BUDGET cuts and strikes have been blamed for an increase in the time taken for firefighters to respond to 999 calls across Merseyside.

Fire Authority figures out this week show the average response time was five minutes and 24 seconds in 2013/14, compared with five minutes, 23 seconds in 2012/2013.

The attendance target of reaching 90% of life risk incidents within the set 10-minute limit was also exceeded.

But the average time for a second fire engine to attend an incident was seven minutes and 51 seconds in 2013/14, compared to an average time of seven minutes 22 seconds in 2012/13, an increase of 29 seconds.

Firefighters have also been on strike 40 times as part of an ongoing dispute over pensions industrial.

Merseyside Fire Service has also made £20m in cuts over the last four years, resulting in the loss of around 300 firefighters and 14 engines.

The Merseyside average attendance time is for "life risk" incidents, accidental dwelling fires, incidents involving hazardous materials, road traffic collisions, commercial fires and other rescues.

Chief fire officer Dan Stephens said: “Our firefighters are committed to responding to incidents as quickly and as safely as they can.

"As a service we robustly manage our response times and in particular our ‘alert to mobile’ times which can make a difference to the overall time it takes us to respond from receiving the call to booking in attendance.

“The industrial action will have contributed towards some of the additional time taken for a second fire appliance to attend during 2013/14 as we had, on average, four less appliances available during the strikes than normal but the response times are higher than the average for England.

"As a result of cuts to our budget we have had to reduce the number of firefighters by almost half over the last decade and the number of wholetime crewed fire appliances has reduced from 42 to 28.”