As an employer, you are responsible for the safety of your employees, and in particular with regard to safety from fire. The Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005 places certain responsibilities on the “responsible person”, one of them being that you must carry out, and regularly review, a fire risk assessment in your business.
If you think about it, this is a sensible requirement, but the problem is that most people have no real idea how to go about it. In 2006, the government printed a number of guides regarding fire safety in different types of premises, and these were reprinted in 2015.
If you look at the one concerning office and shops, as an example, the government quotes figures from 2004 showing that there were over 33,400 fires attended by fire and rescue services in non-domestic buildings, and they killed 38 people and injured over 1,300. Furthermore, the overall cost was put at £2.5 billion. Many businesses do not re-open after a fire. Those are sobering statistics.
However, as an employer, the case is that you may well not be qualified to undertake a fire safety assessment. Many people wouldn’t even know where to begin. To give you some insight, the government guide to fire safety in offices and shops runs to 132 pages! No doubt many of the guides to other premises are as long, or even longer. To be fair, the government states that “your existing fire safety arrangements may not be the same as the recommendations used in this guide but, as long as you can demonstrate that they meet an equivalent standard of fire safety, they are likely to be acceptable.” Truth to be told, you are probably best off following the guide, because then you know that you can’t get it wrong.
Of course, the simple answer is to wipe your hands of the whole business and let our qualified fire safety assessors at UK-Fire Risk Assessments do it for you. Our team has over 20 years of experience in the fire safety industry and assessors have undertook training at the Fire Service College at Moreton in Marsh. We provide fire safety assessments throughout the UK and our aim is to ensure that your business and premises are compliant with the Fire Safety Order 2005.