North Yorkshire fire service has slowest response times

But the fire service said this is due to covering "one of the largest geographical areas" with a "similar number of stations" to other regions.

In the areas covered by the North Yorkshire Fire and Rescue Service, people had to wait for an average of 13 minutes and nine seconds for firefighters to respond to incidents. This includes time spent on the phone reporting the incident, the crew’s preparation and their journey time.

The response time was up on 11 minutes and 37 seconds the year before.

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The average time it took the service to handle calls was one minute and 46 seconds.

The fire service attended 1,100 primary fires in the year to March, which are the most serious with a threat to life or property. This was 157 more than the year before.

Area manager Damian Henderson, director of service improvement and assurance at North Yorkshire Fire and Rescue Service, said that response times are affected by factors such as traffic and how close the incident is to the fire station.

Mr Henderson said: "We cover one of the largest geographical areas of the ‘predominately rural fire and rescue services’ and have a similar number of fire stations as the other predominately rural services who cover much smaller areas. This means incidents in the more rural areas significantly impact our average response times due to the time taken to reach them by their nearest fire station.

"Many of our stations are crewed by on-call firefighters who respond to the fire station from their work or home to attend incidents.

North Yorkshire Fire and Rescue Service said it covers a large area (Image: Newsquest)

“Last year, due to the extreme hot weather, we attended a large number of fires to farms and farm vehicles, often located in the more rural areas of the county, meaning longer travel times on slower country roads. These will have impacted our average response times for last year.

“I would like to offer reassurance that we always attend incidents as quickly as possible and as part of our response principles we look at primary fires we attend where the average response times are above the average for predominantly rural services. This allows us to make proposals for improvement, where we can.

"We are also increasing our prevention and protection work in our more rural areas. Following the large number of farm related fires we have already undertaken work with the farming community including the production of a farm safety leaflet.”

Across the country, the average response time in the year ending to March was nine minutes and 13 seconds — the longest seen since comparable statistics became available.

A Home Office spokesperson said the Government is committed to ensuring fire services have the resources they need to keep people safe.

"Overall fire and rescue authorities will receive around £2.6 billion in 2023/24," they said.