Firefighters rescued seven people following a blaze at a flat yesterday.

Emergency services rushed to the block of flats in Bennett Way, opposite the Tesco supermarket, in South Wigston, at about 3.35pm.

It followed a call from someone trapped in a second floor flat to say smoke had filled part of the building.

Firefighters put out the fire, which started in the kitchen of a ground-floor flat, and led two adults and five children from the second-floor premises to safety.

Police cordoned off the area and paramedics also attended the scene.

Two of the children were taken to hospital suffering from smoke inhalation.

The cause of the fire was an electrical fault in a water pump in the flat kitchen.

The occupants of the ground-floor flat were not in at the time of the incident.

Wigston fire station manager Mark Elliott said: "It was reported as a house fire with people inside, and at the time our control room was on the phone to the people in the flat above, trying to keep them calm.

"When the crews got there, there was smoke issuing from the windows and doors.

"We managed to gain access through the front door, located the fire and damped it down. We went to the second floor and led them to safety – the children were carried down and the adults were able to walk.

"The fire wasn't serious, it was the smoke that was quite serious. They couldn't get out the flat because the stairwell was full of smoke.

"It probably took about 15 minutes to put out the fire."

Station manager Elliott said that he wanted to highlight the importance of having a smoke alarm in homes.