Do you know who is responsible for fire safety in the workplace, or understand who a ‘responsible person’ is under UK law?
If not, this page is for you.
Understanding the "responsible person" under UK law
In the UK, a workplace must have at least one person who is legally responsible for fire safety; the ‘responsible person’. This is usually the employer, landlord, business owner, or building manager.
It is their responsibility to implement safety measures, maintain staff training, and manage fire risks throughout all of the properties within their portfolio. This can be done directly or through delegating tasks to others.
Legal duties and accountability at work
To ensure that a building is safe from fire, a ‘responsible person’ must do the following things:
Conduct a risk assessment that is regularly reviewed
Implement safety measures such as alarms, extinguishers, and emergency lighting
Create an evacuation plan that is shared with all staff
Test all fire safety equipment to ensure it is in good working order
Provide fire safety training to all staff, including regular fire drills
Should a fire occur on the premises, and it is found that the safety measures in place were inadequate, the ‘responsible person’ is held legally responsible.
The legal responsibility cannot be delegated, and failure to to provide adequate safety measures can result in unlimited fines or imprisonment.
Conducting the fire risk assessment
Conducting a fire risk assessment is an involved process that must include a great deal of technical detail.
There are 5 key stages to running and maintaining an effective fire risk assessment.
First you must complete a thorough survey of the building, identifying every potential fire risk that is present. All potential ignition, fuel, and oxygen sources should be logged, as part of the site survey.
The second stage is one of identifying people who may be at risk. Anyone that uses the building, and would be considered more vulnerable (children, elderly or has a disability) should be highlighted at this stage.
For stage 3, you need to evaluate the risks that are found, and implement safety measures to reduce, or completely remove the risk. This includes installing fire extinguishers, fire alarms and fire doors where necessary.
In the fourth stage of a risk assessment, you need to record all of your findings, provide training to staff, and create an emergency plan. Every hazard you have found, and what actions you have taken to remedy them must be documented.
The fifth and final stage of a risk assessment is updating it. A risk assessment is not a static document, it must be reviewed and updated annually, and any time that a building’s use or layout changes.
Fire safety training and employee awareness
Fire safety training must be provided when an employee joins a workplace and should be refreshed for all employees annually. Consistent fire drills should also be performed with a full building fire drill taking place at least once a year.
For anyone with mobility issues, a Personal Emergency Evacuation Plan must be developed and documented. All fire drills must be documented including the date on which they were performed.
Shared responsibilities: fire wardens, landlords, and employers
If a building has a landlord and a number of commercial tenants, they must share information to ensure the fire safety of the property. All ‘responsible persons’ within the building must share their contact details and the specific parts of the property that they are responsible for.
Fire risk assessments must align between one another. If the landlord changes or updates the fire alarm system, they must inform their commercial tenants, so that they can update their fire safety training accordingly.
Common areas and escape routes must be kept fire safe through the cooperation of landlords, employers, and fire wardens. Landlords are responsible for ensuring that all common areas and hallways are fire safety compliant. Employers are responsible for ensuring that their employees can reach the escape routes safely, and fire wardens are responsible for regularly checking that escape routes are clear, with fully functional fire safety measures in place.
All three roles are responsible for working together to run a full-building fire drill at least once a year.
Challenges in modern building safety compliance
Building safety is no longer a simple box ticking exercise. It has evolved to become an imperative data-driven process that requires detailed information and highly accurate reporting. There is now a requirement for all workplaces to have a digital golden thread of fire safety information, manual fire safety reporting is no longer enough.
The risk of manual and siloed data
In today’s fire safety compliance landscape, using manual and siloed data puts you at a significant risk of being non-compliant.
Regulators want to receive digital fire safety information that is easy to access and assess. This is something that manually recorded data simply cannot provide. It is just no longer sufficient.
Siloed data is not much help either. This is because each fire alarm system tends to have its own reporting function. This results in multiple reports needing to be collated across multiple sites, which leaves the door open for human error, and incomplete information.
Centralised alarm management for complete visibility
To avoid the issues raised by using manual or siloed data for fire safety compliance, the best thing to do is invest in a centralised alarm management system.
This allows the responsible person to see the status of all fire safety assets across all of the sites they are responsible for, and makes the provision of reports to regulators considerably easier, with less room for error.
Conclusion: Making safety autonomous and always on
Instead of treating fire safety as an occasional responsibility that only needs to be considered on a fragmented basis, the best way to ensure compliance is by making it part of your daily responsibilities.
This is made much easier when you have a system that allows you to see all of the fire safety assets, across your entire building portfolio, on a single centralised dashboard.
Live alerts and real-time statuses can help you to avoid non-compliance by catching potential fire risks early and running remedial maintenance.
Fire safety in the workplace FAQs
What happens if the Responsible Person fails in their duties?
Failure to comply with the Fire Safety Order can lead to heavy fines, legal penalties, and significant reputational damage. In extreme cases it can also result in imprisonment.
Can fire safety responsibility be shared?
Yes. In buildings with multiple occupants, the employer, landlord, and owner may all share "Responsible Person" status depending on their level of control. They must all shoulder some of the fire safety responsibility and must work together to ensure a building’s fire safety.
How often should a fire risk assessment be updated?
It must be reviewed regularly, especially if there are significant changes to the building layout, occupancy, or work processes. Even if there are no changes to a building, the risk assessment must be updated at least annually.
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