Emergency vehicle access obstructed by parked or stored vehicles

Freedom of Information request - emergency vehicle access obstructed by parked or stored  vehicles

I am trying to understand how UK fire and rescue services deal with incidents where parked, stored, abandoned, scrap, business-related, or otherwise obstructive vehicles affect or may affect access for fire appliances, brigade response vehicles (BRVs), or equivalent smaller response vehicles.

1. Any current policy, procedure, guidance, operational note, risk assessment template, or standard process used when crews or officers identify that a road, street, estate, industrial site, or similar location may be difficult or impossible to access because of parked/stored vehicles or vehicle-related obstruction.

2. Any process for reporting such access concerns to another body, including the police, highways authority, local authority enforcement, parking enforcement, environmental health, planning, licensing, or landowner.

3. Whether your service has, in the last three calendar years, referred any such access obstruction concern to the police or a highways/local authority team. If held, please provide the number of referrals by calendar year. I do not require personal data or exact addresses; broad categories or anonymised examples are sufficient.

4. Whether your service uses or refers to the Highway Code, including Rule 243, when considering or explaining emergency access obstruction by parked vehicles. If held, please provide any recorded guidance, email template, briefing note, or standard wording that mentions this.

5. Any recorded examples, with personal data and precise addresses redacted if necessary, of how your service has advised residents, businesses, councils, police, or highways teams about maintaining access for fire appliances or BRVs where vehicle parking/storage was the concern.

1. Lincolnshire Fire and Rescue (LFR/we) operate a risk gathering process, where temporary risks, such as restricted access to roads etc. is captured and shared.  Once a risk is identified, local actions/managers are allocated to mitigate the impact, e.g. engagement with residents etc.

2. Depending on the nature of the risk / issue identified, local actions will include engagement and sharing of risk information with partner agencies, e.g. Highways, Police colleagues to support remediated actions required. 

3. We do not record the specific examples, but we can confirm that we have shared details with Lincolnshire County Council highways for support.  Where we find cars are parked illegally, details are passed to Lincolnshire Police. 

4. No. We do not use this guidance, and LFR’s current process is to identify the risk, and share with partners to try and remedy.

5. We have carried out numerous campaigns across the County on an ad hoc basis as risks and issues have been identified.  These campaigns are not formally recorded within the Service.