Episode 221 - Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005

This week we will be talking about the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005, what it is, who it applies to, and what it means in practice for architects. This episode content meets PC2 - Clients, Users & Delivery of Services & PC3 - Legal Framework & Processes of the Part 3 Criteria.

Resources from today's episode:

Websites:

• https://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2005/1541/contents
• https://www.london-fire.gov.uk/safety/the-workplace/fire-safety-law-explained/

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Transcript

Episode 221:

Hello and Welcome to the Part3 with me podcast. 

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I am your host Maria Skoutari and this week we will be talking about the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005, what it is, who it applies to, and what it means in practice for architects. Todays’ episode meets PC2 & PC3 of the Part 3 Criteria. 

Fire safety is one of those topics that can feel deceptively familiar. Most of us have encountered fire risk assessments, fire strategy reports and means of escape requirements in our day-to-day work. But do we really understand the legislation that sits behind all of those documents? And do we understand our own role and potential liability within that framework? That is what today's episode is all about.

Let’s start at the beginning, where does the Fire Safety Order come from:

The Fire Safety Order is the principal fire safety legislation in England and Wales for non-domestic premises and for the common parts of buildings containing two or more domestic premises. Before 2006, fire safety in England and Wales was governed by a patchwork of legislation. At first, there were approximately 70 different laws covering various aspects of fire safety before this was consolidated. You had the Fire Precautions Act 1971, the Fire Precautions (Workplace) Regulations 1997, and numerous other pieces of legislation depending on the type of premises. Compliance was complicated, inconsistent and, confusing.

That’s where, the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005, commonly referred to as the Fire Safety Order, came into force on 1st of October 2006. It is a statutory instrument, cited as SI 2005/1541, made under the Regulatory Reform Act 2001 and it applies to England and Wales only. Scotland and Northern Ireland have their own separate fire safety legislation. So, the Fire Safety Order replaced fire certification under the Fire Precautions Act 1971, introduced a general duty to ensure, so far as is reasonably practicable, the safety of employees, and placed a duty on responsible persons to carry out a fire risk assessment. That responsible person is usually the employer, owner, landlord, or another person with control over the premises, depending on the building and occupation structure. In short, the old system of fire certificates, where you got a document from the fire authority saying your premises was compliant, was abolished. In its place came a risk-based, ongoing duty of care.

A useful way to think about the Order is this: it is not a passive compliance document. It is an active duty to manage risk throughout the life of the building.

It is also worth noting that the Fire Safety Order has since been amended. The Fire Safety Act 2021 and the Building Safety Act 2022 both made important changes to the Order, particularly in relation to multi-occupied residential buildings. And the Fire Safety (England) Regulations 2022, which came into force on 23 January 2023, introduced further requirements specifically in response to recommendations from the Grenfell Tower Inquiry Phase 1 Report. We will touch on those later in this episode.

So who does the Fire Safety Order apply to:

The Order applies to almost all buildings, places and structures other than individual private homes. That means individual flats in a block and single family dwellings are excluded but shared areas, communal spaces, and non-domestic premises of all kinds are brought within scope.

The types of premises covered include offices and shops, factories, warehouses and storage facilities, hotels and guest houses, theatres, bars and gyms, day nurseries, hospitals, care homes, educational establishments, and open-air venues such as theme parks. Even if you accept paying guests at a property you also live in, such as a bed and breakfast, the Fire Safety Order applies to those also.

Crucially, the Order also covers the shared and common areas of blocks of flats and houses in multiple occupation, or HMOs. This is particularly relevant given the volume of residential work architects take on. If you are designing or working on a block of flats, you need to understand that the  Fire Safety Order applies to the structure, the external walls, the flat entrance doors, and anything attached to the external walls such as balconies.

Now, at the heart of the Fire Safety Order is the concept of the Responsible Person: 

This is a legal term, Article 3 of the Order defines a responsible person as, in relation to a workplace, the employer, if the workplace is to any extent under their control. For premises that are not workplaces, it is the person who has control of the premises in connection with a trade, business or other undertaking, or the owner.

