Fire safety audit data

Factory and warehouse fire safety audits in England: the 2026 figures

In the year ending March 2026, fire and rescue authorities in England carried out 3,486 fire safety audits of factories and warehouses. They found 1,345 unsatisfactory, 38.6% of premises audited, the highest share in the ten years published. The authorities know of 286,765 such premises, so 1.22% were audited in the year.

Noon Elite, which publishes this page, makes a sign in kiosk that runs a fire roll call on a phone.

Find your fire and rescue authority Sources and method

Source: Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, Fire prevention and protection statistics, England, year ending March 2026, published 2 September 2026. Figures derived 3 October 2026.

Year ending March 2026

Four figures from the year

38.6%

of premises audited were found unsatisfactory in 2025/26, the highest share in the ten years published. It was 34.1% in 2016/17 and 36.1% in 2024/25.

82 years

to audit every known factory and warehouse once at the 2025/26 rate: 3,486 audits against 286,765 premises known, or 1.22% in the year.

54 to 113

enforcement notices served in 2024/25 and in 2025/26: the number more than doubled. Prohibition notices went from 36 to 75. West Yorkshire served 72 of the 113 enforcement notices.

1,154

fires in factories, industrial manufacturing and processing buildings and warehouses in 2025/26, about three a day. 697 of them (60%) were in buildings occupied at the time.

Ten years of audits

Audits of factories and warehouses, 2016/17 to 2025/26

Each row adds up the publisher’s rows for the premises type “Factories or warehouses” across every fire and rescue authority in England. Years run from April to March.

Fire safety audits of factories and warehouses, England, 2016/17 to 2025/26. Source: FIRE1202.

Year	Audits	Unsatisfactory	Share unsatisfactory	Enforcement notices	Prohibition notices	Premises known	Share audited
2016/17	3,950	1,345	34.1%	71	18	179,023	2.21%
2017/18	3,058	862	28.2%	54	26	192,641	1.59%
2018/19	3,243	1,014	31.3%	58	29	213,761	1.52%
2019/20	2,851	1,014	35.6%	68	50	205,089	1.39%
2020/21	1,852	490	26.5%	33	36	203,097	0.91%
2021/22	3,493	1,108	31.7%	56	33	215,581	1.62%
2022/23	3,418	1,044	30.5%	50	66	223,403	1.53%
2023/24	3,081	1,051	34.1%	42	39	229,225	1.34%
2024/25	3,128	1,130	36.1%	54	36	250,306	1.25%
2025/26	3,486	1,345	38.6%	113	75	286,765	1.22%

Share of premises audited found unsatisfactory, by year. The figures are in the table above.

The number of enforcement notices more than doubled between 2024/25 and 2025/26, from 54 to 113. The number of prohibition notices more than doubled, from 36 to 75. West Yorkshire accounts for much of both: it served 72 of the 113 enforcement notices and 34 of the 75 prohibition notices. In the other 43 authorities together, enforcement notices went from 20 to 41 and prohibition notices from 25 to 41.

At 3,486 audits against 286,765 premises known, 1.22% of known factories and warehouses were audited in 2025/26. At that rate it would take about 82 years to audit each of them once. In 2024/25 the same sum gave about 80 years: the count of premises known rose by 36,459 in the year. Across all premises types, 1.83% of premises known were audited in 2025/26.

Across all premises types in 2025/26, the authorities carried out 50,195 audits and found 20,286 unsatisfactory, 40.4% of premises audited.

What the auditors found

The articles with the most failures

FIRE1204 counts non-compliance at audits against each article of the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005. These are the eight articles with the most failures recorded at factories and warehouses in 2025/26, each with the publisher’s own description.

Non-compliance by article, factories and warehouses, England, 2016/17 and 2025/26. Source: FIRE1204.

Article	Publisher’s description	2016/17	2025/26
Article 14	Emergency routes and exits	551	953
Article 9	Risk Assessment	509	746
Article 17	Maintenance	438	742
Article 13	Fire fighting and fire detection	508	680
Article 15	Procedures for serious and imminent danger and for danger areas	347	651
Article 21	Training	398	527
Article 8	Duty to take general fire precautions	315	498
Article 11	Fire safety arrangements	249	487

Failures recorded against Article 15, which the publisher describes as “Procedures for serious and imminent danger and for danger areas”, rose from 347 in 2016/17 to 651 in 2025/26. These are counts of failures, not of premises: one audit can record failures against several articles. Article 15 is wider than evacuation, and it does not name a roll call.

