Multi-agency Incident Transfer: Faster Control Room Information Sharing

Powered by data from Ordnance Survey, the service cuts the delay in moving incident details across emergency control rooms.

Rollout Across England’s Fire Service

A new digital communications capability is being deployed across England’s fire and rescue services to let blue-light agencies coordinate more effectively during live incidents. The upgrade is designed to trim precious minutes from response times during multi-agency incidents. Developed after a Grenfell Tower Inquiry recommendation, the solution uses Ordnance Survey data and was produced with British APCO, the leading public safety body.

How the Standard Works

MAIT stands for Multi-Agency Incident Transfer. In practical terms, it is a standardised method for transferring incident information between emergency service control rooms so that one organisation can securely share structured details with one or many partner control rooms without rekeying the same data.

Known as the MAIT standard, this incident transfer approach lets emergency service control rooms share information and send incident details instantly to one or many partner control rooms through a common, secure channel. The platform structures information in a consistent format, validates what is shared, and supports operational procedures for routine handover and escalation so the data remains accurate and protected.

In systems engineering terms, MAIT functions as an integration and data-exchange standard: it defines how systems package, validate, and pass incident messages between different control room technologies while preserving a consistent data model. Implementing it typically involves agreeing local governance and access rules, mapping control room fields to the standard format, integrating via secure interfaces, running end-to-end testing with partner rooms, and onboarding users with procedures for when to push updates, how to route to multiple recipients, and how to handle validation errors.

On standards, certifications, and compliance, MAIT implementations are commonly aligned with organisational information security and public-sector requirements, including UK GDPR and the Data Protection Act 2018, as well as security controls such as encryption in transit, access control, audit logging, and secure retention practices. Organisations may also align with recognised security frameworks and certifications used in government and critical services environments, such as ISO/IEC 27001 and Cyber Essentials, where applicable.

On data protection and privacy, the standard’s use of structured fields, validation, and controlled routing supports data minimisation and accurate sharing by helping control rooms send only what is required for an operational purpose, to authorised recipients, with traceability through logging. The secure channel and validation steps are intended to reduce misaddressed messages, incomplete records, and accidental disclosure during fast-moving incidents.

“MAIT investigation” is not a standard term within this context, but it is sometimes used informally to describe post-incident review activity where transferred incident records, timestamps, and routing logs help reconstruct what information was shared, when it was shared, and with whom.

AI is not a requirement of MAIT, but MAIT-enabled ecosystems can make it easier to apply AI safely to incident workflows because information is more consistently structured. Potential uses include automated classification and prioritisation, entity extraction from free text, de-duplication of repeat updates, anomaly detection for conflicting details, and assistive summaries to help operators confirm what changed before sending an update.

Funding and National Deployment

Government has funded implementation and early operating costs for MAIT within England’s fire service. The National Fire Chiefs Council is coordinating adoption across all 44 services, covering 34 fire control centres.27 services live.19 control centres live.Most remaining sites expected online before March ends.

Official Comment

Keith Donnelly, Head of Fire Service Operational Communications at the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, said the initiative addresses how control rooms access information held by host rooms.A Phase 1 outcome from the Grenfell Tower Inquiry called for solutions that help control rooms obtain information available to host locations. MAIT provides a rapid way for fire control centres to exchange critical detail with peer centres and, once connected, with other blue-light partners. Since go-live, it has supported multiple operational incidents, and feedback from the fire service has been strongly positive.