It has happened quite a lot actually and in some very high profile cases. Lack of fire risk assessment or poor quality of fire risk assessment is an issue, and the RP does get fined for not having the foundation of fire safety completed correctly. Recently a North Yorkshire Landlord was sent to prison for the deaths of two people because he could have ‘reasonably’ done more to prevent the deaths.
How many times does it need to happen?
I think you will find that in all three of the major fatal fires in the UK more could have reasonably been done to prevent it happening.
The point is; those seeking professional advice need to have a safety net to allow for some form of self-protection, in the unlikely event of a fatal or serious fire.
If a landlord appoints a plumber to fix a boiler in one of his properties and he takes the plumbers word on him being on the gas safe register. In the event that the house blows up killing the family inside and it turns out the plumber lied, the landlord will be guilty of not carrying out reasonable checks. If the landlord checks and the plumber is on the register and the same thing happens; I believe the landlord would have done all that is reasonably possible to avoid the deaths.
The government may have wanted industry to do it themselves as far as fire risk assessments are concerned; but the reality is that loads and loads of RPs didn’t want to have a go at it and they have turned to outside experts to do the job for them. This created a real problem with cowboys, and for almost as long as the RRO has been in place the industry has been talking about a way to prevent the cowboy from ripping off the RP with substandard or dangerous assessments. Actually this ‘not a burden on industry’ was created by DCLG; but when the RP turned to the industry in thousands and thousands, it was suddenly an industry mess, that industry had to deal with. They have done that (not very well in my opinion) but none the less a system is in place; all the fire sector representatives contributed and the consensus is a recommendation to use firms with accredited third party certification. (If you want to appoint an external contractor)
Presumably this is to afford the best assurance against the risk assessor messing up and to assist in due diligence which is a defence in court; if an offence has been commissioned under the RRO.
So the above is a long winded way of asking piglet; what is your point?