By fire and rescue authority

Audit rates in the 44 authorities, 2025/26

The share of known factories and warehouses audited in the year ran from 0.1% in Devon and Somerset, East Sussex and Merseyside to 12.9% in Nottinghamshire. Isles of Scilly, with 11 premises known, is left out of that range.

The share found unsatisfactory is not comparable between authorities. Across the 44 it runs from 0% to 97% of premises audited, which reflects how each authority targets and records its audits. This table compares audit rates, not failure rates.

Each row has its own address, so you can link to one authority: add its name to the end of this page’s address, as in /factory-fire-safety-audits/#derbyshire.

Fire safety audits of factories and warehouses by fire and rescue authority, England, 2025/26. Source: FIRE1202.

Authority	Audits	Unsatisfactory	Premises known	Share audited	Years per audit at this rate	Enforcement notices	Prohibition notices
Avon	138	58	9,511	1.5%	69	0	1
Bedfordshire	17	0	4,266	0.4%	251	0	0
Berkshire	16	2	969	1.7%	61	0	0
Buckinghamshire	24	17	3,515	0.7%	146	0	0
Cambridgeshire	91	9	4,747	1.9%	52	0	0
Cheshire	78	4	4,979	1.6%	64	1	2
Cleveland	23	13	2,467	0.9%	107	0	0
Cornwall	5	4	1,694	0.3%	339	0	0
Cumbria	17	4	1,993	0.9%	117	0	1
Derbyshire	36	10	4,491	0.8%	125	0	0
Devon and Somerset	13	10	13,921	0.1%	1,071	1	3
Dorset and Wiltshire	42	32	14,369	0.3%	342	1	1
Durham	124	55	2,329	5.3%	19	0	1
East Sussex	6	1	7,481	0.1%	1,247	0	2
Essex	300	94	24,187	1.2%	81	0	0
Gloucestershire	160	26	2,318	6.9%	14	0	0
Greater London	111	5	11,949	0.9%	108	1	0
Greater Manchester	161	47	14,465	1.1%	90	18	9
Hampshire and Isle of Wight	85	19	23,248	0.4%	274	0	0
Hereford and Worcester	148	111	3,383	4.4%	23	0	0
Hertfordshire	12	4	5,018	0.2%	418	1	1
Humberside	154	144	7,253	2.1%	47	2	1
Isles of Scilly	1	0	11	9.1%	11	0	0
Kent	81	9	6,345	1.3%	78	0	0
Lancashire	32	31	19,557	0.2%	611	3	1
Leicestershire	100	3	4,833	2.1%	48	0	2
Lincolnshire	44	10	6,237	0.7%	142	1	1
Merseyside	9	2	6,010	0.1%	668	0	0
Norfolk	13	3	3,144	0.4%	242	0	1
North Yorkshire	30	1	4,426	0.7%	148	0	1
Northamptonshire	217	165	4,319	5.0%	20	0	0
Northumberland	21	10	954	2.2%	45	0	1
Nottinghamshire	284	36	2,207	12.9%	8	2	1
Oxfordshire	52	17	5,190	1.0%	100	0	0
Shropshire	84	21	2,510	3.3%	30	2	1
South Yorkshire	86	57	3,599	2.4%	42	1	0
Staffordshire	87	10	4,523	1.9%	52	1	0
Suffolk	43	8	4,278	1.0%	99	0	2
Surrey	75	3	9,504	0.8%	127	1	1
Tyne and Wear	91	26	4,545	2.0%	50	0	0
Warwickshire	58	35	3,386	1.7%	58	4	2
West Midlands	40	19	5,394	0.7%	135	0	4
West Sussex	40	22	1,312	3.0%	33	1	1
West Yorkshire	237	188	15,928	1.5%	67	72	34

Premises known is each authority’s own count of the factories and warehouses in its area. Years per audit is premises known divided by the audits in the year. Download this table as a CSV file.

Fires in factories and warehouses

Fires recorded, 2010/11 to 2025/26

The incident-level dataset records 1,154 fires in factories, industrial manufacturing and processing buildings and warehouses in England in 2025/26, about three a day. In 2010/11 it records 2,176. The count is of four building types, named in the second table as the dataset names them.

