Lunchtime Learning Fire Safety

Thank you. Hello and welcome to today’s webinar from Robertson’s Facilities Services. Thank you so much for joining us today.

We’ve done quite a few of these now and I can tell from the amount of registrations that this one is, pardon the pun, really hot topic for you. We’ve got loads of people on the stream already. We’ve had over a hundred people register for this webinar, which is like smashes all of the previous ones.

So as I say, I know it’s a really important topic And it’s really good that we have our resident expert, Alex Bladen, who’s going to kind of unravel the mysteries, I guess, of some of the regulation and what’s happening in the industry right now.

I think if you’re anything like me, you know, this is one of those topics that even at home, like this is the one that I’m a little bit OCD sometimes. Like, oh, did I check? Did I leave stuff on? Like fire is one of those big things in our consciousness. And I’m guessing for you, if you’re a facilities manager or something like that, this is the one that keeps you up at night.

So hopefully we’re going to be able to answer some of your questions. So without further ado, let’s bring Alex on. Let’s see if we can make tech work.

Hey, there we go. Hi, Alex. Are you okay? Thanks for joining us. Can you hear me okay? Yeah, yeah, I can hear you. Brilliant. Good, good. And now, I don’t know what it’s like there. We always make this joke because you guys are up north and they let me stay down south. So it’s a beautiful sunny day on the south coast.

What’s it like there in, I think you’re in Lancaster, aren’t you? Not unusual. That’s great. Great. Good, good. Well, look, I mean, I guess that’s what you find, right? You know, you work in a kind of great industry, right? Because this is one of those ones that everybody like knows they’ve got to get this right.

Yeah, obviously it’s about mainly life safety, isn’t it? Seeing the tragedies that have happened that obviously causes why we have all these regulations and things that people need to be compliant for just to make sure everyone’s safe when they’re at work or any sort of leisure activities that they’re doing.

Brilliant. Sorry, I was just thinking about your… It’s not brilliant, but it’s brilliant that you’re keeping us safe and you’re going to help us with that. I know we did this earlier on, but your camera, I think it’s just defocused ever so slightly. I just wondered if you could have a… Before we get going, we want to see your lovely face. There we go. Oh, that’s a bit too much, right?

Now, okay, it’s just got a bit pixely compared to how we did it earlier. Well, look, it’s what you’re saying that’s the main thing. As long as we can see, that’s great. a little bit sharper maybe just go back to where you were sorry but we just kind of want to get this right the start and also this gives you time to uh kind of uh join you know I if you’re anything like me webinar oh there was that webinar I better go and we find as we can see the numbers are going up uh you find people coming a bit late which is why in case you’re wondering we don’t always rush straight in we know we’ve got to give people a little bit of a chance to go okay great thanks Alex So I think we’ve, yeah, there’s loads of people on there.

So I think we ought to get on with the questions. So if you don’t mind, is that all right? Yeah, that’s fine. That’s great. Good, good. Right. So I guess the big question, like what are the key fire regulations that commercial property owners, commercial property managers, should I say, need to comply with?

So the main one is the regulatory reform fire safety or the two thousand five um this came in due to quite obviously a few tragedies that happened um in the early eighties seventies eighties and then um there was one in Scotland uh it was the rose park care home fire and the shirt from that they decided that there was too much strain on the fire service to be able to do the job really of making sure every building and everywhere was compliant and fire safe.

So they brought this in to create a responsible person, which is normally the highest senior member in a company or like landlords, and basically put the onus on them to make sure that their buildings or premises are compliant with fire safety. So the responsible person isn’t necessarily the expert.

They’re the person that the buck stops with them. And so they need to create the culture and employ the right people or bring the right experts in to make sure that they’re compliant. Yeah, it’s basically because they have control over that building or premises or company. It’s down to them to make sure that everyone in there who’s either using their premises are safe.

So that’s obviously, that’s where in this, there’s different articles. So article, the first seven articles are basically just highlighting what is within the Regs form or what it’s there for. Starts off with number eight in part two, which says any responsible person must ensure that any employees are safe from fire and also anyone who would be using the building, so that’s visitors or customers or clients, anything like that. um and then it moves down into number nine which is they must have a compliant and competent fire assessment completed it used to be that if you had less than five employees you didn’t have to have a written one you could just sort of go around and go right that’s a hazard that’s an issue this we need this but now they’ve changed that where no matter what how many people you have if you’ve got a place of business you have to have a fire risk assessment done

Yeah, then it moves into number ten and sixteen, which are basically ways of how, from the fire assessment, of how you can have your building safe. So that might be preventive measures. fire safety arrangements, eliminations or reductions of certain materials that might or other factors that could cause fire, you know, getting rid of them, firefighting equipment or detection, making sure emergency escape routes and exits are clear and procedures for any additional issues or again you might also if you’ve got a high risk area that using say flammable liquids for a process you might have additional measures for that area then it comes to which is maintenance so make sure any of the above that you’ve got has been maintained make you know making sure that every when it’s needed it actually works there’s no point having something in um not just think oh yeah it’s fine

Yeah. Yeah. And those minutes I was with things like that. It’s like those minutes, like not all minutes are created equal. Like those minutes, those seconds are really important in life, aren’t they? You know, like that one thing, that one decision that somebody made. Oh, there’s no fire extinguisher.

