Do you expect the landlord to employ a team of staff to be on standby for the one day a year a disabled person may enter the building just in case of fire?
The disabled toilets etc are there because of Building Regulations. On new builds the refuges and communications system is there because of Building Regulations. Correctly as common the landlord will maintain these.
But beyond that any further provision is not feasible for the landlord to implement - they don't have the budget, staffing or control to do so and it's not realistic to do so (if it was it would be in B Regs) beyond helping coordinate and cooperate and maintain common features installed under Building Regs.
Most multi-occupancies are unstaffed and those that do are often single manned and cannot spend all day quizzing everyone entering a building and drafting a PEEP and anyway during an evac they already have too many other key roles to fulfil without running around with an Evac chair under their arm
Some misinterpretation here; my expectation of a landlord is not that they and they alone are responsible for this aspect of fire safety. It would be that they consult and correspond with all their tenants regarding how the safe evacuation of disabled persons can be managed, in accordance with the relevant good practice (BS 9999; HMG Guides etc). This would normally need to be done wherever a building is accessible to persons with mobility impairments (e.g. wheelchair users), whether such occupants are currently in evidence or not.
This should result in a co-ordinated risk assessment that would describe how disabled persons would be evacuated in acceptable safety, from any location accessible to them, to a place of safety, in case of a fire anywhere in that building. For any individual, the PEEP can then be drawn up referring to the overall strategy. The landlord’s responsibility would be to manage and maintain whatever aspects of the relevant evacuation procedure are under their control (i.e. for which they are the responsible person). What, precisely, those are will depend upon the nature of the evacuation plan, the split in responsibilities and the terms of the lease. In some cases the responsibilities will be significant (where, for example, evacuation or fire-fighting lifts are used); in others they will be minimal (sole occupier in a small, single-storey building). In few cases will they have no accountability, because they will usually ‘control’ some of the risk reduction measures that support the evacuation sequence, be they physical assets or management procedures.
That’s exactly how it works in the several offices we’ve used and occupied in central London – we’ve consulted with the landlord regarding how we evacuate disabled people who are (or who may be) in our tenancies. We provide the manpower to deal with most of the sequence, but the landlord also has a management role to play & they accept responsibility for managing and maintaining much of the kit that supports the evacuation.
In summary, I really don’t think that it’s legitimate to say that this issue is something that any landlord can afford to be unconcerned with. They will usually have some role to play in ensuring that disabled evacuation can be safely managed. Saying that they don’t have the funding to do the above isn’t really relevant; they have to find the funding to do what’s necessary; saying that they couldn’t afford it would be absolutely no use in court.