The responsible person must make sure that a suitable and sufficient fire risk assessment is carried out and kept under review. They must also take the necessary steps to reduce the risk of fire so far as reasonably practicable, provide general fire precautions, plan for emergencies, and maintain measures provided for fire safety and firefighter access. Where relevant, they must also ensure employees receive adequate fire safety training.

Now there may be more than one responsible person in certain circumstances. In a commercial building, for example, you might have a landlord, a chief executive officer, and a separate facilities manager who all share responsibility for fire safety within the building. For premises that are multi-occupied, each tenant is considered as an employer or occupier engaged in a business and they must carry out a risk assessment for their own occupancy, and for the routes to and egress from their occupancy. Article 22 of the Order which deals with co-operation and co-ordination makes it clear that where two or more responsible persons share premises, they must co-operate with each other and co-ordinate the measures they put in place.

Now, you might be wondering, where does the architect fit into all of this? Well, the  Fire Safety Order is primarily directed at those who occupy and manage buildings rather than those who design them. As an architect, you are unlikely to be the named responsible person for a building once it is occupied. But your work has a very significant bearing on how easily a responsible person can discharge their duties, and the decisions you make at design stage can have lasting consequences for fire safety compliance throughout a building's lifetime.

This is why Approved Document B and specifically the requirement under Regulation 38, which requires fire safety information to be provided to the responsible person on completion of work, matter so much. You are building the paper trail and the physical infrastructure that the responsible person will rely on to manage fire safety once the building is handed over.

Now lets expand on the most central obligation of the Fire Safety Order, the fire risk assessment:

Article 9 of the Order places a mandatory duty on the responsible person to make a suitable and sufficient assessment of the risks to relevant persons, for the purpose of identifying the general fire precautions they need to take.

The London Fire Brigade is explicit on this point in that a fire risk assessment is a legal requirement. If you are responsible for a building that is not a single private dwelling, you need to make sure a suitably competent person completes one, and you must record the findings. Importantly, it must be reviewed regularly, and specifically whenever there is reason to suspect it is no longer valid, or when there has been a significant change to the premises, the organisation of work, or the equipment in use.

So what does the assessment need to cover. In broad terms, the responsible person must:

• Identify the fire risks and hazards in the premises
• Consider who may be especially at risk, including employees, visitors and those with reduced mobility
• Eliminate or reduce the risk of fire as far as is reasonably practicable
• Provide general fire precautions to deal with any residual risk
• Take additional measures where flammable or explosive materials are present
• Create an emergency plan and record it where five or more employees are employed
• Maintain those precautions and keep the assessment under review

For residential buildings specifically, the assessment must also cover the structure and external walls of the building, flat front entrance doors, and anything attached to the external walls. This is directly relevant to architects working on residential schemes, refurbishments or facade upgrades.

It is also worth emphasising a point from the legislation itself. The duty to record the significant findings of the assessment applies where the responsible person employs five or more employees, where a licence is in force in relation to the premises, or where an alterations notice has been served. An alterations notice, provided for under Article 29 of the Order, can be served by the enforcing authority where it believes premises constitute a serious risk, or may constitute one if a change is made to them. That last point is significant from an architectural perspective as the authority can flag up a property before any changes are even made.

Another key element of the Order are the General Fire Precautions requirements:

So, the Fire Safety Order sets out specific requirements for what it calls general fire precautions. These are defined in Article 4 of the Order and cover a broad range of measures:

• Measures to reduce the risk of fire and the spread of fire on the premises
• Measures relating to the means of escape from the premises
• Measures to ensure that means of escape can be safely and effectively used at all times
• Provision and maintenance of fire-fighting equipment
• Means for detecting fire and giving warning, such as fire detection and alarm systems
• Arrangements for action in the event of a fire, including instruction and training of employees

Article 13 of the Order sets out the specific requirements for fire-fighting and fire detection. Where necessary, the responsible person must ensure the premises are equipped with appropriate fire-fighting equipment and detectors and alarms. Non-automatic fire-fighting equipment must be easily accessible, simple to use and indicated by signs. The responsible person must also nominate competent persons to implement fire-fighting measures, and ensure they are adequately trained and equipped.