Oh, that door’s locked when it shouldn’t be like that. can be one of those sliding doors moments that changes potentially a lot of people’s lives. And it was just one careless thought, one careless action months before because it hasn’t been checked.

Well, a lot of fire strategies and risk-based solutions as well are based off two things called, there’s A-set and R-set. So there’s A-set, which is the available time for evacuation. And then there’s R-set, which is the required time.

So you might, until the premises or area becomes untenable, so basically when people would be overcome by the fire. So you would have… by measuring them two things out, you’d have the required time is always going to be less than the available time because you want to give that extra amount of time to make sure people can get out.

So that’s where all these sort of systems and, you know, having extinguishers, having fire alarms and stuff like that come in that gives that that amount of time to be able to let people out. So if you’ve based it on these products working and then one of them has failed because they’ve not been maintained or for whatever reason, New York town dramatically goes less from what it was previously.

So you sort of going against the own stuff that you brought in to make sure the buildings fire safe. Right, right. So just before we get on to my next question, I just should say to everyone, we like to make these interactive.

So if you’ve got any questions, there is a chat feature. So we’d love to hear any questions. And I’ll try and bring those in at the appropriate moment, or the very least, We’ll, pardon the pun, have a bit of a quickfire round of questions at the end. So at the very least, we’ll try and handle those at the end. But I’ll see if I can kind of weave those in at an appropriate point. So it’s great to hear from you. So if you do have any questions, do feel free to answer them.

And also, I should say, we’re going to be talking for about half an hour, going through the main questions that we were going to look at. But again, be great to look at your questions and we’ll do a little sort of quick fire Q&A at the end.

Okay, so I guess you’ve talked a little bit about fire risk assessment there, Alex. I don’t know whether you’ve really answered the, perhaps it’s obvious, but I think it’d be good to hear it from you. Like, well, what is a fire risk assessment and who’s responsible for carrying that out? So for carrying it out, again, it comes to the responsible person. delegate that to someone within their business to make sure someone comes and gets it done.

But really, it should be someone with… qualifications really of either they’ve done a fire assessment course or they’ve done some sort of something to do with fire safety but because they are starting to bring now where there is going to be a register for certified fire assessors whereas before anyone who’s sort of had the previous sort of done a course or something like would be able to do it but now it’s you’re going to have to be able to be like registered but it is on the owners of the responsible person so they should make sure that someone is coming in to do a fire risk assessment um basically what fire assessment is is a scientific method is used so the scientific method has five points so it has identifying the risk then it has identifying people the people who are at risk.

Then any remediation or action plan of any of the findings of the first two of how to make sure that these risks are reduced or eliminated. Then you have documentation, make sure everything is put out and documented. That’s like maintenance, any sort of evacuation plans, anything like that. And then you have five, which is review.

So this will mean that it should be reviewed And there’s quite a few different reasons why you’d have it reviewed. So if there’s very few issues, you’ve sorted them out, you would just have it reviewed annually. So you just come and get someone in, have a look, make sure everything’s all right, no changes have happened. But then if you have had some sort of redesign, you’ve put in an extra room somewhere, you’ve changed what you’ve used the building for, completely changed, you’d have to have a whole new risk assessment done.

Yeah, because obviously the hazards within the building have materially changed. So every three years it’s recommended that you should have a full new one done. Not just like a review. It’s just creep. Yeah, things creep, don’t they? Things tend to change and no one’s really noticed because it happens over three years, right? So just a couple of people debating this point.

And I was interested in that as well because Terry’s asking, let’s post this up actually. Terry’s asking kind of what I asked as well, but I think it bears… honing in on this because there’s probably people on the call that like well is that me or like is that someone else so uh terry’s asking does a responsible person always have to be the top person in charge because I guess like and Hannah’s chiming in here like well is it the person responsible for the that building like a location manager because I guess it depends how it might depend how complex your company structure is like is that the CEO of a massive corporation or is it like local area manager or the building manager like how does that work yeah so the responsible person still is the most senior member of staff but it also there was also the relevant person so the relevant person is the person who has the most daily control or has control of that building so the CEO is not really going to they probably might not go to every building all the time they don’t know everything about every building the relevant person or someone who has been specifically instructed to be the person for fire safety in that premises. So it’ll be both of these, but it still relies on the responsible person.

So if I can just clarify that then. If I just clarify that for everybody, so the buck stops with this person at the very top, but then they can kind of responsibly with training and all of that. So delegate that effectively to a relevant person who is more like the person on the ground and they’re going to be the people that organise this. know it might not be them that does the risk assessment but like it’s their responsibility but it’s only delegated from this person so it’s up to them really to get the culture and make sure everybody’s trained and all that sort of stuff is that is that right yeah so when it comes to obviously there is an issue comes to prosecution obviously it probably would still be the person at the top would then go I brought this in we’ve given the training we’ve it still happened but they still can’t just can’t go down to them because they should obviously be checking to making sure that people who are employed to do their job for fire safety it is being done Thank you.

That’s a really helpful clarification because, again, it’s like, well, you know, I guess that’s what keeps people on this call up at night. So Lisa’s asked a great question. There’s been a couple of great questions. Lisa and Lindsay, if it’s OK, I think we’re going to cover some of those later on.

