Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what assessment he has made of the benefits of standardising the method for recording fire service response times in England.

Each time a fire and rescue service (FRS) attends an incident in England, details of that incident are uploaded to the Home Office’s Incident Recording System (IRS) by the FRS and this is used as the source for all the statistics in the response times publication https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/response-times-to-fires-attended-by-fire-and-rescue-services-england-april-2016-to-march-2017

The response time is defined as the duration from time of call to time of arrival of the first vehicle at the scene of the incident and is standard for all FRSs. FRSs set their own targets for local response times which may not include the call time, however this should not affect records in the IRS.