Fire Risk Assessment - What All UK Businesses Need To Know

Two years ago the law changed in the UK, and now all British Businesses have a legal duty to carry out a Fire Risk Assessment on their place of work.  If you are wondering whether it applies to your workplace, I can tell you that it does, unless you work at home, offshore, in a field, in the air or down a borehole!The law which covers this is the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005, which came into effect in 2006 for England, Scotland and Wales (and 2008 for Northern Ireland).  But if you aren’t fully up to speed or haven’t yet done a Fire Risk Assessment, there’s no need to panic!  With little help and advice it is a logical process that anyone can carry out for themselves.The law now says that a ‘Responsible Person’ must be designated or all workplaces, and that this person has to undertake a Fire Risk Assessment.  If your organisation employs five or more people, you also have to record the findings of your assessment.  A Responsible Person is defined as the owner, or person in control of the workplace.  If you share a building with other organisations, the responsibility may be shared among several people.  If you have responsibility for the other people in your organisation, it is safe to assume you will be the Responsible Person, even if other people are too.It is an often quoted statistic that over 70% of businesses involved in major fires either don’t reopen or fail within three years.While I can’t actually trace this statement to its source, it certainly sounds plausible.  Whether it’s strictly accurate or not, a fire is something your business will definitely be a lot healthier without.  We are all doing these Fire Risk Assessments because of the law, but it is actually just giving a formal structure to what we should be doing anyway in the best interests of our businesses.  I’ve spent the last twenty years running large public buildings, and for all that time have essentially been taking all the actions that the new Order requires of us, apart from recording it in this new way that the Fire Risk Assessment format gives us.  It is basically what we should be doing anyway, and with a bit of guidance, the formal recording part doesn’t need to hurt – particularly once you’ve done the Risk Assessment.Unless you have a particularly large or complex business, there is no reason why you can’t carry out your own Fire Risk Assessment with relative ease.  Find out how you can produce a Fire Risk Assessment by following the free step by step guide at the website www.fire-riskassessment.com