So we’ll get to those a little bit later, if that’s OK. So I’ll come back to those. I guess we’re talking a bit more broadly here and then we can dive in to specifics. But kind of broadly, what fire safety measures must commercial properties have in place? Yeah, so with the registered formal, it just it doesn’t highlight really what you need. It doesn’t say you will need a fire safety. won’t say like what type or how many you need or anything like it just says sort of states it it then comes down to what we as industry uses the British standards their best practice but they’re not necessarily law so you don’t have to follow them but they are what everyone follows because they are the best practices it shows you have to show that you are putting in what the regulatory form would want you to put in.

So then you’re getting your fire alarm detection, automatic detection extinguishers. You may need some sort of smoke vent system, maybe in stairwells, you know, to make sure that people who are in higher floors can get out. you may need, like going back to firearm detection, you may have detection, but without the call points, but then you, depending on the risk assessment, that will then determine what you will need.

So when it comes to obviously the fire precaution measures. So there’s two types, well, there’s automatic fire safety, fire protection, and there’s passive fire protection. So automatic fire protection is like your detection, your extinguishers, anything that once there is a fire, it activates or you need to do something like press a button and then it works starts working you know parts out the fire or yeah smoke you don’t have the pacifier which is like your fire doors or your uh compartmentation so that’s a you find um resistant construction um that’s by design rather than sort of stick on measures it’s like it just is inherently kind of safer Yeah, so they sort of break off into them, too, of how…

They all sort of do similar things, obviously. You fire your doors and you fire, construction will stop anything passing through to one side to the other, and then you’ve got your smoke vents, they will then suck out the smoke that’s building up in that, say, escape corridor or anything like that. So, yeah, it all does depend on the type of building you’ve got and what… your risk assessment says you should have in certain areas or in the building.

So like when it comes to fire extinguishers, you might have, because each fire extinguisher puts out a different type of fire, so you wouldn’t just put water or a foam fire extinguisher into everywhere and then just expect that to do the job of putting out every fire. If you say you’ve got a kitchen with a lot of cooking oils or big areas like that you then use a you’d have like a wet chemical in the kitchen because that that is their design for that same as you what you’d only see is a foam or water next to a CO² because obviously quite a lot of places now have a lot of electronics or electrical devices so you’ve got the water and foam to put out not sort of fires with like combustible materials like paper and cardboard and maybe furniture and stuff like that and tables and then you’ve got the CO² to then put out the electrical devices.

So you’d always see a CO2 in like a server room, maybe a plant room as well, just to make sure that you’ve got the designated special fire extinguisher for that specific hazard that might be in that area. So what I’m hearing really, and I guess there’s no surprise there. But it really underlines that there’s no one size fits all.

Obviously, it’s highly, potentially highly complex if you’ve got a mixed use building and maybe an older building, you know, there could be some stuff that you could do from that passive, you know, the passive protection, or you may need to start putting in some of these active, well, you always certainly will have to put some active measures on top, but you know, you may be limited in what you can do in passive measures because the building is the building.

But with newer buildings or ones that you’re about to design or changes, then you can start to perhaps go back to add some of those passive ones. But I guess the point is you’ve got to have somebody who knows what they’re doing to make that risk assessment and especially to carry it out and to implement measures and review them, right?

Yeah, because what happens frequently when I go and do risk assessments is people think they’ve got, oh, we’ve got a fire alarm put in. We’ve got a compartmentation that’s been installed for certain areas, like cables passing through. Oh, we’ve got this extinguisher. And they think, well, we’ve got it. outside once it’s been put in but then sometimes it’s reviewing it to see that make sure that it is actually correct because I think quite a lot of times people think the people who install it know always what they’re doing and sometimes that’s not always the the case not saying for everyone because obviously it does happen where people put in the right stuff which is what we want but especially when it comes to compartmentation there’s a lot of We’ve come back since obviously Grenfell happened and the compartmentation was quite a big issue.

When we’ve gone into places, we’ve seen, oh yeah, we’ve got fibre out there. mastic around cables and things like that. But when you actually look at it, it’s not been installed to the manufacturer’s details and it’s not been installed to British standard details. So it’s not always put in correctly. So sometimes it’s to review this stuff. That’s why it says with the risk assessments, it should be reviewed because even though you might go, oh, you’ve got something to put it in, it’s fine.

But then if you get someone in who’s trained and know what they’re looking for. they’ll be able to determine what you’re doing. I guess it’s always good to have somebody else check your working, right? Because even if you think you’re doing it right, you still need you know it’s often like how I mean even just writing an email right sometimes I’ve ever seen important emails you can’t see your own mistakes because you’re too close to it right it’s just good to have somebody else and Chris has asked a great question Chris I’m going to come back to that one again because um there’s some really good questions coming on here but I’m going to come back to those because um Alex sent me and I think this is a good point to do Alex sent me some great uh images uh pictures of things that he’s come across which um will be I think quite relevant given what you said about these risk assessments. Going through them, it felt like I was on one of those online courses of spot the hazard. We can play spot the hazard here a little bit. I think you’ll all probably get this first one. Alex, talk us through some of these. Yeah, so obviously the first one, it’s an exit door, but they put no exit sign on it. There might be a reason why it’s not being used as an exit, but they’ve still got all the other signs up there.

