Fire at Old Kent Road - CAD Report
Case reference FOI2026/01165
Received 17 September 2026
Published 9 October 2026
Request
Under the Freedom of Information Act 2000, I would like to request information relating to the fire at Old Kent Road in January 2023.
Please provide: 1. The complete LFB Control Room incident log for the incident. 2. The complete mobilisation/incident log, including all time-stamped entries. 3. The times of all 999 calls received concerning the incident. 4. Transcripts of the 999 calls, where held. 5. Any Control Room entries recording persons reported trapped, missing or remaining inside the premises. 6. Any time-stamped messages between Control and attending crews concerning persons trapped, rescue or casualties. If any information is exempt from disclosure, please identify the specific exemption relied upon and disclose the remainder of the information with appropriate redactions.
Response
Information contained within our Mobilisation Log (sometimes referred to as a CAD Report) fall within the class of information which LFB provide for a charge (and so is exempt under Section 21 “information accessible to the applicant by other means”). Charging for incident records (on a cost recovery basis) is consistent with the ICO’s definition document for the types of information the ICO expect Fire and Rescue Services to publish.
Payment of the fee is not an automatic entitlement to the whole of the record as the information LFB collates about incidents contains a mix of information; some of which is confidential or otherwise exempt from public disclosure (typically these are the specific details of the incident and the people affected), and some are open to release (typically this is information about the LFBs actions).
Information that is of interest to the public, is not the same as information that is in the public interest, however on this occasion LFB are waving the fee for access to the Mobilisation Report for the fire at Old Kent Road and are releasing a redacted copy of the information. The information released is that related to the LFBs actions, and not the confidential details about the nature and extent of the fire.
LFB considers much of the information within incident records to have been provided in confidence because it is obtained in the course of an emergency response, often from people affected by the incident, witnesses, building occupiers, responsible persons or other agencies. That information is provided for the operational purpose of managing the incident, understanding what happened and supporting any necessary follow-up, not for wider public disclosure. Releasing details of that nature could undermine the confidence of those who provide information to LFB and may prejudice the willingness of people and organisations to share full and frank information with the Brigade in future. We have therefore exempted the information of this type on the basis of s.41 of FOIA – Information Provided in Confidence. S.41 is an absolute exemption and doesn’t not require the consideration of a public interest test.
We have also redacted and exempted the names and identifiers of our staff based on s.40 – Personal Data. S.40 is also an absolute exemption.
The redactions tool has mislabelled a number of the s.40/s.41 exemptions. The redactions remain appropriate even where the label is incorrect.
There is a further set of redactions using the s.24 – National Security exemption. This is information which we are withholding as we consider it could be used to disrupt our services if misused. S.24 is not an absolute exemption, but we believe the weight of public interest favours the security of our emergency operations.
We do hold the 999 recordings of all the calls related to this incident (as audio files). These are exempt from disclosure based on s.41 for reasons of confidentiality as described earlier.
Documents
This is London Fire Brigade's response to a freedom of information (FOI) or environmental information regulations (EIR) request.
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