Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, how many fires in residential properties have been caused by gas faults in the last (a) 12 months, (b) five years and (c) 10 years.

Fire is a devolved matter and Home Office is responsible only for fire in England.

Home Office publishes incident level statistics on dwelling fires in England including cause of fire and ignition power, and on fire-related fatalities in England including cause of fire. These can be found in the ‘Dwelling fires dataset’ and ‘Fire-related dataset’ here: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistical-data-sets/fire-statistics-incident-level-datasets

From these, the data in the tables below can be extracted. Record level information is published from 2010/11 - although the national Incident Recording System began in April 2009 there are a few minor issues with the 2009/10 records which mean that, while statistics at higher levels are robust, some of the incident level records are not of a sufficient quality to publish.

The most recent estimates of the economic cost of fire were published by the Department for Communities and Local Government for 2008. This can be found here: https://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20121105004836/http://www.communities.gov.uk/documents/corporate/pdf/1838338.pdf

Table 1. Number of dwelling fires caused by ‘faulty fuel supplies’ or ‘faulty appliances and leads’, where the ignition power was either electricity or gas.

Table 2. Number of fire-related fatalities in dwelling fires caused by ‘faulty fuel supplies’ or ‘faulty appliances and leads’

Note that 71 of the 92 fire-related fatalities in dwelling fires caused by ‘faulty fuel supplies’ or ‘faulty appliances and leads’ in 2017/18 (Table 2) are from the Grenfell Tower fire on 14 June 2017.