A young family had a lucky escape when an unattended chip pan set fire to their flat in the early hours of this morning.

Fire crews were alerted to the incident, which occurred at a block of flats in Tudor Court, off Manchester Road, when an automatic alarm was triggered at around 3am.

When fire fighters arrived at the scene they found smoke billowing from a seventh floor flat and a woman clutching a small child screaming for help.

The woman said that her partner and child were still trapped in the smoke filled flat. Fire fighters wearing breathing apparatus extinguished the fire in the kitchen and rescued a man in his thirties who had been overcome by smoke while trying to tackle the blaze. They were unable to locate the child but after speaking to the woman again they discovered that she had been confused and that there was no second child.

Both the child and the man were taken to Bradford Royal Infirmary suffering with smoke inhalation but their condition was not thought to be life threatening.