Give me a child with burning ambition...

Arsonists can start their careers very early - sometimes at only two or three years old. Now fire fighters are testing new ways to rescue young pyromaniacs before the flames take hold. Anna Moore investigates

Sue Thomson was worried about her nine-year-old son. For the past month, Daniel had been disappearing with a gang of boys, to return stinking of smoke. Bonfire smoke, not cigarette smoke. Sue's matches were forever going missing, and upstairs, she was uncovering burnt paper buried in bins and singed circles in the carpet, hidden beneath books.

"I didn't know what to do," she remembers. Daniel had been drawn to fire two years before, but had seemed to grow out of it. "This time, when confronted, he'd deny everything. In the end, I called the fire brigade, though I'd no idea if they would help."

They did. Within 48 hours, a fireman and a fire safety officer had been dispatched to her home, armed with books, cards and videos, ready to give Daniel counselling.

If he hadn't lived in Newcastle, Daniel might not have received this instant, specialised response. The Tyne and Wear Fire Service pioneered the Juvenile Firesetters Programme (JFP) partly because it suffers the worst arson problem inBritain - 70 per cent of its fires are deliberate compared with a national average of 25 per cent. The problem is most acute in West Newcastle, heavily deprived, and scene of the 1991 "riots". Here, youths start fires, then obstruct fire engines by standing in the road or throwing stones; one engine was hit by a 4ft metal spike. Fire fighters report about one stoning a week, and now wear full armour and helmets - even drivers.

The problem is not confined to Tyne and Wear. In the past eight weeks, four Yorkshire schools have suffered more than pounds 5m of arson damage, including Sheffield's Waltheof High School, burnt to the ground by a gang of youths. Countrywide, school arson, mostly started by pupils, costs pounds 42m annually. There are more serious arson attacks in schools than any other buildings.

Since most young arsonists start their careers at home, the JFP attempts to catch it early. It was developed by Tyne and Wear's divisional officer Ken Horn, and safety adviser Anne Eglintine, working with Andrew Muckley, a psychologist at Aycliffe Young Person's Centre in Durham.

It began in 1991: Horn was approached by a social worker about a West Newcastle family. Two brothers, aged five and six, were lighting fires in every room. The mother removed all the matches, so they began sticking tapers in the gas fire to get their flames. The mother woke one morning to find the kitchen on fire. Now she couldn't let the boys out of her sight.

This was nothing new. The service was often contacted about "problem children", and sometimes responded with lectures on fire safety, and had considered offering them rides in fire engines (a potentially disastrous response which may be construed as a "reward"). But this letter came in a period of unprecedented arson in Newcastle. "For once, we formulated a 'plan'," Horn explains. "Instead of ticking them off, we'd spend quality time trying to discover what had happened in these little people's lives to start them lighting fires."

In their first hour, Horn advised the mother on safety measures, while Eglintine worked with the children. They played "Fire Man Sam" cards, looked at pictures, and eventually the brothers admitted they were being told to light fires by a local boy to gain admittance to a gang. They discussed the boy, the gang, then the fires.

"I spent a long time explaining fire without being frightening," says Eglintine. Everyone watched educational cartoons together, and the boys were left with colouring books. These visits continued over six weeks, during which their behaviour improved until, almost to Horn and Eglintine's amazement, the fires stopped.

Since then, the JFP has counselled 92 children, 88 of them boys, mostly between five and nine. Only four have "reoffended".

Muckley is not surprised by the success of this simple formula. After 20 years working with young offenders, he's found arson the most treatable behaviour, since it offers few "pay off". "If you steal a car, you get a fast ride, then you can sell it. If you start a fire, you gain almost nothing." In his experience, most arsonists have lit fires since childhood, developing in stages, long before they're noticed. The first stage - the "fire player", the infant who strikes matches - is the most common. Usually parents intervene with a strong message, keep matches out of reach, and children learn. If not, they can progress to "curiosity fire setters", where starting fires is part of their character, initiated by moods, like boredom or anger. The fires then move out the home to skips, derelict buildings, or empty schools. In Muckley's words, "They graduate from fire players to fire setters to arsonists, as others graduate from beavers to boy cubs to scouts."

Muckley believes fire fighters are ideal interventionists. "They're conditioned to 'instant response' - there's none of this waiting-list stuff. Social workers will rationalise their workload, start a file, make an 'assessment', have a case conference. Then they'll refer it to a psychologist, who repeats the process. Meanwhile, the child gets worse."

The JFP works on the basis that some children just need quality time with someone who can specifically address fire setting. "Since it's a barely developed area in social and psychological fields, fire fighters know more about it than almost anyone else," argues Muckley. "They're also extremely skilled with people. They don't just fight fires, they talk to the victims, help them through extraordinary crisis. They work as a team with other emergency services, so they're good networkers. And they're not idealists - they accept their limitations."

After their first success, Horn and Eglintine approached Muckley to establish proper guidelines. Since then, he's helped 34 fire services start JFPs of some capacity, training all volunteer fire fighters at no cost, helping them identify cases that may fall beyond their remit. Pointers include how long the behaviour has gone on for, the severity of the fires and the child's responsiveness. In difficult cases, Muckley urges fire fighters to "shop around", and outlines options from counsellors and social services to educational and health professionals.

By now, Horn and Eglintine are quick to recognise the cases they can't help. "Sometimes, the house is in squalor, the family's in chaos, and we have to step back, and contact other agencies," says Horn. Other times, the children are too young. They were once called to see a two year old who'd begun by running lighters across the floor, then stuck teddy in the gas fire, finally setting his mother's bed alight. "We couldn't do much with him, we just advised on safety measures.

"There's no magic formula. On God's earth, we can't wipe away the problems some of these children suffer. But we can usually address the fire setting. We hope to see the benefits in the next teenage generation. There's no doubt we've saved some lives on the way."

The biggest obstacle to JFP is finance. The Home Office have refused to support the scheme, leaving fire services to run it from their depleted budgets, which are allocated according to number of call-outs. A recent Audit Commission report criticised this short-sightedness as a "disincentive to pursue initiatives that can reduce incidence of fire". Pointing to Britain's steady rise in arson, and noting the fact that household fires increase with the number of children, it singled out the JFP for special praise. The Commission urged the Home Office to "redress the balance between fire fighting and fire safety" and make it a statutory duty for fire services to educate towards fire prevention.

Unless this happens, warns Tyne and Wear's chief fire officer Bill Dunlop, the JFP's days are numbered. Faced with a pounds 1.9m shortfall for the coming financial year, he says, "If it continues like this, the child counselling will have to go. Though most of it's voluntary, when you're hard up, you save every penny. In any case, preventive work loses us money. Having just run a successful campaign against malicious call-outs, we're now liable for even less funding! The system's nonsense."

At least in the Thomson household, there's one person with a lot less on her mind. Daniel admitted to the fires in his first session. A week on, the signs are good. "Maybe he didn't realise the seriousness until someone of authority actually walked into his bedroom," says Sue. "He hasn't mentioned it to me, but yesterday, I heard him tell his friend, 'I used to light fires.' Believe me, I had the best night's sleep in ages."