FOI 1903 - Fires on balconies on residential buildings

Please supply me with data relating to fires on balconies on residential buildings in your area, as follows;

 How many fires involving balconies occurred in total between 1st August 2022 and 31st July 2023?

 In the same period, how many fires occurred where balconies where found to have contributed to the spread of the fire across the external walls?

 Please provide data on the causes of any fires that started on balconies in the period (ie; barbecue, discarded cigarette, electrical appliance fault, etc) and please provide the number of occurrences for each cause.

 If your incident recording system does not include "balcony" as a recorded location, could you please perform a search on free text fields in your database for the term, as I have found in the past that this often returns useable data.

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 balconies at fires attended. Therefore, CFRS can only provide information based on a keyword search (‘balcony’). Consequently, the search may not locate all fires involving balconies unless this keyword was recorded on the incident logs.

During period 1st August to 31st July 2023, Total fires = 2

Both incidents involved the careless disposal of smoking materials.