Fire Risk Assessment -
All You Need To Know

If you got the short straw, I'm here to help. Fire Risk Assessment is a legal requirement for almost all businesses in the UK, but it doesn't need to be an onerous task. The information on this site should provide you with all you need to be safe and legal without wading through treacle to get there.

Finding out what the law says and what it means in practice for your business can be very time consuming, so this site is about presenting the information you need to know in a straightforward way. Fire-RiskAssessment.com is here to give you free advice and guidance (I'm not trying to sell you anything!)

You always have the option to use Health and Safety Consultants to undertake the Fire Risk Assessment for you, but unless you have a particularly complex workplace, or can't spare the time, this site will give you all you need to carry out your own Fire Risk Assessment.

What The Law Says About Fire Risk Assessment

The reason you are looking at this site at all is the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005, which came into effect in 2006 for England, Scotland and Wales (and 2008 for Northern Ireland). 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 Order says that the 'Responsible Person' (and I'm guessing that's you) has to undertake a Fire Risk Assessment, and if your organisation employs five or more people, you 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 others are too.

The Fire Risk Assessment

Over 70% of businesses involved in major fires either don't reopen or fail within three years.

That's a sobering thought isn't it? A fire is clearly a very difficult thing to recover from and 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 structure to what we should all be doing anyway in the best interests of our businesses.

Prevention is of course better than cure, and there is a section of this site concerned with Disaster Recovery Plans and Business Continuity Planning, which looks at this area in more detail.

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 the new formal structure 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.

To find out how you can produce a Fire Risk Assessment by following a step by step process, go to the Fire Risk Assessment page.