So they’ve got fire exit. Do we use it? Do you not use it? But then that would become another thing when it comes to the revenue fire assessment. There’s a reason why that door can’t be used for fire. x for an exit you might have to maybe possibly reduce the numbers of people in there you might have to have an exit somewhere else quite close to that but somewhere else as well but that could be confusing if a fire alarm goes off and there is a fire people seeing smoke and they try and run to that door they might panic and just go to that door instead of going to another door yeah absolutely yeah and then uh obviously there must be some sort of issue with that one where possibly the lock on the door at the floor level wasn’t keeping it shut properly.

So they obviously put that in to make sure people aren’t just walking in or walking out. But again, fire, people start panicking, trying to open that, probably wouldn’t be able to open it. And also that bit of carbon, that stuff in there, it’s just a combustible sort of material in the escape route really shouldn’t be there either. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And then the spillages as well from something even on the floor in front.

But if you look on the last one, obviously, they put the blinds down to obviously reduce the sun, but you’ve blocked the sign. Obviously, you can see at the top of the outline, that’s the fire exit sign there. Right, yes, yeah, yeah. So it all might be coming past and they might see that and they’re not seeing any green sign or anything. They might think, oh, it’s not an exit and then carry on going. Again, that’s delaying their evacuation to getting out into the sea. Or even if they do, they’ve now got to kind of fight through this kind of blind thing, you know, when it’s supposed to be easy to get out, right? It’s meant to be single action.

So let’s have a look at round two. Talk us through this one. And I didn’t spot this, actually. Beforehand, I didn’t see this at all. So what are we looking at here? So in this one, if you can just see on the larger picture that there is a fire extinguisher down there. In and behind all that other material, obstructions, you can’t even really see the sign to know which one it is. Is it Is it a water?

So obviously if you need the extinguisher there and you’re looking around and you’re not that familiar with that area, or even if you are familiar, you might start panicking and you’re trying to get it out. You’re getting stuck. You can’t pull it out. That’s obviously reducing the amount of time you would be able to safely then use the fire extinguisher. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Right. On to this one. I love this one.

This one felt quite Harry Potter or reminded me of Labyrinth. where she’s trying to get into the labyrinth and like, you know, you need to get through the wall and, you know, you’ve got to do something clever to figure out how to get through that exit, right? Yeah, I can confirm there wasn’t a secret. But yeah, obviously that sign, it’s not really showing you where you’re meant to be going. It’s meant to be going to the left, but that is obviously, again, if there’s smoke, visibility down, people might end up at that wall thinking there is a door there and then what he’s trying to say. Yeah, totally. And then let’s, I love this one.

This was kind of said to me like, well, if you’re a carnivore, go straight ahead. If you’re vegan, go left. Is that, you know, it’s a bit confusing. Just giving obviously contradictory sort of information to the, whoever’s to the occupants of the building. Do they go towards McDonald’s or do they, as you say, go to the vegan bar?

Yeah. yeah and then um talk to these there’s some really obvious ones here and and they’re not so obvious I thought as well yeah so obviously you’ve got some um an occupant’s obviously decided oh I don’t want my bike just on the floor I’m going to tie it to this fire extinguisher uh make sure it’s all safe make sure you know if anyone’s trying to use the extinguisher they can not really use the extinguisher there’s also extinguish emission as well from the other side co-two’s missing so I don’t know if that’s on the back wheel or not You never got to the middle one.

Probably everyone’s thinking it looks okay. The issue with this one is there is a printer just sort of in the escape route. And really, you shouldn’t have anything that’s going to cause any unnecessary fire load or ignition source within an escape route. It should all be protected. So really, that should… Yeah, that was an interesting point.

So I thought, oh, he must have sent me this because it’s blocking the route, which, as you’ve just said, is true. But it’s also a potential source of fire itself in an escape route because it’s an electrical object, which I hadn’t realised, so… Yeah, basically, you know, you’re adding additional risks to an area that shouldn’t have additional risk, really. Sure. And then the last one is a detector point. So this is what I was on about saying, we’ve got detection. But as you can see, it’s very close to the frame of a door.

In the British standards, they should have at least, uh, five hundred mil free space around them to make sure that they’re getting smoke, uh, being able to detect smoke, um, correctly, really make sure they’ve got enough space. So when the smoke plumes at the top, it it’s going to hit that detective and give you enough time to be at the correct amount of time to be able to detect it. Great.

Yeah, that’s really helpful. I’ll do one more and then we’ll go back to the questions and maybe jump to some of the really great questions coming through. I want to make sure we address those. There’s some fun ones here.

Talk us through this first one because this is to the untrained eye. I didn’t think it was particularly obvious. So what’s wrong here? So again, as I was saying, people putting in fire compartmentation and putting in type of fire safety stuff. They’ve put… fire back round adducting you know fire stopping it yeah that’s great but if you look at what it’s gone into it’s just a false ceiling so and it’s also open air so if there is a fire either side the fire is just going to burn through that so it’s not really doing anything it’s just sort of someone’s thought oh there’s a wall there it’s been uh damaged by the vent going through I’ll put some fire back around it in there, but also as well, if that is a fire rated ducting, it should have a fire damper in there. And if it’s not got a fire damper in there, then it’s just going to burn away from the release, the ducting, and then it’s just going to go through the ducts anyway.

