Kent Fire and Rescue Service
Review of Evidence to Support Risk Stratification in Accidental Dwelling Fires 2021

This report is based on an assessment of 39 pieces of published research from both academic and grey literature. Fourteen of the articles were based on UK incident data or FRS information (three were specific to particular FRS’s which included London, Oxfordshire, and Merseyside). The geographical spread of where evidence is based can be found in Tables 1 and 2. It is also important to note that the date of publication ranged from 1977 up to research published in 2020, although the data used could have been from any period in time that fire incident records were 
accessible. The papers were categorised based on whether they focused on 1) risk of having a fire, 2) risk of injury related to fire, 3) risk of fire fatality, or a combination of these categories. The biggest proportion of papers (N= 16) focused on a combination of risk factors, followed by fatality only (N= 14). This may be due to the fact that incidents and coronial reports can be used to give the most detailed picture of an ADF and the individual human factors that may have contributed to the incident. The most commonly referenced risks across the research evidence were age (N=31), smoking (N=20), gender (N=16), and alcohol/drug impairment (N=16). An overview of which risks were associated with different human factors can be found in Table 3.

The primary objective for this report was to identify research that helped to segment the population on the basis of demographic, behavioural, social, and psychographic factors that put them at risk of experiencing a fire, ADF-related injury, or ADF-related fatality. It is important to note potential caveats to the robustness of the report, and highlight that conclusions drawn should be tentative and made using a variety of sources of evidence. Firstly, the quantity and quality of the evidence available is mixed. That there is more research focusing on fatalities or a combination of risk 
categories may suggest that some risk categories are easier to identify and study. This means that there is more available evidence in certain areas which may skew segmentation. It is also necessary to keep in mind the potential that location and date of research may impact the findings, although as can be seen in the review of the evidence, there is generally a clear and fairly stable pattern of risk categories across the evidence base, which increases confidence in the segments produced here. 

As highlighted above, this document is intended to remain ‘live’ and be updated as new information becomes available. In addition to the nature of research being continuously updated, there is also a general lack of research evidence in relation to specific risk of fire or risk of injury, perhaps due to difficulties accurately capturing this, and so more work could be done to focus on these areas where there are far more incidents and therefore where statistical methods could be used to identify and target different segments more accurately.

Summary of characteristics 

Broadly, the characteristics identified could be grouped as demographic, behavioural, and socio-economic factors. The evidence to date did not identify any psychographic factors upon which the population could be segmented. The characteristics that were most consistently identified in the research evidence for each type of risk (Note that injury and risk of experiencing an ADF are combined here because there were so few papers focused on injury, and each of the characteristics overlapped with the risks of having a fire.) can be seen as two distinct sets of factors, although there is some overlap in the factors. This is because within those broad characteristics, the interaction of factors and specific people who are at risk within the groups differ. For example, low Socio-Economic Status (SES) is a factor relating to both fatality and fire/injury risk, however SES interacts with other factors differently to predict ADF-related fatality risk than for fire/injury risk. Therefore, low SES is related to all risk types, but the individual people within the ADF-related fatality group with low SES will be different to those at risk of fire/injury.

The characteristics associated with ADF related fatalities include age, gender, ethnicity, mental/physical ill-health (including cognitive impairment, frailty and disability), smoking/drug/alcohol use, SES, and property type/occupancy. Fire/injury risk was associated with age, gender, disability, SES, occupancy, and previous experience of fire. There are a number of interactions between these elements. In particular, age and other characteristics, where the primary factor related to frailty and ability to escape. Many studies have pointed to the fact that although older age groups are more likely to become fire fatalities, they are actually less likely to have a fire in the first place. As Gilbert et al.(2017) point out, the groups who are fire fatalities are separate and distinct from the groups who have fires or experience injury relating to fire.

It is also important to note the prevalence of alcohol as a factor in fire fatalities, especially the interaction with smoking which appears to be a leading combination for inability to escape a fire. Another interesting point raised (although so far, only in one study) was that of people who had survived an ADF, 81% had experienced a fire before, so this must be taken into consideration for future investigation. Currently there is no universal way to capture smaller fire incidents that people deal with themselves without FRS involvement, so it would be challenging to target on this basis, however work could be done to identify how often and for whom this may be a risk factor. It may also be useful to consider the demographics of ADF survivors to see how survivor characteristics compare to those identified in the literature.