THE borough manager of Salford has said that false alarms are becoming increasingly problematic for the fire service. 

Ben Levy, Borough manager for Salford and Trafford said:

“We have a number of initiatives in place we work with young people, we work with schools and we work with building owners to reduce this.

”So hopefully we will see a downward trend in Greater Manchester

“Malicious and false alarms are a problem for firefighters.”

The Home Office Incident Recording System (IRS) has released their annual statistics which shows that in England, in the last financial year there has been more fire false alarms than the previous year.

This is the first time since the IRS has been recording fire false alarms that there has been an increase from one year to the next year.

In 2016/17 there were 223,799 recorded fire false alarms in England compared to 2015/16 where there were 214,358.

The upward trend in false alarm will likely continue into the next financial year (the beginning of April 2017 to the end of March 2018) because in 2017 alone there were 222,997 compared to 2016 where there were 222,222.

According to the Home Office Incident Recording System’s findings, this could be a bigger issue now than it has been in the past.

An in-depth look at the number of false alarms in Salford

You can listen to the full interview with firefighter Ben Levy below, where he speaks about how much of The Home Office Incident Recording System findings reflects the Salford fire service.

The Home Office Incident Recording System also released data showing that there have been 738 incidents involving attacks on firefighters in the last financial year. This is an increase of 116 from the previous financial year.

Mr. Levy also spoke on this saying: “In the past, we have had windows smashed of our fire engines, we have had damage to our equipment. This is completely unacceptable”.

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