Lithium and Electric Vehicle Fire additional data
Case reference FOI2026/00636
Received 3 June 2026
Published 30 July 2026
Request
Is it possible to share the Lithium and Electric Vehicle fires dataset with month of incident and borough or ward of incident included?
Response
The information you have requested, in this specific format, is exempt from disclosure under the FOI act via section 41 – Information obtained in confidence.
The London Fire Brigade publishes aggregated information about lithium-ion battery incidents to support public awareness and fire safety. However, we do not include address-level information, including borough or ward location data, because the underlying fire cause information is obtained and recorded as part of our emergency response and fire investigation functions in circumstances that often import an obligation of confidence. Fire crews and investigators routinely obtain information within private homes, businesses, and other locations that are not ordinarily open to public scrutiny, frequently at moments of acute vulnerability for those involved. Although a dataset may not identify an individual directly, publishing detailed location information alongside fire-cause data can enable specific incidents to be identified and linked back to a particular property or household. The London Fire Commissioner therefore considers that incident-level fire cause information is collected for operational learning, risk analysis, prevention and protection purposes, rather than for routine public disclosure, and that wider publication would risk undermining the reasonable expectation of confidentiality that exists between the Brigade and the communities it serves.
Fire cause information has value because it is aggregated across thousands of incidents to identify trends and support public safety interventions. The public interest is served through the publication of anonymised and aggregated statistics rather than through disclosure of the circumstances of individual incidents. Releasing detailed location information would move the dataset from trend analysis towards disclosure of incident-specific information, which LFB considers to be confidential in nature and unsuitable for routine publication.
I have, however, attached a list of location data (borough and ward) for all fire incidents where a lithium-ion battery or electric vehicle (including e-bikes) were identified as the cause, between 01/01/2017 and 30/04/2026 (PDF file “FOI2026_00636_Dataset” in the ‘Documents’ section below). I hope you will find this of use, whilst maintaining the anonymisation of specific incidents so they cannot be linked back to a particular property or household.
Documents
This is London Fire Brigade's response to a freedom of information (FOI) or environmental information regulations (EIR) request.
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