FIRE Chiefs have condemned Home Office figures which reveal that more people were injured in fires in Greater Manchester last year than anywhere else in the country.

A Home Office survey discovered there were more non-fatal fire injuries in the area than anywhere else -- well above the average for England and double the casualties for Greater London.

Greater Manchester's non-fatal casualty rate is put at 821 for every million people -- by far the worst in the country. Merseyside is second with 581 casualties per million, Lancashire has 418 and Cheshire 236.

The survey also found that almost a quarter of all households in Greater Manchester did not have a working smoke alarm, with families arguing they were not at risk, or that they had not got around to buying one.

The Home Office said families most resistant to installing fire alarms included poor families, adults living alone, smokers and Asian households.

But fire chiefs in Greater Manchester dismissed the Home Office criticism.

Divisional Officer Dave Lewis said: "The reality is a less gloomy picture than has been painted. "The figures must be taken in context. We are one of the few brigades in the country who use all figures of injury in calculating casualty figures, while others base their statistics solely upon hospitalisations.

"There has been a great deal of work put in on our part. For instance, since the late 1970s we have dramatically reduced the number of fatalities from more than 80 a year to just over 20."

Greater Manchester fire chiefs say the number of casualties requiring hospital treatment after fires in the county has been reduced from 733 in 2001 to 639 last year. In Bolton, the figure has also been cut -- from 68 in 2001 to 64 last year.

Mr Lewis also said that, according to market research conducted in Greater Manchester, smoke alarm ownership increased from 78 per cent to 87 per cent between 1998 and 2002.

Greater Manchester is also shown to have one of the worst records for malicious fire alarms -- 6,000 out of 24,000 false fire calls in 2001.

The number of bogus emergency calls may have been high, but has been greatly reduced over the last ten years from 15,000 down to 6,000 in Greater Manchester. Mr Lewis said: "People must take into account that this reduction was set against a political background of a £250 loss in funding for every emergency call lost. But morally it was the right thing to do.

Fire chiefs have revealed that the number of bogus calls in Bolton was reduced from 949 a year in 2001 to 775 last year.Greater Manchester's fire chief Barry Dixon said the region's firefighters not only fought fires, they also played a major role in preventing fires and were increasingly playing a medical role at incidents.

Mr Dixon said much of the education and community work firefighters did was unpaid and outside normal working hours. The public in Bolton -- and the rest of Greater Manchester -- had a fire service to be proud of.