car fires, down from 77,000 in 2001-2 to 17,000 in 2010-11. This echoes the 60 per cent collapse in car thefts in G7 countries since 1995. Deliberate fires in buildings have more than halved in number; I assume this is also something to do with crime detection — CCTV, DNA testing and so forth, which make it much less easy to get away with arson. Only deliberate outdoor fires show little trend: perhaps because not until he is deep in the woods does an arsonist feel safe from detection.

Behind the firefighters’ strike, therefore, lies a most unusual policy dilemma: how to manage declining demand for a free public service. NHS planners would give their eye teeth for such a problem, since healthcare demand seems to expand infinitely, whatever the policy.

Yet the fire union leaders in the current dispute do not seem especially keen on trumpeting these numbers from the tops of their ladders as proof of society’s growing success at suppressing fire. You would think they might, because firefighters themselves have certainly played a part in prevention by devoting more of their time to it — teaching people about the risks of chip pans and the like. (In passing, I wonder how much the emergence of the oven chip is responsible for fewer fires: chip-pan fires used to cause one-fifth of all residential fires. Maybe, too, the general health war on chips has played a part.)

The reason for the reluctance of firefighters to boast about the success of their efforts at prevention, of course, is that it implies the need for fewer of them. They fear that fitness tests will in many cases lead to redundancy before the new retirement age. The statistics I have quoted come largely from the recent report that recommended that the Government could make large efficiency savings in the fire and rescue service.

Sir Ken Knight’s report to the Government’s fire minister, Brandon Lewis, pointed out that despite deaths from fires having hit an all-time low and the number of incidents falling rapidly, “expenditure and firefighter numbers remain broadly the same. This suggests that there is room for reconfiguration and efficiencies to better match the service to the current risk and response context.” Employment in the fire and rescue service has dropped by just 6 per cent during the time when incidents have decreased by 40 per cent.

It is not just the overall numbers of firefighters that could come down as fires come down. There are plenty of opportunities for efficiency savings, as in any public service. Sir Ken observed that he could not explain the differences in the spending of Britain’s 46 separate fire services. Some areas spent almost twice as much as others, yet the discrepancy could not be explained by population density, degree of industrialisation, or level of deprivation. Nor did greater spending produce a faster fall in the number of fires. Noting that localism can become “siloism”, Sir Ken concluded drily that “fire and rescue authorities spend to their budgets, not to their risk.”

Other countries have experienced similar declines in fires and deaths from fire. In the United States, fire death rates fell by 21 per cent between 2001 and 2010 but international comparisons are no more clear about the cause than those between British regions. Sweden and New Zealand spend less per head than we do on fire services and suffer more fire deaths; but America and Japan spend more and also suffer more fire deaths. Singapore stands out: very low spending and very few fire deaths.

There is also a remarkable variety of ways in which countries deliver fire services. Some, such as Germany, rely largely on volunteers. Not many countries use as few volunteer firefighters as Britain does. It is pretty clear that there are opportunities for British fire services to use more volunteers and on-call staff, to share senior managers and to copy best practice from each other. But the unions are not helpful: Cleveland Fire and Rescue Authority explored the possibility of an employee-led mutual contracting with the authority to provide the fire service, but under pressure from the union, the local authority nixed the proposal as tantamount to a form of privatisation.

Fire was an abiding terror to our ancestors, consuming not just many of their lives, but much of their property. Almost all of us have family stories of devastating fires. Although we will always need this essential service , thankfully, that experience is becoming steadily rarer. Sir Ken Knight found it likely that this decline would continue, remarking: “I wonder if anyone a decade ago would have predicted the need for fire and rescue services to attend 40 per cent fewer emergency incidents.” The fire service will undoubtedly have to shrink.

In the meantime, for two hours this morning, the union that represents firefighters has merely reminded us that a firefighter who is called out 40 per cent less than ten years ago will retire at 60 and has pension rights equivalent to a private pension pot of half a million pounds, to which he will have contributed half as much as a private sector worker.