Health and Safety Consultants

If you are the Responsible Person for your workplace, and have been reading about your fire safety responsibilities and the procedure for carrying out your Fire Risk Assessment, you may well be wondering just how you are going to find the time needed to get your organisation where it needs to be in terms of fire safety.

There is an argument that if you don't have the experience to tell a heat detector from a smoke detector or tell a fire resistant door from an ordinary one, then you can't be classed as a Competent Person and shouldn't be doing the Fire Risk Assessment.

That is a perfectly valid argument, and certainly one that a fire safety professional would put forward. While reputable Health and Safety Consultants will certainly know that an intumescent strip is not something you will see in a Soho Club, an in depth knowledge may not be essential to undertake a reasonable fire risk assessment of a straightforward premises. However, I do believe there is some merit in the argument that a challenging assessment may be better left to a professional, particularly if you are responsible for large, complex premises. The fact is that you don't know what you don't know, which can make if tricky to judge your own ability to do it.

When I first had to do a Fire Risk Assessment I paid a firm of Health and Safety Consultants to do the first one, just to make sure nothing was missed and that I had a sound basis from which to proceed myself in the future. I think this is a good approach if you are in any doubt

If your workplace is relatively small and straightforward, I think anyone who applies some common sense and follows the guidelines can carry out a Fire Risk Assessment.

Whether or not you feel competent to carry out your Risk Assessment yourself, the other main argument for using Health and Safety Consultants is that it will save you a lot of your precious time. You need to weigh up the advantage of freeing yourself of that time, against the cost of paying someone else to do the work.

Health and Safety Consultants can be particularly useful if you are responsible for shared occupancy premises. Someone is going to have to co-ordinate all the Responsible Persons, issue instruction to the various organisations about action they need to take in order to comply, etc. It can sometimes be useful to use an 'objective expert' to carry out this role, particularly if there may be changes required which will not be well received.

Health and Safety Consultants - What They Can Do For You:

• Do your Fire Risk Assessment for you
  (very useful for doing your first Fire Risk Assessment, as they can look at the big picture objectively and give you a plan to build on yourself in future).
• Train you or your staff to do your own Fire Risk Assessments
• Plan, organise and report back on fire drills for you
• Health and Safety Consultants can assess the fire safety of whole premises and make recommendations for action
• Provide fire safety training, including use of fire fighting equipment, Fire Warden training, etc
• Create or revise your Emergency Plan of Fire Safety Policy documents
• Prepare CAD drawings to illustrate escape routes, location of call points and fire extinguishers, plans of the fire alarm system, etc. These can all be useful in staff handbooks, emergency plans, Health and Safety Policies, etc.
• Health and Safety Consultants can even meet the Fire Authority on your behalf, representing your organisation at inspections, etc.
• Help with planning new buildings or expansion/redesign of existing ones
• Carry out general health and safety risk assessments
• Specification and Design for fire alarms systems, emergency lighting, etc

Health and Safety Consultants - Advice on Purchasing

If you are looking to spend money on things like a new fire alarm system or new fire extinguishers, it can make sense to get objective advice from a Health and Safety Consultant. The alternative is to approach the specialist suppliers, who are more likely to make recommendations based on whatever it is they happen to provide.

Recommended Fire Safety Consultant

If you are considering using a consultant to carry out a fire risk assessment, I can recommend an excellent company called 1stAid Fire, based in the south of England. They are experienced professionals and carry out fire risk assessments, staff training and PAT testing all over the country. Please quote reference 'FRA1' when contacting them.

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