FOI 1897 - Electric vehicle fires

The specific information I am requesting is:  

• The number of fires caused by electric vehicles broken down by each city/town your fire service is responsible for during the last fiscal year (2022/23).

• The type of electric vehicle involved in each fire caused by an electric battery throughout the last fiscal year (2022/23).

 Currently the Cheshire Fire and Rescue Service Incident Recording System (IRS) has insufficient facilities for the comprehensive recording, and subsequent analysis, of the involvement of electric vehicles at fires attended. Therefore, CFRS can only provide information based on a keyword search (‘electric vehicle’, ‘electric car’, ‘electric vehicle battery’ or ‘electric car battery’). Consequently, the search may not locate all fires involving electric vehicles unless these keywords were recorded on the incident logs.

After a thorough search of our Incident Recording System, no fire incidents were found involving electric vehicles/cars or electric vehicle/car batteries between 1^st April 2022 and 31^st March 2023.