Half of fire services have no wildfire kit, CLA investigation finds

The CLA approached 47 fire services in England and Wales under the Freedom of Information Act and received 29 responses, which it says reveal crews being sent to wildfires without proper protective gear, patchy training and engines off the road for weeks at a time. The findings land after a summer in which 17 of 22 responding services recorded more wildfires in the first half of 2026 than in the whole of 2024, with Berkshire and Shropshire hitting five-year records by the end of June.

What did the FOI returns show about kit?

Over half of the forces that answered the equipment questions, 12 of 22, hold no specialist wildfire personal protective equipment at all, despite repeated warnings that standard fire kit, built for burning buildings, is too hot and heavy for hours on open ground in summer heat. The CLA says that can leave crews overheating or removing kit altogether.

Provision varies widely. Surrey reported more than 800 wildfire PPE kits and Kent and West Yorkshire issue a set to every firefighter, while others hold none. Tyne and Wear has no terrain support vehicles for reaching remote ground, Cheshire and Durham have one each and Dorset has 29. Over a third of stations, eight of 22, have no drones for detecting and mapping fires.

Training is thin on the ground

In Cheshire just 8.62% of employees are trained to undertake wildfire operations, and in Cleveland five staff, 1.2%, are qualified to give tactical advice or command at a wildfire. In West Yorkshire 15% of operational personnel hold in-date wildfire training. Where courses exist they are typically run online rather than in the field. By contrast, Durham, Kent and East Sussex train 100% of firefighters and officers for wildfire operations.

How often were engines unavailable?

Across the 29 services that shared data, on-call engines were unavailable for an average of 32% of the year. In Surrey, West Sussex and Cleveland, engines were unavailable for more than half the year on average. Three Essex engines spent over 90% of the year off the run, and individual engines in Suffolk and Leicestershire were unavailable 100% of the time in July 2026, the peak of the heatwave.

During the summer’s biggest fires the gaps showed. As a major incident was declared at Dovestone and Saddleworth Moor, on-call engine unavailability in Greater Manchester jumped to 19.3% in July against under 4% in every other month. Nearly half of the services that shared response data missed their target times on average in 2025 and 2026, with waits reaching 21 hours in Northamptonshire.

What does the CLA want done?

Gavin Lane, CLA president, said: “We ask firefighters to risk their lives in conditions most of us would not go near. So we should be giving them the equipment, training and support to come back safely.”

He said some crews are “being sent into wildfires in heavy kit made for burning buildings, worn for hours across open ground in summer heat”, with little more than online training, and pointed abroad: “Places like California and Australia have spent years learning how to fight and prevent large fires. They’ve invested in specialist equipment, training, and a much more proactive approach to managing the land, including through controlled burning.”

Alongside funding and equipment for fire services, the association wants the restrictions on controlled burning lifted. “Government must lift the ban on controlled burning, so landowners have the freedom to reduce fuel loads before a blaze becomes a disaster,” Mr Lane said. Gamekeepers and land managers have long argued the same case, and a fire service wildfire lead recently rated the gamekeepers’ own risk index the most accurate tool available.

What happens next

The CLA has published its FOI returns and summaries in full and is pressing for funding, specialist equipment and field training for fire services, alongside a change of policy on burning. The sector gathers at the Wildfire 2026 conference in Leeds on 10 and 11 November, where fuel-load management will be on the agenda.