The government’s Cobra emergency committee met to discuss how to respond. After sign off from Prime Minister Andy Burnham’s de facto deputy Louise Haigh, the alert was sent at 19:00 on 14 August.
It triggered a backlash on social media with some vowing to opt out of further alerts in their phone settings, domestic abuse charities and survivors saying victims with hidden phones were put at risk, and confusion about alerts sent multiple times.
Dowden’s worry is that the wildfire alert was more like a public information campaign than an imminent threat to life across all of England and Wales.
“People need to know that when they receive an alert, it is a genuine imminent emergency,” the Conservative MP says. “If that confidence is lost, people will simply ignore it.”
A Cabinet Office report during trials in 2014 warned of this “cry wolf” effect, while pointing out there was strong support among the public for the alerts.
“Alerts should not be issued just because the government wants to be seen to be doing something,” Dowden adds.
The National Fire Chiefs Council said the alert heightened people’s awareness and public behaviour, while government insiders point out wildfire alerts are commonplace in many European countries.
“By following the guidance that was issued, people were able to take the necessary steps to keep themselves safe and front line services recorded a significant decrease in incidents in the following days,” a government spokesperson said.
But Frazer Rhodes, who worked in government across a decade to help build the technology and devise high thresholds for the alerts, feels a review is now necessary to avoid future ones backfiring.
He was in a bar in Halifax, West Yorkshire, with his wife when the sound of pinging phones began echoing around.
“Everybody around was just going, ‘what’s this?’ What’s this?'” he tells us. “Then my wife shouted, ‘he did that’.”
His wife’s joke aside, he said his “immediate thought” was whether it met the threshold for sending one. He explains: “At its heart are three criteria: urgency, severity and certainty. So, in simple terms, how bad, how soon, and how sure?”
Rhodes thinks the wildfire alert arguably met the bar for urgency and severity, but perhaps not for certainty of a threat to life.
“It should be very rare to get an alert,” he points out.
