The National Fire Chiefs Council (NFCC) have launched a new Online Home Fire Safety Check (OHFSC) tool, available free of charge to all fire and rescue services (FRSs) in England.

The user-friendly resource has been developed following a successful pilot study in collaboration with Fire Kills and Safelincs under NFCC’s Prevention Programme.  It was officially launched at NFCC’s recent Prevention and Protection Conference which was attended by more than 150 protection and prevention leads from FRSs across the country.

OHFSC has been developed to complement the Person-Centred Framework, which underpins the work of virtual and face to face Home Fire Safety Visits, and deliver a product available to households who may not reach the threshold for a physical visit, or to be used when and where physical visits are restricted or not possible. It has been designed to provide a person-centred self-assessment of fire risk for individuals that may have low or medium fire risk.

To ensure the vulnerable are not overlooked, the tool has a mechanism to flag a user to their local FRS where a physical visit would be recommended as a consequence of completing the self-assessment.It has been designed to be used by either the home occupant directly, a third party (police, social worker, paramedic etc) who may have concerns to an occupant’s welfare/safety, or simply aid the FRS directly with home visits.

Neil Odin, Chair of NFCC’s Prevention Committee and NFCC’s Prevention Programme Executive, said: “We have been overwhelmed by the positive feedback from FRSs who attended the Conference, with many having already signed up to the on-boarding process. 

“In the long-term NFCC would like to see all FRSs adopt the new Online Home Fire Safety Check and use it as an integral part of their prevention activities.  This, we hope, will provide a consistent approach to identifying and logging issues related to home safety prevention activities, and assist with centrally capturing valuable data which will be made available for all FRSs to use and plan future prevention strategies.”