Question to the Home Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, whether the fire service response times of each fire authority in England are recorded from the same point after receiving an incident call.
Home Office published statistics are recorded from the same point.
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 and hence the statistics published by the Home Office.