National Headquarters
Fire and Emergency New Zealand
National Headquarters
Spark Central, Level 7
42-52 Willis Street
Wellington Central
Wellington 6011
Phone +64 4 496 3600
29 May 2026
Ref: 21558
Harwood Wilson
[FYI request #34532 email] Tēnā koe Harwood
We refer to your request of 23 April 2026 to Fire and Emergency New Zealand requesting the
following information under the Official Information Act 1982 (OIA):
•
The number of career appliances (including pumps, ladders, and specials) that were not
operating at full capacity (either out of service or short-crewed) during the months of
January, February, March, and April 2026.
Please table the number of hours these appliances were not operating at full capacity, by
month and by reason (i.e. mechanical issues, no crew, short-crewed, industrial action,
special events, etc.). This should exclude appliances recommissioning post-incident or
callback appliances.
If any data is not available, please detail the reason it is not recorded and outline any plans
Fire and Emergency New Zealand has to improve data collection and address issues
contributing to appliances being out of service or short-crewed.
Out of service
Fire and Emergency records appliance availability by callsign. When a frontline appliance is out of
service, any relief appliance deployed to replace it uses the same callsign. Our systems do not
record the hours during which a relief appliance was substituting for a frontline appliance in a way
that can be separated from the frontline appliance’s own availability record.
As a result, Fire and Emergency does not hold information identifying the number of hours that
appliances were not operating at full capacity once relief appliance usage is taken into account.
Producing the information you have requested would require reconstructing appliance
movements and availability on a case by case basis and creating a new dataset. This would require
initiating a project to extract, analyse, and compile information that is not currently recorded in a
form that can be provided.
For this reason, this aspect of your request is refused under section 18(g) of the OIA, as the
information requested is not held by Fire and Emergency, and we have no grounds for believing
that it is either held by another agency or more closely connected with the functions of another
agency.
Short-crewed
Due to how information is recorded in our systems we are unable to provide data on how many
incidents were responded to short-crewed. In order to provide data in relation to short-crewed
appliances, we would need to extract appliance information from two sources and cross-examine
the data between sources to confirm its accuracy. For this reason, this aspect of your request is
refused under section 18(f) of the OIA, as the information requested cannot be made available
without substantial collation or research.
Work is underway to improve the recording of data in regards to fleet and we hope with
developments in a fault management platform we may be able to better track appliance
availability in the future.
Additionally, Fire and Emergency is currently preparing information for the Governance and
Administration Select Committee’s inquiry into fleet. The terms of reference for that inquiry
includes “examining any current faults, breakdowns and serviceability issues with the current
fleet”. While we are unable to provide the specific information you have requested, it is likely that
information provided to the Select Committee may touch on similar themes, and will be made
publicly available via the parliamentary website.
You have the right to seek an investigation and review by the Ombudsman of this decision.
Information about how to make a complaint is availab
le at www.ombudsman.parliament.nz or
freephone 0800 802 602.
If you require further information, please email [FENZ request email]
Nāku noa, nā
Aidan Saunders
Manager, Information Requests
