Kent Fire Response Times Worsen: One in Seven Dwelling Fires Takes 15 Minutes or More

If your home catches fire in Kent, the latest government figures raise a pretty fundamental question: how quickly will the first fire engine actually arrive? Our analysis of newly released Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government data shows that in 2025/26 only 62.6% of Kent dwelling-fire responses included in the Government’s FIRE1004 dataset were reached within ten minutes. More than one in seven — 13.5% — took at least 15 minutes.

And Kent isn’t simply following a national slowdown.

The Shepway Vox Team has analysed two official datasets. FIRE1004 counts incidents by one-minute response-time bands, while FIRE1001 breaks average response time into call handling, crew turnout and driving time. Taken together, they show something more useful than one headline average: Kent has fallen behind both England and fire services with broadly comparable geography, the proportion of long waits has grown, and the biggest gap against its peers appears after the first appliance leaves the station.

Start with the latest year. FIRE1004 contains 570 qualifying Kent dwelling-fire responses in 2025/26. Of those, 357 were reached within ten minutes — 62.6%. Across England the equivalent proportion was 77.9%. Among the Government’s “Intermediate urban” grouping, into which Kent falls, it was 67.1%. In other words, England was approaching four in five; Kent was only a little over three in five.

The other end of the scale is more uncomfortable. Seventy-seven Kent dwelling-fire responses took 15 minutes or longer in 2025/26. That’s 13.5%, roughly one in seven. The equivalent figure was 9.7% among Intermediate urban services and 5.8% across England. Kent’s proportion was therefore more than twice the national rate.

Nor is this just a case of Kent being a large county and therefore having more incidents. Proportions strip much of that problem away. Among the 13 individual fire and rescue services classed as Intermediate urban, Kent was third worst for the proportion of dwelling fires reached inside ten minutes, and third worst for those taking at least 15 minutes. Only Hereford & Worcester and Gloucestershire performed worse on those measures in 2025/26.

One bad year could be shrugged off. This can’t so easily.

Back in 2019/20, 69.3% of Kent’s qualifying dwelling-fire responses were inside ten minutes and 7.6% took 15 minutes or longer. By 2025/26 the first figure had fallen to 62.6%, while the second had climbed to 13.5%. England has also become slower over that period, but Kent’s long-response tail has grown much more sharply.

The more recent movement is revealing too. In 2023/24, 47 of 513 qualifying Kent dwelling-fire responses took at least 15 minutes — 9.2%. In 2024/25 it was 67 of 565 — 11.9%. Now it’s 77 of 570 — 13.5%. So this isn’t merely more fires generating more slow responses. The share of qualifying incidents taking 15 minutes or longer has risen substantially.

That leaves the obvious question: what’s eating those extra minutes?

For that we turn to FIRE1001. Using the latest completed annual figures in the FIRE1001 files we previously analysed, Kent’s average dwelling-fire response in 2024/25 was 9 minutes 47 seconds, compared with about 9 minutes 13.5 seconds for the Intermediate urban group. That’s roughly a 33-second gap. The Government describes FIRE1001 as its table for average response times by location, fire and rescue authority and geographical category.

But the interesting bit isn’t the total. Kent’s average call-handling time was about 1 minute 11 seconds, actually a few seconds quicker than the comparable group. Crew turnout was almost identical at roughly 1 minute 42 seconds. Then the figures split apart. Kent’s average drive component was about 6 minutes 54 seconds, against roughly 6 minutes 16 seconds for the Intermediate urban benchmark — around 38 seconds longer.

That doesn’t mean Kent firefighters are driving too slowly. The data doesn’t prove that at all. Longer drive times could reflect appliances travelling from farther away, a nearer appliance being unavailable, traffic, roadworks, road layout, rural geography, deployment decisions or several of those things at once. KFRS itself acknowledges that greater travel distances and the different way on-call stations operate make rural responses slower than urban ones.

