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If you are an employer, the law says that you are responsible for fire safety in the workplace, both for your staff, customers, and any other visitors. You are also responsible if you own the building, are the landlord, an occupier, or anyone else in control of the premises such as a building manager or managing agent.
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The Laws Pertaining To Fire Safety And Responsible Persons When you are an employer, you are responsible for fire safety in your premises, whether that is a workplace or other non-domestic premises. You are also responsible if you are the owner, the landlord, an occupier, or anyone else with control of the premises such as a building manager, managing agent, or facilities manager for instance. You are known as the “responsible person” according to the law, and it is possible for there to be more than one responsible person. For example, there could be four businesses in the same building, each with its’ own suite of offices, in which case there would be four responsible persons – the owner or manager of each business. Each is responsible for his or her own suite and has a responsibility to work with the others, because there will be communal areas such as corridors, staff washroom facilities, and so on.
The Fire Safety Order also applies if you have any paying guests, for example a guesthouse or B & B, or you own a self-catering property. As the responsible person you must: carry out a fire risk assessment of the premises and review it regularly tell staff or their representatives about the risks you’ve identified put in place, and maintain, appropriate fire safety measures plan for an emergency provide staff information, fire safety instruction, and training Just the first of those can be complicated enough. Even if you only own a small shop with a half dozen staff, there will be stockrooms and storerooms. There may be no back entrance so the escape route would be only through the front door. You may not have a lot of space in the stock rooms, but nevertheless you must keep flammable materials separate from any possible sources of fire. You also have to allow for the fact that a staff member might pop into the stock room for a crafty cigarette, even if not permitted, and which, if not properly extinguished could cause a fire. You can readily begin to see that undertaking a fire risk assessment can be no easy task. Now consider the situation if you have, say 250 employees. Where the building is shared there may be more than one responsible person in which case you need to co-ordinate your fire safety plans to ensure that everyone in the building is safe and that escape routes are all in working order – fire doors and so on – and corridors are not blocked by stock, staff bicycles, or anything else. For common or shared areas, the responsible person is the landlord, managing agent, or freeholder. Once you have carried out a fire risk assessment you need to review it regularly. The law does not define what “regular” means, but common advice is to review once a year. In addition, you should also carry out a fire drill once a year to ensure that everyone knows what to do and where to go
Furthermore, you should review your fire safety assessment every time something changes. So for instance, you might decide to move all the machinery on your factory floor around to provide a better working experience. However, by doing this you might block an escape route or cause some other form of danger that didn’t exist beforehand. If you are a landlord who owns a building divided into flats, you must carry out a fire risk assessment for flats. This applies even if it is only a house divided into two flats, and your responsibility is for the communal areas and includes the front door of each flat. You are not responsible for the interior of each flat because it seems that the law accepts that you cannot be responsible for what your tenants might do. Even so, carrying out a fire risk assessment for flats can be quite an undertaking if you have a high-rise building with a lot of flats in it. As you can readily see, undertaking a fire risk assessment can be extremely complicated, especially if you have no training – which is the case with most people –and don’t really know exactly what to look for. This is why many people today uses the services of outside companies who are specialists in fire risk assessment and DO know what could cause a risk. By doing that, you can be confident that you are compliant with the law.
