Banjo, I think the point being made by some is that the government wish to turn everyone and their cousin loose to carry out their own fire risk assessments without any proper guidance as to what constitutes a suitable and sufficient FRA or who is competent to carry them out. Now the old style fasicst fire officers were/are a pain in the sit-upon with all their dogmatic prescriptive crap, but they couldn't do much harm, in that there would be no major shortcomings in fire safety (as a rule). And while we will all (certainly here on the bulletin board ) try to help those lumbered with the task of carrying our FRAs, does it not scare the you know what out of you that in some life risks they will be left to people who dont even know where to start. In doing some work for the landlord of a multi-tenanted commerical property last week, I strayed into a tenant' s unit and then wished I hadn't. The tenant had created inner rooms on the first floor with no vision whatsoever, but worse still had taken away the protection of the staircase from the first floor. Now, the first floor occupants have to enter a printing machine area on the ground floor to reach a final exit, and there is not even any AFD on the ground floor, while the manning of the ground floor is minimal. But, yes, the health and safety officer of the company ( who is the wife of a director of the company) had done a risk assessment allegedly.