But it does tell us where the question ought to be aimed.

And that brings us straight into the politics.

On 6 August, the Kent and Medway Fire and Rescue Authority voted 17–2 against putting a revised resourcing package out to public consultation. The decision kept the standalone on-call stations at Chilham, Wye, Cliffe and Westerham, preserved attached on-call cover at Deal, Herne Bay, Faversham and Tunbridge Wells, and retained two overnight engines at Dartford and Thames-Side. Months of protests, political pressure and a six-week cross-party review had killed the package before it reached the public.

Cue the victory lap. The Fire Brigades Union described the outcome as a major victory; Reform councillors said they’d stood with residents and frontline firefighters; Labour claimed its members had recognised serious weaknesses in the package; MPs pointed to petitions and campaigning. Depending on which account you prefer, practically everybody had saved Kent’s fire service by teatime.

Yet the proposal didn’t come from Reform headquarters. It was developed by KFRS management because the service says its resources no longer match when and where they’re most needed. KFRS argued that on-call appliances had become increasingly unreliable during working hours and proposed shifting resources towards stronger daytime cover. Fourteen chief fire officers and their analysis teams were asked to find another viable option within the same financial envelope; according to the authority papers, none did.

That doesn’t make KFRS’s rejected scheme automatically right. Closing local stations and removing on-call provision raised legitimate questions about resilience, simultaneous incidents and what communities would lose. The FBU proposed enhanced payments to improve on-call availability instead. Councillors were entitled to challenge the scheme, and ultimately they weren’t convinced.

But rejecting an answer doesn’t make the question disappear.

Indeed, KFRS Chief Executive Ann Millington (pictured) said after the decision that there wasn’t an alternative proposal to address the need for more daytime cover. The rejected package would have created three additional wholetime daytime engines at Strood, Ashford and Folkestone, while reducing provision elsewhere. KFRS said those changes were intended to put appliances where daytime demand was higher and improve response times.

Folkestone therefore has a very direct stake in what happens next. Under the rejected model, the town would have gained an additional guaranteed daytime engine, giving it two during the day. That part of the package vanished along with the station closures and other reductions. So if Kent’s data now shows a growing proportion of long dwelling-fire responses, and if KFRS had identified Folkestone as somewhere that would benefit from stronger daytime cover, what replaces that proposal locally?

The political arguments over who deserves credit for defeating the proposals are legitimate, but they risk obscuring the more important issue exposed by the new Government data. Reform, Labour, the FBU, MPs and campaigners may all have different accounts of why the plans failed and what should happen next. None of that, however, changes the underlying performance figures.

The more pressing question is what Kent now does about them. Kent is third worst among comparable Intermediate urban fire and rescue services for both the proportion of dwelling fires reached within ten minutes and the proportion taking at least 15 minutes. Whatever political victory was claimed after the 6 August vote, the response-time problem remains — and rejecting one proposed solution doesn’t, by itself, provide another.

There’s also a statistical limit worth being clear about. FIRE1004 isn’t every dwelling fire Kent attended; it contains incidents eligible for its response-time analysis. Nor can a spreadsheet tell us whether any individual delay endangered somebody or worsened a particular fire. What it can do is expose a pattern — and give those running the service a rather precise question to answer.

The Authority may have been right to reject the package put in front of it. The campaigners may have been right to fight station closures. And KFRS may also be right that the existing deployment model has a daytime availability problem. Those propositions aren’t mutually exclusive. The new figures simply make it harder for anyone to pretend that leaving everything exactly as it is amounts to solving anything.

Saving a fire station is something politicians can put on a leaflet.

Getting an engine to a burning home quickly is rather harder.

Kent’s politicians have settled who won the vote on 6 August. The Government’s data now leaves them with a much tougher question: what replaces the rejected plan — and will it get a fire engine to somebody’s front door any faster?

The Shepway Vox Team

Deliciously Different Dissent