More than 30 bogus fire callers have been disconnected in the last month as the fire service steps up its blitz on telephone timewasters.

West Yorkshire Fire Service, which last year received 2,500 malicious call-outs, has teamed up with mobile phone operators including Orange, Vodafone and O2 to crack down on the menace of bogus 999 calls.

Thirty-two mobile phone numbers have been passed to network providers for disconnection so far - the latest earlier this week.

Firefighters from Brighouse and Cleckheaton rushed to Shirley Manor Primary School, Wyke, on Monday night after a call to say the building was ablaze. No fire could be found on arrival but the caller's details were later traced and passed to the mobile phone company for disconnection.

Councillor Anthony Niland, Bradford Council's lead member of the West Yorkshire Fire Authority, welcomed the tough measures.

"This is excellent news and I am delighted the mobile phone company has done this for us," he said. "I hope it sends out a clear message that if people do this sort of thing we can catch them and even prosecute them."

He believed there were psychological reasons why people made bogus calls but claimed the majority were made by people aged between 18 and 44, not youths.

"Some people like to see fire engines racing up and down, which puts firefighters and other people's lives at risk. It is not acceptable when they could be used to save the lives of real people in real incidents," he added.

A fire service spokesman said: "West Yorkshire Fire and Rescue Services receive about 3,000 hoax 999 calls each year, involving a huge waste of resources and unnecessary turn-outs.

"All calls are recorded and monitored and we have an agreement with mobile phone companies that where there is evidence of malicious calls being made from one of their phones it will be cut off."

He said there had already been a significant reduction in the annual number of bogus calls made across the district in the last decade, from a peak of about 8,000 a year. But he warned pranksters to watch out as the fire service was taking action to cut figures by a further five per cent each year.