So it’s basically someone’s come in and said, you need a fire stop in there. When you don’t need a fire stop in there, they just sort of pull the fire stop on the fire. I think you and I can spot number two and three, I think, but just talk us through those quickly. Obviously, you’ve got the fire up to there and no one’s getting through that. You’re getting one person maybe down the side and then that’s going to cause a bottleneck.

Delay of evacuation, getting people going to trip over, causing injury. And then the last one is evacuation chairs stored away, nice and safe, locked away. No one can use it unless they want the keys. The key’s probably going to be on the other side of the building. Or if someone is on the outside and then no one’s going to be able to get out.

The person who needs that chair isn’t going to be able to use that, be able to use the chair to help them evacuate. and that’s one of the like I said that’s one of those like key seconds that somebody’s put that on there and just at the point you need it those two seconds or those ten seconds that will make all the difference you know it’s it’s a mass it makes a massive difference so uh let me just come back to um uh I’ll look at some of uh these questions so we’re talking about risk assessments so let me I’ll dig into a couple of those before we move on there’s quite a specific one here what fire risk assessment would need to be done for a small block of two or three flats that have a small communal area and I guess it’d be great to answer this specific question but also like the point behind it it’s a relatively small building um you know that there might be a lot of people on here who are landlords for you know relatively small buildings like this what specifically needs to be done yeah so you the risk assessment would still be similarly still be the scientific based one it’d still be to the we use the past past slash industry issued one that everyone sort of uses. It’s got all the areas that most buildings have, like the issues and stuff that come up frequently.

So it’d still be that one, just obviously some of the things wouldn’t be relevant for it, but you would still want to look at the fire resistance between the compartmentation of between each flat, also between the flat and the communal areas. So when it comes to detection, you’d have a part one, which is the commercial side. So that would be all my detection in the communal areas linked to a fire panel. And then you would have in the actual apartments, you may have then maybe one detector from that same part one. on linked onto it and then you’d have your domestic detection is well involved so if there’s an issue you don’t want like false alarms coming through they would have they could turn it on and off if need be then if there is a fire deal the detector then linked to the fire alarm system, so that’s what sort of stuff you’d have for that.

So the risk assessment wouldn’t be the same. They’d just look at them sort of communal areas, make sure that they’re free, the scavengers are free. It’s not that there’s some sort of lower level of risk assessment. Some of the sections or some of the detail might not be relevant to that building. And just like your tax return, you just go, no, that’s not relevant. That’s irrelevant. But it still has to be the same thing.

Yeah, so that’s basically what happened. It would be probably a level three. A level four risk assessment is where you start digging into the… like evasive so you start taking uh samples from the walls uh some from the ceiling you’d look more into into the build like in depth into the build to make sure obviously the quantations there is fine because obviously but that would maybe come off of unless you think you know you’ve got issues of of that you would go for the part three at the level three but that they might if you think you’re fine they might come and go well we’re not sure about that wall we’re not sure about this area you we think you’d have a level four maybe not even level or you may have a compartmentation survey based off that where someone would come in they look above false ceilings they’d look uh deep into like void areas uh stuff like that so that’s where the levels will come from but they would all really be level three you just be sections would just be innate or you know no need for any of that to be in the risk assessment

OK, thank you. That’s really helpful. Now, there’s a couple of questions here that relate to this. So rather than ask a question, I’m going to ask you the question I was going to ask you, and then we’ll see if that answers everybody’s question. So how does the fire safety rate, and you’ve kind of talked about it a little bit there, how does the fire safety legislation apply to shared or multiple occupancy commercial buildings?

I guess we just looked at residential. And one of the questions here is, who’s responsible? I think, where was it? What was the question? I’ve lost it. Anyway, I guess that’s the point of who’s responsible. Is that confusing? How does it apply to multiple occupancy commercial buildings?

Yeah, so in the regular form order it says in article article twenty two cooperation and coordination between responsible people or persons and basically what this means is if there’s more so if there is a landlord say landlord owns the building but there’s multiple floors different off different companies in different offices each one of them would have to cooperate and coordinate with each other so to make sure everyone in that building is.

So that would mean also it just depends on the lease, because sometimes the leases might say that the landlords are responsible for only the communal areas and then possibly offices that aren’t occupied at the moment in time. So they might have risk assessment done just for the communal areas, making sure their areas are fine. And then they get the tenants to do risk assessment for their own areas. Or it could be that the landlord just does everywhere. And then they have to make sure that the tenants keep to what he says in their fire assessment, you know, changes loads of stuff, making sure like, you know, doors aren’t kept open and stuff like that.

But then once that’s been decided on who’s responsible for what, it then comes down to making sure that their fire risk assessment, the landlord’s fire assessment is given, the copy is given to each tenant and then vice versa. So the tenants are then given their assessments to the landlord, making sure that if there’s any issues that are contradictory to someone else’s assessment, that it’s all fine, there’s no issues there. bring them in, go through it and say, well, this is affecting this person, this other company needs, you need to change this to make sure that we’re all. I’m guessing.

