The LWF Blog

Fire Safety for Facilities Management Personnel – Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005 – Part 11

September 16, 2019 12:01 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 10, we discussed the introduction of the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005 which brought significant changes to face of legislation in the fire safety arena. In part 11, we will continue to look at the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005 (RRFSO) and its resulting impact, before considering the scope of the regulations.

In 1994, the government commissioned a scrutiny panel to carry out a review of fire safety legislation, which was carried out in accordance with deregulation initiatives. The review concluded that, as the existing legislation was conflicting and confusing, it placed an unfair burden on businesses. The resulting recommendation was that a rationalisation and simplification of all fire safety legislation was undertaken and from this The Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order was formed.

The aim of the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order (http://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2005/1541/contents/made) was to consolidate and rationalise the disparate pieces of fire safety regulation and bring it all together. The effect was to place an almost universal duty of fire safety care on the owners of nearly all non-domestic premises.

The RRFSO replaced almost all other legislation relating to fire precautions in existing buildings, with the exception of the Fire Precautions (Sub-surface Railway Stations) Regulations, and because it relates now to so many different types of building, the scope is very wide. The requirements of the Order refer to ‘premises’ and Article 2 of the order provides a definition to the word ‘premises’ of ‘any place’.

The types of buildings or premises that the Order applies to appears almost unlimited at first glance, but is, in fact, limited to:

– Any workplace
– Any vehicle, vessel, aircraft or hovercraft
– Any land installation, including the foreshore and other land intermittently covered by water, and any other installation – whether floating or resting on the seabed or the subsoil thereof, or resting on other land covered with water or the subsoil thereof
– Any tent or move-able structure

There are buildings which are definitively not covered by the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005 and details of these will be covered in the next blog in this series. In the meantime, if you have any queries about your own facilities or wish to discuss this blog series, please contact Peter Gyere in the first instance on 0800 410 1130.

Lawrence Webster Forrest is a fire engineering consultancy based in Surrey with over 25 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.