Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, what discussions she has had with fire and rescue services on including in the data collated by her Department the number of fires caused by (a) mobile telephone chargers and (b) e-cigarettes.

Home Office officials have regular discussions with fire and rescue services about the data collected through the Incident Recording System how e-cigarettes should be specifically categorised in future. Fires related to mobile phone chargers are captured under the category ‘Battery Charger’. There were 109 accidental fires recorded as being ignited by battery chargers in England in 2014/15.

National Statistics on the causes and locations of fires are published annually in, Fire Statistics England’. The most recent publication for 21014/15 can be found here:

https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/fire-statistics-england-april-2014-to-march-2015

Accompanying data tables can be found here:

https://www.gov.uk/government/statistical-data-sets/fire-statistics-data-tables

The next publication of ‘Fire Statistics England, for 2015/16, is due for release in 2017