HomeSafe

Residential fires are the third leading cause of unintentional injury globally, and a prevention programme is rarely one thing. HomeSafe, implemented in Surrey from 2008, ran several initiatives at once — visits, inspections, installations, door hangers, distributed packages.

That is the usual shape of prevention work, and it is also why most of it is never evaluated. When everything happens at once, nobody can say which part worked.

The programme ran for twelve years across 120,349 households. The evaluation looked at the frequency of fire incidents, residential fires, casualties, functioning smoke alarms and contained fires.

What makes it unusual is the method: each initiative's effect was worked out by comparing the outcome for its intervention group, and the city-wide outcome, against the period before the intervention. Every part was asked to justify itself separately.

Across the programme, the researchers report fire rates down 80%, functioning smoke alarms up 60%, the proportion of contained fires up 94%, and fire casualties down 40%.

The three most effective initiatives were firefighters visiting households, inspecting and installing smoke alarms, and verifying alarms at fire incidents.

The paper also names initiatives it describes as less successful: post-door hangers, reported at +12%, and package distribution, at +15%.

Twelve years is long enough for a great deal else to have changed in a city, and this is an observational evaluation rather than a trial. The authors' own framing is that the lessons should be transferred to similar contexts — not that these percentages will reappear somewhere else.