Fire engines and appliances got to their most important calls within a 10-minute cut off 88 per cent of the time during the three months form June to September.

The response standard for the Wiltshire Fire and Rescue Service in Swindon is to get to alarms where people are or may be sleeping within 10 minutes of a call being answered.

That percentage rate represents a drop from the previous two quarters, when appliances got to 'sleep risk' calls 94.5 per cent of times in January to March and 96.9 percent in April to June.

Group Manager Glyn Moody, the deputy commander for Swindon said: "If an appliance arrives at the site of a fire in 10 minutes and one second, that's counted as a fail- so it's a hard cut-off.

"Sometimes the fails are caused by call-handling - often it's necessary to get more details from the caller especially as to locations

". Other times it can be caused by traffic congestion in Swindon, if it's around 5 or 6pm on a week day it can take the on-call firefighters more than five minutes to get to the station and then there's traffic for the appliance. Every fail is reviewed"

The second appliance reached "sleep risk" calls within its allotted time 90.5 per cent on the time during the last quarter - again a drop from 95.7 per cent and 92 per cent for the previous two quarters but much better than the end of 2017.