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FIRE SERVICE AND GENERAL FIRE SAFETY TOPICS => Fire Safety => Topic started by: colin todd on September 17, 2020, 12:24:04 AM
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C.S.Todd & Associates Limited (CSTA) has been awarded a contract by the Home Office to produce new fire safety guidance and update existing guides as part of a wider overhaul of guidance which supports the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005.
The four existing guides to be updated are:
A Short Guide to Making your Premises Safe from Fire;
Fire Safety in Purpose-Built Blocks of Flats.
Fire Safety Risk Assessment Checklist;
Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005 Guidance Note no.1.
In addition to ensuring the guides are consistent with any amendments via the Fire Safety Bill and any secondary legislation implementing the Grenfell Phase 1 report recommendations, CSTA are tasked with improving the guides.
If you are familiar with any of the above documents and would like to provide brief details of how you think they can be improved or any issues that you have with any of the guides, particularly the first two in the above list, CSTA would welcome your views. At this stage, all that is required is high level comment, rather than great detail, as there will be extensive stakeholder consultation when the drafts are available.
Please submit your comments via consultation@cstodd.co.uk Ideally, by the end of September, but by end of October at the latest.
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Do you know if the wider suite of DCLG guides is going to be reviewed?
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Tony, There are three tranches of work. The first tranche is some basic updating of stuff to take changes in legislation into account. We are doing tranche 2 for them, which is revision of the 4 docs to which i referred above. We are also preparing two brand new guides. One will be a comprehensive but easily readable guide for the RP on their duties under the FSO as it will be amended by the new Fire Safety Bill and the proposed new secondary legislation that will address the Grenfell Phase 1 recs.
A further tranche 3 will ultimately involve revision of the old CLG guides.
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Thanks for the info, I look forward to reading them if they are in the same vein as the previous guides your company has helped compile.
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One of the most important things to highlight would be (in my opinion) practical guidance on the real meaning of 'Responsible Person'.
Numerous entities (of all sizes) continue to insist that this is a named individual, rather than a corporate responsibility. Sometimes it's only academic; other times companies assume that by telling an individual manager that they are the 'RP' then they can largely forget fire safety at Board level.
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One of the consequences of the wording of the legislation - several organisations have managers who are indeed 'persons with responsibility' for fire safety at varying levels and indeed sometimes they can carry individual liability (like the care home manager who was convicted after a fatal fire) but forget that there is usually a top tier responsible person, which often (not always) is a entity.
Better to have a 'duty holder' at the top with the local 'persons having responsibility' underneath - different terms to suit different roles.
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Better to have a 'duty holder' at the top with the local 'persons having responsibility' underneath - different terms to suit different roles
I concur AnthonyB. I work for a University where the 'Heads of School' change 3 yearly, and in that time rarely adopt any responsibility for for fire safety or building management. In fact it feels like they are 'protected' by the Principal. In this regard I believe it should be the Principal who is the legal duty holder and persons should be 'nominated' to manage fire safety etc.
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...but even where we have 'duty holders' as a legislative requirement, it's very commonly the case that they aren't individuals. As an example, the Building Safety Manager role proposed under the Building Safety Bill is (realistically, in many cases) going to be a Company, not a person.