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NFRS 2025 2 - Fires in student residences

You asked for

Please provide the following data for the period from January 1, 2019, to December 31, 2024:

  1. The total number of callouts to fire incidents at student halls/student residences
  2. The total number of callouts to student halls/student residences that were false alarms.
  3. The total number of callouts to student halls/student residences that were the result of a real fire incident.

If possible, please provide this information broken down by year.

Our Response

This information is not recorded in an easily retrievable format. To locate, retrieve and extract the requested information requires a manual search of all records held, we would have to examine each specific record as we do not differentiate whether it is a student hall or residence against any other residential building within our incident management system.

An initial search revealed a total of 1323 Fire (Primary) records over a one-year period. It is estimated that to search one record would take approximately 1 minute which would equate to approximately 22 working hours for 1 years’ worth of records). This takes the request over the cost threshold of 18 working hours and engages Section 12 (1) of the Act.

This letter constitutes a refusal notice under Section 17(5) of the Freedom of Information Act 2000 with Section 12(1) of the act being applied

12. – (1) Section 1(1) does not oblige a public authority to comply with a request for information if the authority estimates that the cost of complying with the request would exceed the appropriate limit.

Should you wish for the Force to continue with your request, a more accurate figure will be provided within a fee’s notice. The cost will need to be paid by you, prior to any further investigation. Please advise if you wish to proceed.

Alternatively, you are invited to refine your request to bring it within the cost threshold, It may be feasible to search for the number of fires within multi storey occupancy buildings but we would not be able to determine if they related to student accommodation without reviewing and cross referencing the data.

In accordance with the Act, once one part of the request exceeds the cost threshold the entire request exceeds the cost threshold.

This letter constitutes a refusal notice under Section 17 (5) of the Freedom of Information Act 2000.