Surrey's Emergency Response Standard

We want to provide Surrey communities with the best possible service so we set ourselves standards to achieve for our emergency response. This helps us to decide how many fire engines we need and where they are best located. It also allows us to measure our performance so that we can be accountable to you.

Our response (click on flow chart image) starts with our mobilising control; the people that you will speak to when you call 999. Our mobilising staff are trained to obtain the information that we need from you as quickly and calmly as possible and to provide you with advice when necessary. Whilst they take the details from you of where the emergency is and what is involved they will simultaneously be identifying the most appropriate response for you. Our mobilising system uses predicted road speeds to decide which fire engine or engines will arrive at the incident in the quickest time.

We will focus on the emergencies where, at the time of call, we believe lives and property are most at risk; we feel these critical incidents are primarily building fires and vehicle collisions.
Once we know what your emergency is and where it is occurring, we will send the quickest response. We aim to have one fire engine at critical incidents within 10 minutes and a second one within 15 minutes on 80% of occasions. For all other emergencies, we aim to have one fire engine on scene within 16 minutes on 95% of occasions. For non-emergency incidents, we will attend when resources allow and will redeploy fire engines to emergency incidents where appropriate.

Incident type	Response	Within	Target
Critical incidents	1st fire engine	10 minutes	80% of occasions
	2nd fire engine	15 minutes	80% of occasions
All other emergencies	1 fire engine	16 minutes	95% of occasions

We cannot guarantee how quickly we will reach you but what we can guarantee is that we will be there as fast as we safely can. To enable us to do this we manage our resources dynamically using automatic vehicle location and will move fire engines around the county to maintain emergency cover.