Keeping you safe: CFRS Annual Report 2025-26

Keeping you safe: CFRS Annual Report 2025-26

Our vision is a Cheshire with zero deaths, injuries, and damage from fires and other emergencies. Over the past 12 months, our dedicated firefighters, community safety colleagues, and fire staff have worked hard towards achieving that goal.

Incidents we attend

This year, the number of incidents we attended in 2025/26 increased by 534 compared with 2024/25. The number of fires involving buildings and property continues to fall overall, but this year we attended more fires in the open - particularly during the hot period between April and June 2025 - and the number of false alarms increased slightly.

Other incidents include responses to automatic fire alarms, deliberate fires, rescues of people from water or height, animal rescues and assisting other agencies, such as the ambulance service.

If you’re interested in the incidents we attend, why not follow our live incident feed?

Saving lives

The number of accidental house fires we attended fell by 39 compared with 2024/25. The number that started in the kitchen decreased by 2% and those that were cooking related fell by 1%. Other common causes of house fires include electrical faults, smoking and domestic appliances.

There were three fire deaths, two more than the previous year, and 46 fire injuries, five more than in 2024/25. It should be noted that not all deaths and injuries happen in a domestic setting.

Protecting lives and property

Safe and Well visits are our flagship community safety intervention. Our prevention team and firefighters beat their target of increasing the number of visits to most people at risk of fire, with over 32,200 visits - 3,000 more than last year.

Our business safety inspectors, business safety team and firefighters increased their engagement with non-domestic premises through a programme of inspections, audits and engagement events.

Changing lives

More than 8,700 children, young people and older people visited Safety Central, our immersive safety and life skills education centre, during 2025/26 - almost 300 more than last year.

Our partnership with the King’s Trust went from strength to strength, with more than 160 young people taking part, and more almost 180 young people taking part in our fire cadet scheme, 40 more than in 2024/25. Both programmes operate from some of our fire stations.

We also recruitment almost 20 more people to our volunteer programme.

Value for money

Cheshire Fire and Rescue Service cost just under £57m in 2025/26, funded from a combination of council tax, business rates and central government grants.

Much more detail about our income and expenditure can be found in our Statement of Accounts.

You can also read about how we intend to become even more efficient and productive.

HMICFRS inspection report

During 2025/26 we were inspected by His Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire and Rescue Services. We were found to be outstanding at leading our people and good in all other areas. Read the report here.

The year ahead…

Our plans for how we intend to carry out more prevention, more protection and improve our emergency response in the the medium term are set out in our Community Risk Management Plan 2024-28. Our specific plans for this year (2025/26) can be read in our Annual Update.