Fires in the four building types, England, by year.
Year	Fires
2010/11	2,176
2011/12	2,103
2012/13	1,749
2013/14	1,687
2014/15	1,667
2015/16	1,549
2016/17	1,478
2017/18	1,438
2018/19	1,461
2019/20	1,356
2020/21	1,188
2021/22	1,255
2022/23	1,194
2023/24	1,144
2024/25	1,095
2025/26	1,154

By building type, 2025/26.
Building type	Fires
Industrial Manufacturing (not including Factory)	491
Warehouses and bulk storage	296
Factory	232
Industrial Processing (not including Recycling Centre)	135

Whether the building was occupied at the time, 2025/26.
Occupied at the time	Fires	Share
Occupied	697	60%
Not occupied	421	36%
Not known	36	3%

Time of day, 2025/26, in the dataset’s own four bands.
Time of day	Fires	Share
Morning	336	29%
Afternoon	384	33%
Evening	261	23%
Night	173	15%

In the ten years from 2015/16 to 2024/25 the dataset records 13,146 fires in the same four building types. In 3,250 of them, about one in four, people were evacuated with fire service assistance, and in 435 more than 20 people were. These figures end at March 2025 because the year ending March 2026 edition of the dataset does not publish the field for non-dwelling fires. They count people evacuated with the fire service’s assistance, so they understate how often a building was emptied.

The fires in these buildings that started with welding and cutting equipment or a blow lamp, on a page of their own

Caveats

How to read these figures

38.6% is a share of premises audited. Each fire and rescue authority must have a locally determined risk-based inspection programme, so audits are aimed at the premises it judges to be higher risk. It is not the share of all factories and warehouses.
Premises known is each authority’s own figure. It is not an official count of factories and warehouses. It has grown from 179,023 in 2016/17 to 286,765 in 2025/26, which lowers the share audited.
Article counts are failures, not premises. One audit can record a failure against several articles.
Some authorities record no article detail. Six authorities recorded unsatisfactory audits of factories and warehouses in 2025/26 but no failure against any article, so the article table does not cover every audit.
England only. The tables cover the 44 fire and rescue authorities in England.
“Factories or warehouses” is one category. The audit tables do not split it, so no audit figure here is for factories alone or for warehouses alone.
These are official statistics. They are published by the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, which took responsibility for them from the Home Office on 1 April 2025.

The roll call

What an audit looks at, and where a roll call comes in

Article 15(1)(a) of the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005 says the responsible person must “establish and, where necessary, give effect to appropriate procedures, including safety drills, to be followed in the event of serious and imminent danger to relevant persons”. There is no line in the Order that says you must hold a roll call. Accounting for people at the assembly point is how nearly every fire risk assessment discharges that duty, and Article 15 is where a failure of those procedures is recorded at an audit.

Noon Elite makes a sign in kiosk that gives a live roll call of the visitors and contractors signed in, read on a phone at the assembly point. It does not make a site pass an audit. The page on the fire roll call sets out what the Order asks and how the list works, and there is a free fire drill record template for the drill itself.

Sources and method

Where each figure comes from

FIRE1202: fire safety audits by premises type and authorityMinistry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, Fire prevention and protection statistics, England, year ending March 2026. Published 2 September 2026. The audits, outcomes, notices and premises known.
FIRE1204: non-compliance by articleMinistry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, the same release. Published 2 September 2026. The article counts.
Other building fires dataset (incident level), year ending March 2026 editionMinistry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, Fire and rescue incident statistics, England, year ending March 2026. Published 22 July 2026. The fires, by building type, occupancy and time of day.
Other building fires dataset, year ending March 2025 edition (the last to carry the EVACUATIONS field)Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government. The evacuation figures. The link is to the copy of this edition held by the Internet Archive.

Derived on 3 October 2026. Every figure on this page is a sum of the publisher’s own rows, with no reclassification. The tables are listed on GOV.UK under fire statistics data tables. The publisher’s own commentary on the audit figures, which is where the risk-based inspection programme is described, is in its statistical release.

Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0.

Use these figures

Quote them freely

These figures may be quoted freely. Please link to this page as the source of the analysis, and name the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government as the source of the data.

The table by fire and rescue authority is available as a CSV file, with the source and the licence on every row.

Three charts are free to publish as they are, on the same terms: a link to this page.

If a figure here is wrong, say so and it will be corrected: [email protected].

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