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GeoPlace partnered with the National Fire Chiefs Council to examine the benefits a focus on the UPRN can bring to improving fire safety in communities. Richard Duffield, Senior Consultant at GeoPlace and Catherine Levin Communications Adviser from the National Fire Chiefs Council provided this report.

Fire and rescue services are really good at looking at data about people and place to work out fire risk in their local area. We wanted to see if a focus on place using the UPRN could yield interesting information about fire risk.

Apollo Gerolymbos is the Data lead for the NFCC and also Head of Data Analytics at London Fire Brigade. He has worked with GeoPlace before and spoke at the 2019 GeoPlace conference about his team’s work with the UPRN to forecast fire risk using energy performance certificates (EPC) as a proxy. Early results showed that the EPC could be a useful addition to predicting fire risk. The slides and audio from Apollo’s presentation are available here. 

Building on this approach, we tested the hypothesis that if a food outlet had a low hygiene rating then it would be more likely to have a fire. We wanted to know if poor food hygiene management is an indicator of a poor attitude to managing other aspects of the business including fire safety.

We got a group of fire analysts together and asked them to look at Food Standard Agency data alongside fire-related and other datasets containing a UPRN to see if there were any connections.

We focused on the London boroughs of Greenwich and Lewisham; two neighbouring south London boroughs which offered a good range of food outlets for us to examine. For these areas, we gave our analysts access to fire incident data, inspection data (for non-domestic buildings), and food hygiene rating scheme data from the Food Standards Agency, Energy Performance Certificate data and to AddressBase, the authoritative source of UPRNs.

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