THOUSANDS of pounds have been spent on fire services to help move obese people in Lancashire over five years.

And the number of cases nationwide nearly doubled over the same period, with unions saying ambulance staff and equipment are being pushed to their limits.

Figures from the Home Office show that the Lancashire Fire and Rescue Service attended 98 call-outs for bariatric assistance - helping ambulance crews to move obese people - between April 2012 and March 2017.

While they represent a small portion of the service’s 15,000 non-fire incidents over the last few years, the vast majority of call-outs took more than 45 minutes to resolve. Of those, three incidents were over four hours long.

Firefighters often need lifting equipment and special slings to transport people, and sometimes remove windows, walls and banisters.

Freedom of Information requests to some fire and rescue services have shown that the average cost of a call-out is £400. For some non-emergency cases, services have been able to recover costs since legislation was put in place in 2004.

Bariatric assistance call-outs have become more common in recent years, with the Lancashire Fire and Rescue Service recording 34 incidents in 2016-17. In 2012-13, there were just eight.

Across England, fire and rescue services attended 851 bariatric assistance cases in 2016-17, a 98 per cent increase on five years previously.

Unison’s national ambulance officer Alan Lofthouse said that judgement on whether bariatric assistance was required was made by paramedics on a case-by-case basis.

He said: “Obesity can be a real issue for ambulance staff trying to help critically-ill patients.

“Ambulance equipment has a safe working load, and pushing the limit puts patients and staff at risk."

“In an emergency a paramedic has to make a judgment call on how best to help an obese patient, and in some instances this means calling for assistance from other services.”

Tam Fry, the chairman of the National Obesity Forum, which aims to raise awareness of obesity in the country, said: “The leap in the frequency that fire crews have to winch very obese people from their homes is truly shocking.

“It’s the inevitable result of decades of Westminster failing to produce any strategy to help lessen the chances of the fat getting fatter.”