Big reductions are being recorded in false alarms to the West Sussex fire and rescue service.
Trevor Pilcher, its director of community protection, told the county public protection select committee statistics were showing a dramatic decline.
"We are doing a lot of work on automatic fire alarms, which generated an awful lot of false alarm
s, and they have been reducing consistently over the past three years because of measures we have put in place," he said.
Malicious calls were not a great number – about 100 a year from mobile phones.
They were putting initiatives into this, and were stopping people – particularly young people – making malicious calls.
Cllr Peter Evans, county cabinet member for public protection, said the service now had the ability to cut people off, and could text them back and warn action would be taken against them.
"We are making sure there is no hiding place for these people," he declared.
If a fire-and-rescue tender was called out as a result of one of these malicious calls, there could be a problem if a road traffic crash happened elsewhere.
Cllr Evans said target response times for the fire-and-rescue service appeared in a new integrated risk management plan, on which the public was consulted.
These were shown from the time when the call was received to when the service turned out to individual towns and villages on the list.
In about 80 or 90 per cent of cases, the service was beating these targets.
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The full article contains 322 words and appears in OS-Chichester Observer newspaper.
