it one we are all going to have to think about Mistyhall thats for sure.

I work for an organisation which provides retirement housing and our management procedures include alarm verification. Briefly, alarm sounds and manager identifies from the control panel the site of activation, makes their way to the scene to establish if the Fire Service is required. Tenants remain in their flats unless instructed to leave by either the manager or the fire officer. In their training we always emphasis that managers should never put themselves at risk, any signs of a genuine fire they immediately dial 999. If established that it is a false/unwanted alarm, they return to the alarm panel and re-set. When the manager is off-site the alarm goes directly to an off-site monitoring station who call the Fire Service. This has cut the number of unnecessary call outs to the fire service quite considerably, to the benefit of both the emergency services and the tenants.

So good that we cancelled the servicing of the Alarm Receiving Centre.

Durham were the first Brigade in the contry to instigade this between the hours of 9am and 5pm the brigade will not attend alarms in low risk premises without confirmation of a real fire -- If you phone up saying that your alarm is going off they will ask you to confirm if you cant best look then ring tham back we have 5 large hospitals 3 small hospitals 89 other buildings including residences clinics etc so we sat down with the brigade and agreed to put our buildings into 3 catigories High Risk sleeping risk --- They will still atend thease which include residences and major accute hospitals High risk Special importance -- Such as our warehouse which hold 600,000 patient notes or the back up computer site - to loose thease would cause harm to the community so need a response Low risk -- Needs confirmation from the occupier -manager responsible to call 999 If we phone the brigade its prefixed with the above to ensure an attendance we then had 6 months of training with the staff managers of buildings, Fire teams, Property companies etc to put it all in place differant proceedures for differant buildings not forgetting the Alarm recieving stations who no longer phone the brigade during the working hours its done by staff in the minor buildings our large buildings use the on site telephone exchange operators to contact the brigade lots of work but has to be done durham were dealing with 1000s of calls a year

mssy, Totally agree with you. I feel that would benefit where i work as well. I will be looking to instigate this and get rid of the ARC.( Thats if the insurance dept. let me!!!!)