An 18-year-old man and his teenage girlfriend had a lucky escape after a fire started in a laundry basket outside their bedroom.

The man awoke to the smell of smoke filling the house in Booth Street, Cleckheaton, at 2.09am yesterday.

Four other family members, a man and three women, were downstairs at the time of the fire.

One rushed upstairs to find 4ft-high flames pouring from the laundry basket in the hall and called the emergency services.

The family put out the fire before a fire crew from Cleckheaton arrived.

Crew manager Wayne Ogden said the house did not have smoke alarms and the man was “very lucky” to have woken when he did.

Mr Ogden said: “It was a considerable fire, with a lot of heat and smoke damage in the hall and landing. Another five minutes and the young man and his girlfriend would have been trapped in the upstairs room and we would have had to use ladders to pull them out.”