BUSINESSES in North Yorkshire are enduring long delays for fire safety certificates, with waiting times still well above the local fire authority's own targets.

Despite significant improvements in recent years, applications by shops, offices, hotels, and nightspots still face an average wait of nearly 70 days.

This is despite North Yorkshire Fire Authority setting a nominal target to deal with all requests within 60 days.

The latest figures have seen waiting times drop by a week. This follows a slashing of delays in 2002-03 from 148 to 76 days.

But in 2002-03 Shropshire Fire Authority managed to keep waits to just a week.

However, North Yorkshire fire safety manager Ian Bitcon said his authority's earlier figures were misleading.

He said: "We had some difficulty initially with how we recorded the time pending applications were under our control.

"We were counting days when the ball wasn't in our court so to speak - when the application may have been in the hands of the applicant or architects, or we were waiting for work to be done.

"In the case of the 146-day average in 2001-02, our calculations were even worse than now."

The Government has withdrawn plans to release the national 2004-05 figures next month, due to the widespread unreliability of data.

But under new plans due to come into force in April next year, the certificates will be scrapped in favour of regulations aimed at further cutting waiting times.

Under the Regulatory Reform Order fire safety will become the responsibility of business owners, with individual risk-assessment plans drawn up by the proprietor replacing one statutory regulation for all.

Len Cruddas, chief executive of York and North Yorkshire Chamber of Commerce said that, despite the figures, local businesses have not complained of significant delays.

He added: "We are looking forward to the introduction of the new regulations and hope they will further reduce the waiting times."

Updated: 14:26 Wednesday, March 16, 2005