Article 14 covers emergency routes and exits. Routes to emergency exits and the exits themselves must be kept clear at all times. Emergency doors must open in the direction of escape. Sliding or revolving doors must not be used as emergency exits. Emergency routes and exits must be indicated by signs, and where necessary, emergency lighting of adequate intensity must be provided. These requirements map closely on to what we deal with in design through Approved Document B, but it is important to understand that they also constitute ongoing legal duties for the responsible person once the building is in use.

Article 15 requires the responsible person to establish and implement appropriate procedures, including safety drills, to be followed in the event of serious and imminent danger. Competent persons must be nominated to implement evacuation procedures. These requirements sit behind the emergency plans and fire strategy documents that architects often help to put in place, and they should be designed with these ongoing statutory duties in mind.

One area that is sometimes overlooked but which is directly relevant to how architects specify and detail buildings, is the maintenance obligation under the Fire Safety Order. Article 17 of the Order places a duty on the responsible person to ensure that the premises, and all facilities, equipment and devices provided under the Order, are subject to a suitable system of maintenance and are kept in efficient working order and good repair.

This has real implications for how buildings are designed and handed over. If you are specifying fire detection systems, suppression systems, emergency lighting or fire doors, you are making decisions that will determine how easily those elements can be maintained and tested over the lifetime of the building. Testing and maintenance of fire alarms is mandatory under the Fire Safety Order, and also a requirement of BS 5839-1 2017, the standard for fire detection and alarm systems in non-domestic buildings. A minimum bi-annual maintenance inspection by a competent person is required under that standard.

Article 38 of the Order extends maintenance obligations to any facilities, equipment and devices provided for the protection of firefighters so fire service access points, dry or wet risers, and similar infrastructure must also be kept in efficient order. These are building elements that architects specify, detail and coordinate, and their long-term maintainability matters.

The Fire Safety Order also imposes significant duties relating to information and training: 

Article 19 requires the responsible person to provide employees with comprehensible and relevant information on the risks identified by the risk assessment, the preventive and protective measures in place, and the emergency procedures. This is not optional and it is not a one-off exercise it must be kept up to date.

Article 21 goes further, requiring the responsible person to provide adequate fire safety training to employees at the time they are first employed, and also whenever they are exposed to new or increased risks, for example, because of a change of responsibilities, new work equipment, or a new system of work. The London Fire Brigade's guidance notes that in practice, adequate training generally covers fire awareness at induction, periodic refresher training, training for those with specific fire safety duties such as fire wardens, and skills-based training such as use of fire extinguishers.

Employers are legally required by law to provide information, instruction and training to employees about fire precautions in the workplace. This covers all staff including full-time, part-time, zero hours contract, security staff, cleaning staff and contractors. The training must cover what to do if they discover a fire, what to do if they hear the fire alarm, the escape routes, refuges and exits, how to raise the alarm including the location of the alarm indicator panel, and who to call.

Now, let’s look at what the Enforcement and Penalty concequences are under the Fire Safety Order:

So, the Fire Safety Order is enforced by local fire and rescue authorities in England and Wales. In London, that is the London Fire Brigade. The Brigade operates a risk-based inspection programme  as they cannot visit every one of the hundreds of thousands of premises they are responsible for, but they will prioritise those where the risk to vulnerable people is greatest.

When an inspection identifies non-compliance, the enforcing authority has a range of options. These include serving an alterations notice under Article 29, an enforcement notice under Article 30, which requires the responsible person to take specific steps to remedy a failure within a defined period, or a prohibition notice under Article 31, which can restrict or prohibit use of the premises immediately if the risk is serious enough. For serious offences, the consequences under Article 32 of the Order include an unlimited fine on conviction on indictment, or imprisonment for up to two years, or both. The London Fire Brigade publishes details of enforcement notices and prosecutions publicly.

Now over the last few years, a number of changes have been introduced to the Fire Safety Order:

Namely two significant developments were built into the 2005 Order. 

