Hampshire Fire and Rescue Service Plan 2012 to 2015

Annual report 2010 to 2011

How quickly we respond to incidents

In April 2010 we changed how we record our response times to incidents.

We split the incidents we respond to into three groups:

Critical
Non-critical
Other

Critical incidents are those which have a direct risk to life or property (these include fires in domestic properties and road traffic accidents where someone is trapped in a vehicle).

We aim to get to 80% of these incidents within eight minutes.

Our average response time to critical incidents in 2010 to 2011 was seven minutes 17 seconds (against a target of eight minutes). We are constantly looking at where we are using our resources to see if we can reduce this time further.

It takes us longer to attend incidents in rural areas than incidents in urban built-up areas. Even though our average response time to incidents is better than our target, we only got to 72% of critical incidents under the eight-minute target in 2010 to 2011.

We are taking steps to improve this by sending different types of resources (for example, other vehicles, officers and so on) to these incidents.