Kent Fire Response Times Raise Safety Questions

Kent Fire and Rescue isn’t simply getting busier. The more serious story is that it’s getting slower at reaching life-threatening incidents, while false alarms, road crashes, rural cover and on-call availability are all putting pressure on the system.

Kent’s fire service has a quiet numbers problem.

Not the easy kind. Not the sort that can be waved away with a cheerful “overall incidents are broadly flat” and a photograph of a shiny appliance outside a station.

The real problem is sharper than that. Kent Fire and Rescue is attending broadly the same number of incidents as five years ago, but the job itself is changing. Fires rose sharply in 2025. False alarms are up. Road-crash work has climbed. And the average time taken to reach serious fires has got worse.

That’s not a spreadsheet curiosity. That’s the public safety question.

In 2025, Kent Fire and Rescue attended 18,326 incidents, compared with 18,519 in 2020. On the face of it, not much has changed. But beneath that apparently steady total, the pattern has shifted.

Fire false alarms rose from 5,108 in 2020 to 6,149 in 2025. Road traffic collision incidents rose from 846 to 1,306. Total fires rose from 3,785 in 2024 to 4,643 in 2025.

So the headline isn’t that Kent Fire is simply being swamped by more calls. It’s that more of the system is being consumed by callouts that pull crews, appliances and control-room attention in different directions.

The response-time figures are the part that should make councillors sit up.

Kent’s average response time to primary fires rose from 9 minutes 47 seconds in 2020 to 11 minutes 25 seconds in 2025. Dwelling fires rose from 8 minutes 32 seconds to 9 minutes 58 seconds. Other building fires went from 9 minutes 42 seconds to 11 minutes 38 seconds. Road vehicle fires rose from 10 minutes 24 seconds to 11 minutes 49 seconds.

Looked at against England, the position is uncomfortable. Kent’s average response time to primary fires is now around two minutes slower than the England average, which stood at 9 minutes 25 seconds in 2025.

The Kent and Medway Fire and Rescue Authority papers make the story more serious, not less.

In its 2024/25 performance out-turn, the Authority reported that only 66% of life-threatening incidents were reached within 10 minutes, and 76% within 12 minutes. It then said, plainly, that “performance against response time targets has declined in recent years”.

That sentence matters. It isn’t a critic’s gloss. It’s the Authority’s own paper.

It also gave the reasons: the number of fire engines immediately available, crew turnout time, traffic, 20mph limits, roadworks, road closures and the quality of address information given. Some of those are outside KFRS’s direct control. Some are not. But all of them go to the same basic issue: in an emergency, the machine is taking longer to get there.

There is an awkward contrast with the 2020/21 papers. Back then, KFRS said 72.7% of life-threatening incidents were reached within 10 minutes and 83.9% within 12 minutes, above the targets then in place. But even that came with a warning label. The paper said the improvement had been influenced by the pandemic, when more on-call fire engines were available during the day because some firefighters were furloughed from their main jobs, while incident levels were lower.

In other words, the better response performance in 2020/21 was not a settled new normal. It was partly a Covid-era distortion. The Authority itself anticipated that level of appliance availability would not continue.

It didn’t.

By 2024/25, KFRS had reset its expected appliance availability. The Authority aimed for a minimum of 32 fire engines available, with an aspiration of 44, across Kent and Medway. Its own paper said availability is “heavily influenced” by on-call firefighters. Average availability in 2024/25 was 33 engines by day and 45 by night.

That is the operational heart of the story. Kent is a large, mixed county: urban, rural, coastal, motorway, tunnel-linked, port-facing and increasingly exposed to climate-driven outdoor fire risk. It can’t be judged by one clean headline figure.

The Authority knows this. In 2025, it changed the way it measures response times. Instead of one broad standard, KFRS now targets emergency incidents in urban areas within 9 minutes on 75% of occasions, and emergency incidents in rural areas within 15 minutes on 75% of occasions.

That may be more honest. It is also more politically dangerous.

KFRS itself says it takes longer to get to isolated communities than urban areas. It says the new standard was approved after consultation. But it also admits that, to achieve the standard consistently, it needs to improve the availability of on-call fire engines — the very engines often serving those more rural places.

That is where the rural question becomes unavoidable. A slower response in an isolated community may be more explainable. It isn’t automatically more acceptable.

Between April and August 2025, KFRS received 17,856 emergency calls and mobilised to 8,661 incidents. The majority of fires attended were outdoor and rubbish fires. Most false alarms attended were automatic fire alarms in domestic properties. And KFRS attended 485 road traffic collisions, excluding those where no action was needed; three people died and 55 were seriously injured.

That is not background noise. That is frontline pressure.

KFRS attended 2,581 fires of all types between April and August 2025 — 25% more than the same period the previous year — owing to warmer, drier weather and more outdoor fires. That fits the wider national picture: hotter, drier conditions are changing fire risk, and fire services are increasingly being asked to deal with the consequences.

Then comes the inspection evidence.

KFRS had a strong 2025 HMICFRS inspection. The Authority said the service remained among the top three performing services in the country and highlighted outstanding work on protection and fire regulation. That should be acknowledged. A serious article doesn’t pretend good news doesn’t exist.

But the same inspection findings, as reported to the Authority, also said KFRS needed to do more to improve the availability of its on-call response. One of the areas for improvement was to assure itself that its response cover, including its mix of crewing and duty systems, provides the most effective and efficient response for the public.

That is a polite inspectorate way of asking the same question residents will ask more bluntly: are there enough crews, in the right places, at the right times?

The false alarm issue is also bigger than it looks. False alarms are easy to dismiss as harmless mistakes. They aren’t. Every unwanted alarm call can put an engine on the road, occupy a crew, use control-room capacity and create risk in traffic. Kent’s rise from 5,108 to 6,149 false alarms over five years is not a side issue. It is operational drag.

So the real Kent story is this: the service still performs well in several important areas, but the response system is under pressure from several directions at once.

Road crashes are rising. False alarms are rising. Outdoor fire risk is more volatile. Rural response is now formally separated from urban response. On-call availability is a recognised weakness. And average response times to primary fires have worsened.

That combination deserves more than a congratulatory committee paper and a polite nod through the agenda.

It needs scrutiny.

Kent residents pay for a fire service because minutes matter. They matter when a chip pan catches, when a care home evacuation goes wrong, when a lorry jack-knifes, when a shed fire becomes a house fire, when a field burns in a dry summer, when an automatic alarm might be nothing — or might be the first sign of something deadly.

The question for the Kent and Medway Fire and Rescue Authority is not whether the service is full of dedicated people. It plainly is.

The question is whether the system around those people is keeping pace with the risks now arriving at the door.

And on the Authority’s own evidence, that answer is no longer comfortable.

The Shepway Vox Team

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