First, the Fire Safety Act 2021 clarified that the Fire Safety Order applies to the structure and external walls of multi-occupied residential buildings, as well as flat entrance doors. Closing a loophole that had existed since the Order was introduced. 

Second, following the Grenfell Tower Inquiry Phase 1 recommendations, the Fire Safety (England) Regulations 2022 came into force in January 2023. These regulations, made under Article 24 of the Fire Safety Order, require responsible persons of high-rise residential buildings, those with storeys over 18 metres, to take additional steps, including providing information to fire and rescue services, installing and maintaining wayfinding signage, and carrying out regular checks of fire-fighting equipment. Responsible persons of buildings with storeys over 11 metres and all multi-occupied residential buildings with two or more sets of domestic premises also have additional duties.

For architects working on residential buildings, these changes make it more important than ever to understand what the responsible person will need in terms of accessible information, and to ensure that design decisions support rather than hinder their ongoing compliance obligations.

So what does this means for architects in practice:

First, practictioner must understand the legislative framework and their place within it. While architects will rarely be the named responsible person under the Fire Safety Order, their design decisions directly shape the fire safety environment that the responsible person inherits. Every decision about compartmentation, escape route geometry, door specifications, sprinkler provision or fire-stopping detail has an ongoing life beyond practical completion.

Second, Regulation 38 of the Building Regulations is the bridge between design and occupation. Practitioners are required to provide relevant fire safety information to the responsible person no later than the date of completion of the project. They must make sure that this information is genuinely useful and that it reflects the fire strategy, the systems installed, the maintenance requirements, and the assumptions embedded in the design. A Regulation 38 package that is simply a PDF dump of drawings is not good enough.

Third, if projects involve a change of use, a significant refurbishment or an extension, Article 29 of the Fire Safety Order gives the enforcing authority the power to serve an alterations notice requiring the responsible person to notify them of proposed changes. Meaning any planned extension or building work should be designed with fire safety in mind from the outset, not added as an afterthought. It is more challenging and more costly to retrofit fire safety measures. The architetcs role as the designer is to embed compliance from day one.

Fourth, practitioners should be aware of the shared responsibility model in multi-occupied buildings. If the project involves a building with multiple tenants or responsible persons, Article 22 of the Order requires them all to co-operate and co-ordinate. The fire strategy needs to acknowledge and support this not make it harder.

And fifth, keep up with the evolving legislative landscape. The Fire Safety Order has been amended, the Building Safety Act 2022 has introduced new regulatory structures, and the Fire Safety (England) Regulations 2022 have added further requirements. Understanding how these layers interact is part of professional competence.

Let’s sum up what we ran through today:

• The Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005, SI 2005/1541, came into force on 1 October 2006. It applies to England and Wales and replaced approximately 70 previous pieces of fire safety legislation, consolidating them into a single risk-based framework.
• The Order applies to almost all non-domestic premises, as well as shared areas of residential buildings including blocks of flats and HMOs. Individual private dwellings are excluded.
• The concept of the Responsible Person is central to the Order. This is typically the employer, the occupier in control of the premises, or the owner. There may be more than one responsible person in a building.
• The fire risk assessment is a mandatory, ongoing duty under Article 9. It must be suitable and sufficient, reviewed regularly, and recorded where five or more employees are employed or where a licence or alterations notice is in force.
• General fire precautions under Article 4 cover means of escape, fire detection, fire-fighting equipment, emergency procedures, and the instruction and training of employees.
• Maintenance of fire safety systems and firefighter access equipment is a legal duty under Articles 17 and 38. This has direct implications for how architects specify and detail buildings.
• Penalties for non-compliance are significant, including unlimited fines and up to two years' imprisonment for serious offences.
• The Fire Safety Act 2021, Building Safety Act 2022 and Fire Safety (England) Regulations 2022 have all amended or extended the regime particularly for multi-occupied residential buildings.
• As an architect, your design decisions shape the fire safety environment the responsible person inherits. Regulation 38 is your key mechanism for transferring that knowledge at handover.