So therefore, like so many things in life, you want to be on good terms, right? It’s like, you don’t really want to sort of revert, you know, go, have to look at all the legal stuff like obviously you do for something like this but it’s better to start with like a good relationship like we’re all trying to do the same thing here and I guess as well firstly that’s interesting so you it’s really key to go check your lease like who is responsible if you’re an immobile occupancy like check like legally you know who is responsible for what and then I’m guessing that situations like serviced offices or where the use is quite similar it’s I’m guessing it would probably be more the landlord but then for other situations although you still got to check that for other situations where you might have very different kinds of you know maybe more sort of commercial sort of out of town areas you know where you might have different type quite different types of um business in one building you know you’ve got a car repair guy here and a you know, a consultant here, you know, white-collar sort of, you’ve got two very, very different businesses. I would imagine that their own risk assessments, they might have to do their own risk assessments more because they’re so different.

Is that typical? Risks they’ll have different risk assessments and also they’d have to show how it would hinder the other side so say like you’re saying with garrison might have uh fuel pumps outside or uh something else that’s more flammable that might risk their front door going out their main exit going out might be there and there’s the gas pumps right there so it’s a bit you don’t obviously well we can’t have that going out to there uh that could be the hazard that’s then set off something else yeah that’s and because of the nature of what they have those hazards could be quite quick and very flammable so uh um I’m just gonna just go for our last one here because this is I guess a biggie for you keeping the people on um this call up at night what are the penalties for failing to comply with these fire safety regulations yeah so any fire fire service or hsv hse inspectors that come in and they can inspect your building basically and if they’ve determined that there is issues they can hit you with like an alteration notice uh which basically means you just need to make like small changes or that there is a change of use in the building but there’s not been a risk assessment so if you’ve gone so say you’ve decided you’re completely changing your business and then you completely revamped to a whole different type of complete what you need to get your assessment done to make sure that the changes are done.

Then there’s the enforcement notice. So that’s where they’re, they found issues that are still very serious, but they’re not serious enough to like shut you down or shut parts of the building off. But you get given a time period to basically you’ve got till I say a year or so or six months or a month or whatever it is end up going to court go to jail if you continue not to do it and then you’ve got the prohibition notice so that’s even more serious where basically they decide that your building is that unsafe that they’re going to completely shut you down you have to have all your occupants out so that’s obviously more damage for residential because people live there that’s where they live people might have to be moved out And then that comes down to the responsible person and the company to, well, you’ve got to find them alternative accommodation now.

So that’s cost of that. But it could also be they just shut a part of the building down. So say possibly like a nightclub or something, they’ve got two floors, but they’ve decided for whatever reason, something’s happened, the rear exit from the second floor or the exits from the second floor aren’t complying because whatever, they’ve done some sort of refurbishment or until you’ve made the upstairs safe. You are not allowed to operate using the upstairs. so that obviously the money that they’ve put into revamp upstairs is going to go now because obviously you’ve can’t use that space you’re not getting anywhere from that so that’s again that’s where it comes to huge fines prosecution shut down the business completely um yeah that’s the issues that you can face from because it’s criminal it’s a criminal offense as well to basically not do any of the changes that they’ve done.

Yeah, I can imagine. Well, it’s pretty, again, I mean, it’s the big one, isn’t it? You don’t want to kind of mess with this because it’s so, it can affect so many people so quickly. So, and also there’s reputational risk as well. Obviously we’re more concerned about the fire, the health and safety risk, but, you know, there is reputational risk as well, you know, because it’s, you know, fires are big and loud and very visible all over the news and they tend to make the news for that reason.

So, That happened with Woolworths when they went bankrupt, but they had a couple of fire incidences going through, especially the big one in Manchester. And then eventually after they had a fire after that, they decided that the American owned business decided because of the reputation, they just parted way with the company, they sold it off.

Oh, really? Interesting. Yeah, yeah. So even if nobody’s hurt, you know, still they’re big and they could have been hurt. And yeah, so it’s a very, yeah, there’s obviously a very real reputational risk with these. Brilliant. Thanks, Alex.

We’ve gone through the main questions I wanted to cover. We’ve had lots of good questions. So rather than go to my kind of quickfire questions, I’m going to try and get some of those answered. I’m also aware that we’ve kind of gone, we’ve talked a lot, we’ve come so much, I find it really interesting, actually. We’re already to twelve forty three.

So just to say, before we go on to those questions, that if today has raised anything that you would like to talk further about. The team here at Robinson’s would love to talk to you, so do feel free to get in touch with us. Details are at the bottom here. And we’ll also watch out for the next webinar that will be coming up probably in two or three months’ time.

It’ll be great to see you on that one. If you need to jump… uh feel free to to jump but we’re going to carry on answering some of these questions so if you that’s interesting you want to ask any more questions we’re going to be here for another uh five or ten minutes if that’s okay uh with you uh if you need to carry on or get back to work make that call eat finish the sandwich then you know it’s be great to see you and thanks for joining us um so alex I’m just going to pin you with another couple of questions we’ve had a couple of questions about um fire extinguishers so let me deal with this one first.

