FOI 4668 / May 2024 / Fire Fatalities since 2019

Thank you for your request under the Freedom of Information Act 2000.

We can confirm that Essex County Fire & Rescue Service does hold the information you have requested.

Questions and final response:

Question 1 – Please could you provide the following information under the Freedom of Information Act.

1.Total number of fire fatalities for each of the years from 2019 until 2024, split into risk groups, specifying which groups, e.g. Hoarding behaviours; inappropriate smoking; people under the influence of alcohol; people who used emollient creams; people who lived alone; ex-military.

Please provide your response broken down by year.

Essex County Fire & Rescue Service (ECFRS) have recorded a total of thirty-two fatalities as a result of a fire incident, attended by ECFRS since 2019.

Please find attached a spreadsheet which contains the data requested, broken down into years 2019 – 2024.

Our Strategic After Incident Response (SAIR) data is limited to incidents occurring after 1st January 2021.

These are shown on the second page of the attached spreadsheet.

We are providing the dataset showing a list of all the fatalities since 2019, the risk factors and main causes, if known.

The SAIR reports for many of the fatal fire incidents is missing some of this information and these are displayed as unknown with the dataset.

Question 2 - For each of the years from 2019 until 2024, for the 31st March in each year. please provide the number of properties / premises in your area with a Clutter Image Rating (CIR) of 6 or above.

We record hoarding risks with a Clutter Image rating of five or above, within the ECFRS area with an annotation against the address.

Addresses with an annotation within our four regional areas, are as follows:

Area                    Number of Properties

North East          382

South East          417

North West         453

South West         231

Note

We have published a response to a similar request in October 2023, you may find the information within this response of some use - EIR1649 / October 2023 / Hoarding (essexfire.gov.uk).

We hope you find this information useful.

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Incident and other data is published on our transparency site. Incident Data (essexfire.gov.uk).

Please note that the response and data released to you as part of this request will be published on our website http://transparency.essex-fire.gov.uk/.

All requests will be anonymised and no personal information including contact details will be disclosed as part of this process.

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Thank you for your interest in Essex County Fire and Rescue Service, we hope this satisfies your request.

If you are dissatisfied with the handling of your request, you have the right to apply for an internal review.

Internal review requests should be submitted within two months of the date of your original email and should be sent to informationgovernance@essex-fire.gov.uk or sent to our postal address: Internal Review, Information Governance Team, Kelvedon Park, Rivenhall, Witham, Essex CM8 3HB.

Please ensure you quote the above reference number in all future communications