I have just been to the hoteliers meeting that I mention ealier. It turned out that the risk assessment speaker was in fact a sales person for an online-downloadable do-it-yourself risk assessment package.
I found it very frustrating, it he was giving out the impression that once you had bought the software and filled in the boxes that that was the end of it.
He answered a few fire alarm questions wrongly. He told people that "if, once thay had done the online risk assessent, they were happy that there was enough detectors and sounders in the building" then they could stick with thiet 1974 set up-------WELL OF COURSE THEY ARE GOING TO BE HAPPY WITH THE STATUS QUO, IT WON'T COST THEM ANYTHING.
I eventually got up and asked him some BS5839 Part 1:2002 L2 type questions which he neetly sidestepped, but I managed to trap him by reminding him that to do a fire risk assessment, it says that you must be a competent person, I read out the definition of a competent person from the new guide, and suggested that it would be wrong to place the burden of resposiblity of defining fire precautions on a hotel owner, who had until recently been a bus driver for 25 years.
I approched him after the meeting, now I need some clarification here , He had said that the fire risk assessment requirement was a new thing, coming into force on Oct 1, I pointed out to him that the requirement to carry out a FRA had been there since 1999 under the MOHASAW act 1999, to which he stated, "that only applied to the employees". ( but at the same time he'd already told people that the assessments should be carried out by Oct 1)
Now please, and I'm sure you will, tell me if I am wrong.
