New Penalties for Non-emergency Lift Rescues

London Fire Brigade has announced that councils and businesses will face tough new penalties if they persistently call 999 to deal with non-emergency lift call outs.

Under the new rules, the Brigade will recover £290 plus VAT from the owners of buildings and lifts for attending non-emergency lift rescues. This charge will be applied from the third occasion firefighters are called to the same building in any twelve month period.

Although the number of lift rescues has halved since the Brigade’s introduction of cost recovery and call filtering in 2009, figures show that last year, fire crews in London still attended a total of 6,430 lift rescues – around 17 each day.

The Brigade still wants to be called if there is a genuine emergency, but has introduced the new cost recovery programme to ensure that building and lift owners maintain their lifts properly. It says that when people are shut in lifts and their health is not at risk, lift engineers should be called rather than the Brigade. This would ensure that firefighters are free to attend real emergencies and carry out important fire safety work.

Chairman London Fire and Emergency Planning Authority, James Cleverly, said:
“Firefighters will always attend a call out where it is a real emergency but in many of these cases it should be up to the person in charge of the building whose lift has broken down, to fix the problem.”

These new rules were agreed as part of the Fifth London Safety Plan (LSP5) which outlines a range of policies and measures intended to improve the safety of Londoners, whilst also creating savings of £29m.

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