Legal advice: The risk of fire hazard rules

I have often wondered in my various dealings with licensed premises just how many of them have a proper fire risk assessment in place carried out by a ‘competent person’, which deals with all of the risks within the premises together with the steps taken to mitigate or eliminate those risks. The PMA has recently cited statistics from a Government report that suggests a worrying lack of compliance in this area related to risk assessments as well as the preservation of escape routes and maintenance of general fire precautions.

The basic rule of thumb is that whereas the fire and rescue authorities used to be very proactive in their involvement with licensed premises in issuing fire certificates and so on, the onus is now firmly on the premises to make sure that it is compliant with relevant legislation and partic-ularly the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005.

The reality is that the fire authority tends to be significantly less involved in the proactive regulation of licensed premises, but will rather react to issues or complaints and investigate whether the premises have properly complied with the legal requirements. This is not to say that routine inspections no longer occur, but that they are far less
frequent than before.

Tool

The basic tool is the fire risk assessment and this will govern issues such as the safe capacity of the premises, the maintenance of escape routes, the provision of fire safety equipment and the maintenance of alarm systems.

It may also make reference to relevant training provided to staff to ensure the objectives of the fire risk assessment are met.

This is a very important document for two reasons. Firstly, it is the cornerstone of your legal compliance. Secondly, the capacity stated (broadly based on a combination of floor space and the width and number of available exits) will dictate how many customers can be within the building (and therefore spending money) at any one time.

Experience

From my own experience, I suspect larger companies, which operate numerous premises around the country are fairly well organised in this respect. Many of them use external specialists to assist them in the preparation of risk assessments, which deal with fire safety, health and safety and similar issues concerning food safety as well. They will also operate a system of regular auditing in an effort to identify potential risks and look for any inadequacies in staff training.

This will, of course, be supplemented by regular ‘walk rounds’ carried out by staff on the ground to check for obstructions to fire exits, for example, as well as regular maintenance programmes for emergency lighting systems, fire extinguishers and other relevant equipment. Additionally, staff may also be instructed to modify generic risk assessments, produced by consultants, to make them premises-specific. They will, however, need to be adequately trained to do so!

It would, therefore, seem likely that it is those operators without such systems and contracts who are more likely to fall foul of the regulatory requirements in terms of the carrying out of risk assessments and compliance with the legislation generally. It is worthy of note that smaller operators can equally avail themselves of relevant experts, but obviously have less opportunity to take advantage of economies of scale in this regard.

Compliance

The importance of compliance is obvious. Failure to comply can have fatal consequences together with appalling publicity for the premises in question.

Many of the prosecutions that arise under this legislation do not flow from such serious consequences but rather more fundamental procedural failures that could lead to such consequences if it all went wrong.

As with health and safety, and food safety regulation, a microscopic inspection of documents and systems will often lead to identification of a number of procedural non-compliances and therefore a number of potential offences. The usual processes include a potential interview under caution (not a pleasant experience!) and then an appearance in the magistrates court, or even the crown court in more serious cases.

Fines can run into thousands and indeed tens of thousands of pounds, together with terms of imprisonment being possible in the most serious cases and where individuals are clearly to blame.