Many people are aware of the standard annual fire extinguisher testing, but not so much five-year extended testing. Is this a five-year requirement based on all or just specific types of extinguishers? I’m testing your deep knowledge here. um it does depend on obviously the manufacturer details of what it says it’s it’s it’s life of it is but that normally that the five year is mainly for the water and the foam I believe I think the co-twos can last up to ten years so it is based on the actual uh fire extinction It’s not just it’s not a it’s not a blanket thing. Pardon the pun. It’s a it depends on the extinguisher.

So on that note, I’m going to say I’m going to put this where I’ve got to have this after that. Where would you need to use a fire blanket? the kitchens are the biggest area for fire blankets. Again, it’s the same as if you’re not going to have, if it’s just, so if you’ve got more of a commercial kitchen, it’s a restaurant side place or a fast food area, something like you probably, you would have a wet chemical as well as the fire blankets. Cause if it’s just a small little pan, you might be able to put that with a fire blanket. If it’s, you know, a, a, a big, um, uh, what’s the word? Um, grill, not grill, deep fat fryer type thing, you then would want the wet chemical. Whereas if you’ve got, you know, more of a kitchenette in your offices, you’ve got, you know, a kettle, microwave, maybe a small hob or something like that, something where only a little thing might catch fire, that’s where you’d want the fire blanket and possibly a CO² as well, you know, for the electrical issues as well.

But that’s where a fire blanket would come in, more for little food fires more. I have my own I think amusing story about fire blanket, which I was debating, which I’m going to share it if it’s all right, quickly indulge me. So I used to work on an oil refinery. So used to be chemical engineer and we got to do like big fire safety. It wasn’t just like extinguishers, like we got to use the hoses and like, how do you turn off a, you know, file or oil refinery. So it’s quite cool. And we had the fire retarded suits on and stuff. And we had to put out, they were showing like the fire triangle. So you cut, you know, cut off the oxygen.

So we had to put out a burning oil drum fire, which is pretty hot. with a fire blanket, as far as I remember. And I just copied what the fireman did, right? Which was he did that. And, you know, be careful here so the fire didn’t come up here. And he gripped the sides with his jacket. But, of course, he had a heat-resistant jacket, not just a fire-resistant jacket. So I went like that. I managed to get, like, a burn on a fire safety course, which I was like, yeah, like, what’s the word? I can’t think.

Yeah. can’t think of the word but you know what I mean it’s just like how am I about to get burnt on a fire safety course right so uh I had to go off and get like a height um pyrazine or something like that you know with cream and oh it’s quite funny anyway so use fire blankets carefully but there is something coming in as well that for so obviously we live in digital age and also more and more electronics with lithium ion batteries are coming quite a big risk of obviously especially ones that aren’t necessarily produced correctly or they’ve got damage or some sort of issues Dave bringing up because basically with lithium ion batteries is when they burn thermal runaway exothermic reaction it’s a thermal runaway so the cells in the battery when one blow like is damaging blows it then sets the next one off and then once that’s done right yeah it keeps doing that and that so and also you can’t use water extinguishers and you can’t use you could possibly use a CO2.

They are sort of bringing out this, an extinguisher that does put out lithium ion batteries. But the issue is you think you’ve put it out and then another one sets off and then you might eventually run out of what you got. So they are bringing out these fire blankets, free for like e-cars and other fairies. So basically wherever it is, you sort of just put the blanket over the top and then you just let it do its thing. let it burn out and I guess that’s starting to become an issue right because more and more buildings that have battery they might have solar panels and they might have an on-site battery storing some of that as the buffer or or whatever so yeah I can imagine those are that that’s uh not just an issue for like cars or something it’s you know they more and more buildings uh have those kind of uh batteries I’m just gonna try and whiz down a couple more questions before we uh go I don’t think I’m sorry everyone don’t think we’re gonna have to get all of them but um uh first let’s go for this one fire safety assessor who visited our site told me that a certain type of extinguisher is now being changed does not be used anymore in a few months time.

Is this the case if so why yeah if it’s what I think is it’s basically the uh foam extinguishers are being phased out due to environmental issues there’s no nothing to do with the fact it’s just once they don’t get used to then get sprayed out or wherever how have they disposed of them um and also it’s just to remove that environmental issue so the sort of there is a new phone coming out that is meant to be more environmental you know and also it’s just pretty much that halon back in the day right the same yeah yeah okay that’s helpful And then do you have to have, let’s do this one.

Do you have to have a fire compartment plan in place? You should, everywhere should. It just makes it so much easier when you’re determining what areas you need to be part of the compartmentation. Because a lot of areas we go to where there hasn’t been a fire strategy done for the building, or if there has, they’ll have a copy of it. So if you want to get a fire door replaced, because you’ve put all the fire, a lot of areas where we go into places, they want all the same doors put in.

So they put all the doors in and then no one knows if that is meant to be a fire door or not, or if it’s just a door that looks like a fire door to make everywhere else look the same. Whereas if you add them designs or plan, you would know, right, okay, yeah, this area needs to be a fire department and we know this fire door, whatever, ensure obviously that it is correct as well right yeah this is a protected area protected corridor this is someone’s apartment or anything like you know then yeah then if you look as well if there’s any any cables going through into the apartments or through anywhere else or anything going through at the top or even in the walls or in fact you know right okay well that’s a firewall it’s got fire resistant materials on it we need to fill that make sure it’s the same resistance as doing any repairs or remedial works that you have to do.

