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1593
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19/11/2025 12:00 am
17/12/2025 12:00 am
Assets, Staffing and employment
Occupational Exposure to PFAS in Firefighting
This is a FOIA request. Please confirm/provide the following:
ï‚· Any documents (including, but not limited to any policies, memos, communications, advice) regarding PFAS generally and/or PFAS exposure.
ï‚· Whether you have, at any point, conducted any testing for PFAS levels in blood on any firefighters within your workforce.
ï‚· If you have conducted testing, please confirm the type of testing carried out and provide the data results.
ï‚· If you have not conducted testing, please confirm on what basis this decision has been made.
For the avoidance of doubt, this is a FOIA request. It is well established that Article 8
ECHR imposes a duty on public authorities to provide information to the public which
enables them to assess the risks to which they are exposed: Di Sarno v Italy (App. no.
30765/08, ECtHR, 10 January 2012) at §107 and 113; Guerra v Italy (1998) 26 EHRR 357
at §60l Verein KlimaSeniorinnen Schweiz v Switzerland (2024) 79 EHRR 1 at §§553
554. Occupational exposure to PFAS would clearly fall under this category.
Thank you for your Environmental Information Regulations (EIR) request regarding potential PFAS (Per and Polyfluoroalkyl Substances) blood testing for firefighters employed by Shropshire Fire and Rescue Service (SFRS).
Please find our response below.
1. The Service does not hold any policies specific to PFAS or PFAS containing foams. Firefighting foam is referenced only within general technical guidance documents relating to foam production and equipment, such as information on the use of foam branches, foam pumps, foam inductors and foam generators, as well as within our broader environmental policy. These documents do not provide PFAS specific guidance or relate to PFAS exposure.
The Service does not hold incident level data regarding the historical use of PFAS containing foams.
For context, the Service previously used Solberg foam products and later transitioned to Moussol products. We are able to release the attached product information sheets under the Environmental Information Regulations 2004, as they constitute environmental information and no applicable exceptions apply. However, these documents were product information supplied by the manufacturers and do not constitute internal PFAS related policies or guidance. Please note that these materials may be subject to third party copyright, and reuse beyond private study or non-commercial research may require permission from the copyright owner.
2. Shropshire Fire and Rescue Service has not carried out any PFAS blood testing on firefighters within our workforce.
3. As no PFAS testing has been undertaken by the Service, we hold no information relating to the type of tests used, nor any data results.
Under Regulation 12(4)(a) EIR, we may refuse a request for information we do not hold; however, in the interests of transparency, we can confirm that no such information exists because no testing has been conducted.
4. Our current Occupational Health Provider has confirmed that PFAS blood testing is not included within the occupational health services they deliver to the Service. We are not aware whether any of our previous Occupational Health providers may have undertaken such tests historically; PFAS testing was not specified within those contracts, and given that it is not part of the services offered by our current provider, it is reasonable to assume that previous providers were also unlikely to have carried out PFAS testing. However, we cannot state this with certainty.
