Tēnā koe Mark Grayson  
 
We write to acknowledge receipt of your information request dated 9
January 2026. Our commitment is to provide a response to your request as
soon as possible, and no later than 20 working days after the day it was
received. If we are unable to meet this timeframe, we will inform you
promptly and provide details regarding any extension required. Should
clarification be necessary for your request, we may reach out to you for
additional information.
             
The information you have requested may contain the names and contact
details of our staff or volunteers. Please let us know whether you require
these names and contact details. We may need to consult our people before
deciding whether we can release this information, and this may take a bit
more time. If we do not hear from you, we will assume that you do not
require their names and contact details.
 

Please note that over the holiday period there is a three-week period
where the days are not counted as ‘working days’. This applies to Official
Information Act and Privacy Act requests and that period is 25 December
2025 to 15 January 2026, inclusive. That means the maximum time limit for
responding to requests made from 27 November 2025 may run into the new
year. The Ombudsman’s OIA calculator can show you the latest date for a
response: [1]Go to the OIA calculator.

Nāku noa, nā
Information Request Team

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Tēnā koe Mark

 

Please find attached correspondence from Fire and Emergency New Zealand |
Whakaratonga Iwi.

 

Further to this, we are also writing to seek clarification in relation to
question 11 of your request.

 

You have asked for a report or the number of appliance breakdowns over the
last 24 months, separated by Career and Volunteer trucks. The requested
information is not held in a way that allows us to generate this report.
To provide it, we would need to manually review every invoice for each
appliance, identify any recorded faults, and then categorise these by year
and station type. Fire and Emergency operates more than 1,000 appliances,
so this process would involve a significant manual review and would
require staff to be diverted from their core duties. We consider that this
would have an unreasonable impact on our normal operations. For this
reason, it is likely we would refuse this aspect of your request under
section 18(f) of the OIA, as the information requested cannot be made
available without substantial collation or research.

 

Our Fleet team has advised that the closest information we can provide is
a list of call signs that reported being unable to proceed to an incident
during the last 24 months, identified using a keyword filter for
mechanical or appliance related issues. However, this method would not
necessarily capture all relevant instances and would have limitations. To
avoid refusing this part of your request, would you be willing to refine
it to the following:

 

o The number of occasions across New Zealand where an appliance was
unable to respond immediately to a call due to a mechanical fault or
lack of crewing, broken down by region, Volunteer or Career, and
reason for delay or failure to respond.

 

We hold this data for the period 1 July 2017 to 28 October 2025. Please
let us know whether this dataset would meet your needs.

 

If you could please let us know whether you are willing to narrow your
request we would appreciate it. If we do not hear from you, we will
proceed to make a decision on the request as it is currently framed.

 

Ngā mihi,

 

Information Requests Team

 

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 E: [2][FENZ request email]

 W: [3]www.fireandemergency.nz

A: Fire and Emergency National Headquarters

     Level 7, 42-52 Willis Street, Wellington Central

     PO Box 2133, Wellington 6011

 

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