The London Fire Brigade (LFB) is saving £34million a year on overtime shifts and thousands of hours on attending false alarms following significant reform to their response and staffing policies, it has emerged.
London Fire Commissioner Jonathan Smith revealed that the organisation’s annual spend on overtime work has fallen from £40million to an estimated £6million in the current financial year.
This was down to boosting recruitment and driving down long-term sickness figures.
During a session with the London Assembly Fire Committee, Mr Smith said the LFB had curbed its policy of operating with a “vacancy margin” – meaning there were around 400 empty roles post-Covid – to save on salary costs.
The figure has dropped to as little as 140, meaning that individual stations across London now have more staff to cover normal shifts.
Meanwhile, the LFB as a whole has moved away from using overtime as default when scheduling in advance to fill any staffing gaps, as well as a “relentless focus” on reducing long-term sickness figures within the force.
“We’ve seen those numbers come down significantly over the last three to four years,” Mr Smith told Assembly Members about overtime statistics.
“So there was a point when I was the Deputy Commissioner for Operations where we were spending close to £40 million a year on overtime.
“At the moment we look as if we’re on schedule to be around £6 million.
“There have been significant reductions in both pre-arranged overtime and other elements of overtime, and we’ve committed to that as part of our budget management moving forward.
“We will always require overtime – it will always need to be a tool we draw upon – but over the last three or four years, we’ve seen significant reduction and long may that continue.”
Mr Smith also revealed that staff are attending far fewer false callouts than in previous years after the force announced a policy in 2024 to stop attending automatic alarms in commercial buildings in the daytime.
Prior to the policy change, 40 per cent of sites attended by the LFB were automatic fire alarms – many of which did not end up being emergencies.
Instead, staff only attend such sites when there is a secondary call to back up any automatic alarm triggered.
This has led to an annual reduction of 20,000 automatic alarm sites responses to just 12,000 in the current year.
Mr Smith said: “We’re starting to see dramatic reductions in the numbers of times that we’re attending automatic fire alarms, which means we’ve then got more time available to see firefighters training as they need to do, but also in terms of their role within prevention and protection and freeing up that capacity.
“The policy decision is making a real, real difference.
“At the end of this current financial year, it will show a very positive story that we’ve reduced our attendance to automatic fire alarms without compromising the safety of London and Londoners.
“There’s still more we can do around check and challenge to drive down those calls that we attend but I can see now that the change is making a tangible difference.”
The LFB are also benefitting from the use of technology to ensure there is actually an emergency happening before heading to the scene. GoodSAM, an emergency alerting and dispatching platform, allows staff to open the caller’s phone camera in seconds and survey the scene.
“This is where technology makes a difference,” he said.
“So essentially if there was a fire, people are able to actually share that information directly from their phone via a live video stream into our control room.
“So it means that we can then make mobilising decisions based on real time live footage that we’re now seeing. We didn’t have that technology available last year.
“There are many more safegaurds in place now to make sure we can make an intelligent decision as to whether to mobilise our resources. We’re now responding in a more intelligent way.”
Kumail Jaffer is a Local Democracy Reporter covering City Hall and London-wide political news, with a focus on housing, transport, policing, regeneration and issues affecting communities across the capital. Before joining the Local Democracy Reporting Service, he worked as a political and foreign correspondent for national newspapers including the Daily Mail.
