Mothers are being urge to join the fire service as the industry moves away from tackling blazes towards flying drones, tracing dementia patients and training dogs to find missing persons.

Lancashire Fire and Rescue Service says many women, especially those with children, believe they are not strong or fit enough to match male firefighters, or think they don’t have the time to commit to the role.

But the service said its own female firefighters were easily able to keep up with male colleagues and wanted to send out the message that: ‘If you think you can’t handle the pressure, meet the fitness standards, change your career...yes you can.”

Fewer than six per cent of Britain’s 32,340 firefighters are women which the service says is largely due to misconceptions of what the job entails. Many mothers are now ‘retained firefighters’, meaning they are on-call rather than working full-time.

Advancements in safety and prevention mean the fire service now typically spends just 10 per cent of its time putting out fires or tackling other emergencies, and instead mostly deals with, education, enforcement, locating missing persons, breaking into homes to reach injured people, or rescuing animals.