London’s e-bike and e-scooter fires hit a record 206 in 2025 — what the data means

What happened

On 28 January 2026, London Fire Brigade published its full-year data for 2025, confirming that firefighters attended 206 e-bike and e-scooter fires across the capital during the year — an average of 17 a month, and the highest annual total since the Brigade began tracking this category. Around 83% of these fires (171) involved an e-bike, with the remaining 35 involving e-scooters.

The Brigade also confirmed that two people died in these fires during 2025, bringing the total number of fatalities in London since 2023 to five. One detail the Brigade has repeatedly stressed: none of the five people who died owned the e-bike or e-scooter that caused the fire that killed them. In its release, the Brigade renewed its public call for government to introduce firmer product regulation, referencing the Product Regulation and Metrology (PRAM) Act (Royal Assent, summer 2025) and confirming that its Deputy Commissioner had written to the responsible minister in December 2025 urging faster progress on secondary legislation.

Our read on it

This is first and foremost a fire-safety story rather than a legal one, and London Fire Brigade's own framing makes that clear: most of these fires are linked to poor battery build quality, counterfeit components, physical damage, overcharging, or mismatched and incompatible chargers, many of them during home charging. Safe charging habits and buying from reputable retailers materially reduce the risk.

Where it does meet our work is when a fire is traced to a specific defective product, a landlord's fire-safety failures, or a workplace charging setup — because in those cases the person affected (who, as the Brigade's own data shows, is very often not the device's owner) has a real question to ask about who was responsible. The answer depends entirely on the individual facts, and the fire service's own incident report is where we would start.

Read more

• Original source: London Fire Brigade, "Record number of e-bike and e-scooter fires across London in 2025" (28 January 2026)
• Local coverage of the same release: Haringey Community Press, Barnet Post
• Our full sourced data tracker: UK lithium battery fire statistics, which reproduces London Fire Brigade's full 2017–2025 year-by-year table and borough breakdown, with our methodology.

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