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London, United Kingdom – Fire safety enforcement varies thirteenfold across London boroughs, according to a new open dataset published by RiskFire.

The London Fire Safety Index brings together fire incidents, safety audits, enforcement notices and average response times for all 33 London boroughs in a single searchable view. It is drawn from London Fire Brigade records published on the London Datastore, released under the Open Government Licence, and is free to search, download or embed.

Across the capital, London Fire Brigade carried out 7,049 fire safety audits in the most recent twelve months and issued 727 enforcement notices, an average of 11.1 notices per hundred audits. That average hides an enormous spread. A premises audited in Ealing, where 23.7% of audits led to a notice, is thirteen times more likely to receive an enforcement notice than one audited in Bexley, where the rate is 1.8%. Brent and Harrow follow at 21.8% and 20.9%. Bromley, Newham and Southwark sit near the bottom, at 3.8%, 4.1% and 5.2%.

Audit coverage bears little relation to fire volume. Haringey recorded 483 fires and 89 safety audits, while neighbouring Islington recorded 387 fires and 387 audits, a fivefold difference in audit intensity between two adjacent north London boroughs.

Response times differ by nearly two minutes across the capital. The London average is five minutes 31 seconds. Lambeth averages four minutes 36 seconds, while Hillingdon averages six minutes 25 seconds, 39% longer. The gap is largely geographic, since the five slowest boroughs are all in outer London.

The Index sits alongside a companion cladding remediation tracker built from Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government Building Safety Remediation data. Nine years after the Grenfell Tower fire, average completion across 66 English local authorities stands at 36.2%. Twenty-four of the 29 London authorities in the dataset are less than halfway through remediation. Hillingdon has completed 16.1%. Nationally, Stoke-on-Trent has completed none.

“A landlord in Ealing and a landlord in Bexley are under exactly the same legal duty, but the chance of that duty ever being tested looks very different depending on which side of a boundary the building sits. That doesn’t change what the law requires — it just means a lot of people are relying on not being asked. We published this because the information existed, it just wasn’t in a form anyone outside the industry could use,” said a spokesperson of RiskFire.

The data is published as duties on building owners have widened considerably. Section 156 of the Building Safety Act 2022 removed the five-employee threshold for recording a fire risk assessment from October 2023, bringing far more small landlords, HMO operators and small business owners into scope. Until now, borough-level information on where enforcement actually happens has not been readily accessible to them.

“None of this data is new — it’s all published by London Fire Brigade and MHCLG. What was missing was a way to see your own borough without downloading three spreadsheets and knowing which columns to join. We’ve put it in one place, made it free to download and free to embed, because the people who most need it are small landlords and building managers who were never the intended audience for a statistical release,” RiskFire’s spokesperson added.

Both datasets can be downloaded in full as CSV or JSON, and any publisher can embed the borough charts free of charge.

Two caveats apply. Enforcement rates reflect both underlying compliance levels and each borough’s enforcement approach, and the data cannot separate the two, so a high rate is not automatically a worse borough. Response times are strongly shaped by geography, with the five slowest all being outer London boroughs covering greater land area. Cladding percentages are calculated on banded building counts as published by MHCLG, so should be read as indicative.

Sources: London Fire Brigade via the London Datastore for fire data, as at 1 June 2026, and MHCLG Building Safety Remediation monthly data for cladding, as at 31 May 2026. RiskFire consolidates and presents this data. It does not collect it.

About RiskFire

RiskFire publishes free fire safety compliance guidance for landlords, letting agents, property managers and business owners, covering duties under the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005 across 17 property types. It also connects property owners with accredited third-party fire risk assessors.

Quick Notes:

• Free reuse. All figures are published under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Charts on any borough page can be embedded free of charge. Both datasets download in full as CSV or JSON with no registration required.
• Borough-level detail. Individual pages for each of the 33 London boroughs are searchable by borough name or postcode.
• Interviews. Ray Ansel, a BAFE SP205 and NFRAR registered fire risk assessor, is available for comment on fire risk assessment practice, competency requirements and the practical effect of the Fire Safety Act 2021 and Building Safety Act 2022 on landlords and small businesses.
• Updates. Both trackers are refreshed as new source data is published, monthly in the case of cladding remediation.

Learn more at https://riskfire.org.uk/

Enquiries can be sent to [email protected]

Media Contact
Company Name: RiskFire.org
Contact Person: Media Relations
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City: London
Country: United Kingdom
Website: riskfire.org.uk