The LWF Blog

Fire Safety for Facilities Management Personnel – Fire Safety Management – Part 290

February 10, 2025 12:09 pm

Lawrence Webster Forrest (LWF) is a specialist fire engineering and fire risk management consultancy whose aim is to give information on best practice in fire safety for facilities management personnel through this blog series. In part 289, LWF looked at how people continue to use familiar escape routes instead of travelling by the most appropriate alternative escape route in a building and how this information should impact design, fire drills and fire safety training for staff. In part 290, we begin to discuss the effective management of fire safety.

Fire safety management is an area of business and facility management that cannot be neglected. Enforcing authorities and insurers may provide an input into the process, but fire safety should be actively monitored, controlled and managed by senior staff members.

The monitoring and control of fire safety should only be undertaken by management and should not be regarded as an ‘add-on’ duty, but rather an integral part of day to day management duties. It has been known for these duties to fall to lower level management in an organisation and for those individuals to struggle to obtain the necessary commitment and funding from more senior management. A pushing aside of effective fire safety management in this way can lead to dangerous fire situations and culpability in the eyes of enforcing authorities.

There are many elements of effective fire safety management and duties may range from liaison with building control to approve changes to means of escape, to the arranging of staff training in fire safety matters.

If fire safety were given appropriate priority in the management activities of businesses, there would be fewer fire disasters occurring. A considerable number of multiple death fires in modern industrial or commercial buildings have been attributed to inadequate management of fire safety, rather than to the building design or failure of fire protection equipment.

Human behaviour and human responses to fire situations were covered in recent blogs, but significant elements of that subject matter are relevant here too, as the inappropriate or incorrect actions of staff and members of the public in a building can be largely attributed to a broader failure of management to implement and carry out appropriate fire safety management activities.

In part 291 of this series, LWF will consider specific examples of real life fire situations where management deficiencies were determined to be significant in the outcome of the fire. In the meantime, if you have any queries about your own facilities or wish to discuss this blog series, please contact LWF on freephone 0800 410 1130.

Lawrence Webster Forrest is a fire engineering consultancy based in Surrey with over 35 years’ experience, which provides a wide range of consultancy services to professionals involved in the design, development and construction and operation of buildings.

 

While care has been taken to ensure that information contained in LWF’s publications is true and correct at the time of publication, changes in circumstances after the time of publication may impact on the accuracy of this information