Fire Services sets up one-stop office to speed things up

Ayra Wang

The Fire Services Department will establish a one-stop coordination office for New Fire Protection Facilities Acceptance by March this year to cut the acceptance process time by one-third.

At a press conference reviewing the department's work in 2024 yesterday, director of fire services Andy Yeung Yan-kin said the new office will help shorten the acceptance time of regular projects from 52 to 35 working days and from 52 to 22 working days for public housing estates. "We will provide checklists for applicants to ensure they provide enough documents for acceptance and deploy technologies such as 3D scanning in on-site inspection to speed up the process."

The office will provide information on fire protection facilities acceptance, hold pre-inspection meetings with project stakeholders, draw up acceptance inspection timetables for projects and share examples of unsuccessful cases.

The department also aims to complete fire safety improvement works of 10 selected buildings by mid-2026 after the amended Fire Safety (Buildings) Ordinance took effect last month. This which allows the government to carry out fire safety improvement works for buildings with genuine difficulties in meeting statutory requirements. The department handled 37,828 fire calls last year, up 4.8 percent on 2023. There were 5,222 fire cases, an increase of 154 cases year-on-year.