LO
DeploymentCognitive automation2025-03-31
England's fire inspectorate reports that services target home fire safety visits better, with 85.1% reaching at-risk people in 2024/25 against 76.6% in 2021/22, some using AI for risk profiling
Firefighteroccupation page →
Event date / reported
2025-03-31 · reported 2025-11-05
Evidence stage
DeploymentAn employer has put it into production. Can move the baseline — weighted by scale and how similar the setting is.
Tasks this bears on
Prevention, drills and community work
Visiting premises, running evacuation drills, teaching residents what to do, and keeping crews trained and fit.
Still human-led✓ Evidence-backed
Where this applies
The statutory inspectorate's annual assessment to Parliament. It says the number of home fire safety visits has stayed broadly the same since 2018 but services have improved how they target them: 76.6 per cent of visits in 2021/22 included at least one vulnerable or at-risk person, against 85.1 per cent in 2024/25; it names County Durham and Darlington using artificial intelligence for risk profiling and proposing work plans for watch-based crews, and Humberside using machine learning to profile risk. The improvement is not attributed to AI, and the visits are still made by crews.
What this means
Who gets a prevention visit is increasingly decided with data, and in some services with AI; the visit itself — the knock on the door, the smoke alarm, the conversation — is still made by firefighters. Targeting is changing faster than the work.
What it does not yet show
One country's inspectorate; it does not attribute the better targeting to AI or show any change in crews' time.
What you can check
Open HMICFRS's State of Fire and Rescue 2024–25 and find "compared to 85.1 percent (501,123 out of 588,855) in 2024/25".
Does it change the assessment?
No. The impact index is never moved by a single event. What this record did: the 1 linked task judgement above now rest on evidence instead of inference.
Source
His Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire & Rescue Services — State of Fire and Rescue: The Annual Assessment of Fire and Rescue Services in England 2024–25 (published 5 November 2025) · verified 2026-09-27 · Claude (VOLO agent) · interpreted 2026-09-27 · Claude (VOLO agent)
Primary source — published by the party that did this, or the authority of record. No co-signature needed.