The potential for prosecution or financial ruin lurks just around the corner for all landlords, property managers and owners of businesses. Almost four years after the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005 (RRO) came into effect, James Truscott considers the question as to whether there is a sufficient understanding of how the law affects the business or premises.

Apart from loss of life and the destruction of property, failure to comply with the requirements of the RRO can lead to fines, imprisonment and disqualification. This applies to directors, managers and company secretaries.

A number of recent high-profile cases involving breaches of fire-safety laws and resultant heavy fines might suggest that duty-holders haven’t yet come to terms with this ‘new’ legislation.

In the last year alone, we saw the largest fine to date under the RRO as fashion retailer New Look was fined £400,000.

Ensuring buildings are safe for the people who use and access them is non-negotiable, and the fire authorities remain committed to enforcing fire legislation by carrying out inspections, and prosecuting serious, or repeated breaches.

Competency

One key aspect of the RRO is that the role of the risk assessor be undertaken by a competent person. Specifically someone with sufficient training and experience, or knowledge to assist properly in undertaking the necessary preventative and protective measures.

Most organisations involved in managing public premises (e.g. retail, leisure and entertainment) recognise that specific skills and competency are required to carry out fire risk assessments.

However, many employers and landlords do not give the same consideration to office or residential premises, where there may also be a large number of people present and at risk from fire. For some of these premises, such as high-rise office or residential blocks, the level of knowledge and skill required to carry out a suitable and sufficient fire risk assessment will be significantly higher than for small units.

Some of those currently carrying out fire risk assessments are simply not competent to do so, resulting in inadequate assessments – the consequences of which become apparent only when it’s too late, and a fire has claimed lives and livelihoods.

All too often, the lowest-cost solution to assessment is chosen, which encourages the assessor to use a simple checklist approach. While this may be sufficient in some circumstances it is usually a false economy, because the aforementioned consequences of an inadequate risk assessment are so high.

In addition to the question of competence, it is important to recognise that the risk assessment itself is only the first step in the process. There is a common methodology for meeting obligations under nearly all H&S legislation (including the RRO) whereby one must identify hazards associated with such work, assess the risks involved, and put measures in place to avoid or control the risks - such measures possibly including instruction, training, supervision, protective equipment…etc. Steps then need to be taken to check that control measures are used, and to review the risk assessment from time to time to ensure it is still adequate.

If only it were that easy!

This sounds fairly straightforward. Many landlords, for example, will delegate the risk assessment task to a managing agent/RMCs and work under the assumption that they are covered under the law. Not the case!

It seems fairly unambiguous that responsibility to ensure that landlord’s H&S obligations are met lies legally with the landlord. Accordingly, if said landlord is unable to say whether necessary and relevant duties have been performed on his behalf, then he is unlikely to be able to demonstrate that he had done everything incumbent upon him to ensure the elimination or reduction of risks.

At the least then, the landlord needs to monitor the performance of its agents – appoint and relax does not work!

For those who are responsible for a large number of properties, or an entire estate, it can be difficult to form an overall picture of fire-safety deficiencies, priorities, and resource allocation across the organisation, and capture it in a management plan. Indeed, monitoring individual risk assessments for each building can be administratively challenging and fundamentally ineffective in dealing with the risk. 

In response to this challenge, many organisations use a fire risk-management database, which holds all their fire risk assessments, and allows them to be analysed at various levels. For example, property-specific; by estate or division; or organisation-wide. A good database will automatically generate action plans specific to each property, outlining the unique tasks pertaining to each Responsible Person and will also provide the facility to collate common actions across multiple premises, which facilitates cost estimation and, ultimately, procurement.

Incorporating fire risk management properly into existing safety management systems, or applying a management system approach to fire safety management, provides an efficient, structured and effective way of managing this risk.

Meeting the requirements of the RRO is relatively straightforward, provided that a suitable and sufficient fire risk assessment is undertaken by a competent person, and a plan put in place and implemented to address actions arising from the assessment.

The costs of corrective actions identified in the action plans are generally not prohibitive – more often than not, issues for which companies are prosecuted are a direct result of poor management procedures and training, which would have been relatively easy to correct in the first place.    

See www.cardinusproperty.com for the white paper on ‘Managing Fire Safety in Commercial and Residential Premises’.

2006 Fire Stats

In 2006, UK fire and rescue services attended a total of 426,000 fires. Just over three-quarters of these were external, e.g. vehicle, refuse, grass etc. The remaining 89,460 fires were in business premises or within private dwellings (including blocks of flats or multi-tenanted buildings).

If we consider the direct impact on people, these fires resulted in 491 deaths. This was the lowest since 1959 and continued the downward trend since the peak of 1,096 deaths in 1979.

The majority of these fire-related deaths occurred in private dwellings, the highest fatality rates being the elderly (80+), males, and those living in Scotland. Also in 2006, non-fatal casualties resulting from fire fell for the seventh successive year to 13,800, with the North West region having the highest casualty rate.

Casualties involving fire fighters dropped to 350, although there have recently been some high profile incidents in which fire fighters have been killed or injured, such as the fire in a block of flats which occurred earlier this year in south-east London.

The data relating to the causes of fires show that in dwellings, over 80% of fires start accidentally, while in non-dwellings this figure was 60%. This suggests that a large number were, or could have been, started deliberately.

As a result of fires in properties other than dwellings, 37 people were killed and 1,500 injured, representing rates of 1 death and 40 injuries per 1,000 fires.