The Home Office’s Fire Kills campaign and the National Fire Chiefs Council, working with Safelincs, an online fire safety provider, makes available a national online Home Fire Safety Visit tool and are committed to making its website accessible, in accordance with the Public Sector Bodies (Websites and Mobile Applications) (No. 2) Accessibility Regulations 2018 (‘the Accessibility Regulations’)
The tool allows households to carry out a fire safety self-assessment of their home to better understand fire risk and to take steps to make their home safer from the risks of fire. The focus of the tool is to offer fire safety advice and guidance to the general public in an accessible and readily available manner, especially when and where physical visits are restricted or not possible. Where a household is identified at risk through a self-assessment, users will be able to refer themselves to the local fire and rescue service for an in-person visit.
The tool has not been designed to replace all existing referral routes to a local fire and rescue service. In the development of the tool, we have sought to make the tool as accessible as possible, but we recognise that not all individuals will be able to fully use the tool and, in these instances, we ask that individuals use the existing referral routes to your local fire and rescue service to seek advice and support to stay safe from fire in your home.
All serious high-fire risk cases should be expedited as a priority referral to a fire and rescue service and should be conducted through existing partnership agreements and direct referral routes into your local fire and rescue service.
This accessibility statement applies to https://www.safelincs.co.uk/hfsc/
This website is run by Safelincs Limited. We want as many people as possible to be able to use this system. For example, that means you should be able to:
We’ve also made the website text as simple as possible to understand.
AbilityNet has advice on making your device easier to use if you have a disability.
We know some parts of this website are not fully accessible:
If you find any problems not listed on this page or think we’re not meeting accessibility requirements, contact technical@safelincs.co.uk.
If you need information in a different format like accessible PDF, large print or easy read, audio recording or braille:
We’ll consider your request and get back to you within 30 days.
The Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) is responsible for enforcing the Public Sector Bodies (Websites and Mobile Applications) (No. 2) Accessibility Regulations 2018 (the ‘accessibility regulations’). If you’re not happy with how we respond to your complaint, contact the Equality Advisory and Support Service (EASS).
Safelincs Limited is committed to making its website accessible, in accordance with the Public Sector Bodies (Websites and Mobile Applications) (No.2) Accessibility Regulations 2018.
The website has been tested against the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) [2.2] AA standard.
This website is partially compliant with the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines version 2.2 AA standard.
The 3rd party plugin used to change the language of the website is not compliant for the following reasons:
It is considered that the inclusion of this plugin provides greater accessibility to those users whose first language is not English. We will continue to research alternatives that are WCAG 2.2 compliant.
The optional PDF download of the action plan at the end of this tool is not compliant and does not contain the meta data needed by screen readers. The plugin used to produce the PDF is outdated and not upgradable. We therefore will be re-developing this area of the website in late 2024.
We do not currently have any claims of disproportionate burden in place.
The accessibility regulations do not require us to fix PDFs or other documents published before 23 September 2018 if they’re not essential to providing our services.
Any new PDFs or Word documents we publish will meet accessibility standards.
We do not plan to add captions to live video streams because live video is exempt from meeting the accessibility regulations.
Third-party content that is neither funded nor developed by, nor under the control of Safelincs Ltd is exempt under the regulations.
Some of the education materials we use, for example, have not been directly commissioned from us and come from sources that we cannot control, therefore the subtitles, transcripts, audio descriptions and captions may not be present.
This statement was first prepared on 25 September 2023 following a comprehensive in-house and external audit that used a blend of manual and automated testing.
The statement was last reviewed and updated on 16 April 2024 to improve accuracy in the reporting of areas where we are not yet compliant.
This site is due to be re-audited January 2025.