Dear Staffordshire Fire and Rescue Service,

Please supply me with data relating to fires on balconies on residential buildings in your area, as follows;

· How many fires involving balconies occurred in total between 1st August 2021 and 31st July 2022?

· In the same period, how many fires occurred where balconies where found to have contributed to the spread of the fire across the external walls?

· Please provide data on the causes of any fires that started on balconies in the period (ie; barbecue, discarded cigarette, electrical appliance fault, etc) and please provide the number of occurrences for each cause.

If your incident recording system does not include "balcony" as a recorded location, could you please perform a search on free text fields in your database for the term, as I have found in the past that this often returns useable data.

Yours faithfully,

Stephen Cole

Dear Jo,

Thanks for this, it's much appreciated. :)

Yours sincerely,

Stephen Cole