Right. So I was just debating which to go to next, but I think this is relevant. So Sarah, I’m going to try and get to your question, but if I just get a very quick answer on this, which is very much related. So you mentioned this fire strategy survey.

Does that replace the need to have a fire risk assessment? From what I heard, it’s more like that’s the pre-work we do and then it makes it much easier to do the fire risk assessment. Is that, they are separate things? Yeah, so the fire strategy you develop for either the for the building and then the fire assessments make sure that it sticks to that fire strategy so if you’ve got a policy you know a certain type of evacuation policy is that still the policy that it says in your fire strategy uh have you refurbished a certain area is that refurbishment on been added to this fire strategy or um anything like so basically anything the fire strategy says when you do your assessment you go back to that right this fire got an issue here because that’s not compliant, that’s not the same. So short answer, since we’re going to go quick fire, short answer, no. In the reform, it still says you need to have that reassessment. Sarah asks, what letter as an agent do we need to send to the responsible person of a block of flats? And then she followed up regarding an FRA.

Does that make sense? As in. Your guess is a good one. So basically what they need to produce for their tenants of what fire risk of what requirements are under the for the tenants, what they need to follow. I think that is saying so. Yeah, it would be. So I guess this is an agent who maybe rents out the flat on behalf of somebody who owns the building, I’m guessing. That person would be the responsible person. And so what do they need to send them? I mean, it sounds like they need to send them more than, they don’t just want to send them stuff. They want to have a conversation and just make sure that everyone’s safe. Who’s possibly in the, who is going to be in the building. So possibly if they’ve got any disabilities or any impairments or anything like that, do they need to have an evacuation plan put in, like a PEEPS?

I guess bottom line, Sarah, we’re not entirely sure what you mean. So do feel free to get in touch. I think maybe we just got the wrong end of the stick. So I’m just going to deal with one last question.

Chris, I think you asked that earlier on. Have you ever experienced any variability between fire risk assessment? I’d be very surprised if you say that it must be some variability. What’s your experience of that been? Well, between fire assessments, did you say? Yeah. Yeah, so we’ve been to some places where it’s been two pages long. or you can clearly see that they’ve not looked around the whole building properly or looked into the documentation.

I’ve heard of things that have been there an hour or two and it’s like a building that’s took all day to actually assess. So most risk assessments should be quite a big document. So ours are normally sixty pages to maybe eighty pages depending on the amount of failings that we find or issues or Sometimes it’s not even that. Sometimes it’s just literally putting in all the stuff that they do have, not just the stuff you don’t have.

So to make sure, right, you’ve got the fire extinguishers within a certain area. You’ve got the fire alarm detection system. You’ve got the co-computation, the evacuation stuff, all the training that your staff members have that’s up to date. They might have done everything right, but you still want to document it. Yeah, so even… Like I said, even if your place is very safe, you’ve got all the stuff in place, it still has to be documented, so it should still be a big document. And I’m guessing, look, at the end of the day, you know, I go back to my very early comment, right?

Like, did I leave the oven on, you know, kind of thing. This is the sort of thing that, like, if I’m going to be, we joked about this when we were preparing for this, you know, if I’m going to be standing up in court and I, like, do I want to be holding the Yeah. Yeah. I think that would be that that’s kind of where I’m at as a lay person. Like I want to be holding, I want to be able to show that like I did everything I possibly could. Um, you know, even if we got it wrong or something happened, like we did try, like we did do everything we were supposed to do. So, uh, yeah. Look, Alex, thank you so much. Thank you for all the, like, this is clearly a hot topic because, like, we’ve still got plenty of people still on. We’re well overrun.

So I just wanted to try and get as many of those questions. If you’ve got any more questions. Yeah, yeah, go for it, Alex. So, again, with the fire assessment, a lot of, because in regulation, in the regulatory formal, it says Article XVII is about maintenance, so it’s making sure all your stuff’s maintained, serviced, firearms all that a lot of that of the fire assessment sometimes half that is looking through all that sort of stuff making sure everything in your documentation even when it comes to like boiler checks gas safety checks the fixed wire testing pat tests and stuff like that that’s all in it so sometimes it can if depending on the documentation you’ve got which you should really have anyway that could take up a big bulk of what you’ll do not just then right now I’ve got to go walk sure that you’ve got all the documentation that you need to have. Right. It just pulls everything together. Make sure I’ve done all this. Everything’s up to date. Tick, tick, tick, tick. And it’s not all over the place. It’s in one place. I can check everything. Yes.

Which makes sense, doesn’t it? And again, just by doing that reduces the risk because you’ve got all of that information. It’s being checked regularly and so on. So Alex, thank you so much. And thank you for, I’m going to let you go, Alex. But thank you. Cheers. Thank you so much for watching.

And again, do join us for our next webinar we’ve got coming up. If you missed the previous webinars, you can go to this link below, robinsonsfs.com slash video, and you’ll see the replay of this will be up there fairly shortly, probably in the next day or two. And you can see all the previous webinars that we’ve done as well. So, yeah, thank you for watching and enjoy the rest of your lunch. Cheers.