FIRE RISK ASSESSMENT

For a business to protect itself against the risk of fire, you need to understand your weak points and address them. Smiths Fire gives you a one stop shop for everything you need to develop and implement comprehensive business protection policies and processes.

For most businesses, a fire risk assessment is mandatory and at any time you could be visited by your local fire authority. Inadequate risk assessments can invalidate insurance policies, so it’s important to make sure you’re covered.

When lives and property are at risk you need to know that the advice you are being given and the equipment you use are appropriate and reliable. That’s why it pays to consult an expert and our many years of experience make us ideally placed to advise you on all your fire safety management needs, including training, processes, detection and equipment.

We offer prompt, professional and competitively priced fire risk assessments and provide advice and solutions to all your fire safety management problems.

The Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order requires all businesses undertake a Fire Risk Assessment of their workplace to ensure that people, processes and equipment fully comply with the new legislation. This will include ensuring the safety of everyone on the premises, making sure that adequate training is provided and that all the facilities relating to fire fighting, fire alarm and detection systems, emergency escape routes and exits are adequately maintained.

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Fire Risk Assessment Frequency

The Legislation relating to conducting a Fire Risk Assessment doesn’t actually state a precise frequency. What the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005 does require though is that the Fire Risk Assessment is kept up to date and re-done if there are any kind of significant changes within the workplace.

The pragmatic approach is generally accepted to be aiming to do a formal review once a year that checks whether your Fire Risk Assessment is still highlighting and addressing all possible fire risks.

On an on-going basis, you must be alert to any changes made at your premises that may affect the risk level and therefore need assessing too. These changes can be very varied: if the purpose of the building has altered, for instance, or if there’s been a substantial change of layout you may well need to have a new Fire Risk Assessment completed in that area. Likewise, a Fire Risk Assessment needs to be carried out if there’s a significant change to the people using the premises, a major change of activity or the addition of new equipment.

It’s also really important that if there’s any failure in your current fire safety arrangements you carry out an assessment immediately to determine what additional or alternative steps are needed to address the risk.

It’s not a requirement to have Fire Risk Assessments and reviews completed by a third party but you must ensure that whoever carries them out does have the necessary competence to conduct suitable and sufficient assessments. Even if you carry out your own annual review and it doesn’t raise any major issues, you may decide to use a third party to complete a new full Fire Risk Assessment periodically: many businesses do this on a 2 / 3-year frequency but of course it depends on premises complexity and so forth.