What are the fire safety duties in facilities management?
Fire safety duties require a responsible person to assess fire risk in a building and manage it — covering the assessment, the measures it identifies, and the records that evidence them.
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<a href="https://facilityoptix.co.uk/glossary/fire-safety">What are the fire safety duties in facilities management?</a> — diagram by
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</figure>For an FM team the practical content is maintenance and inspection: alarms, emergency lighting, extinguishers, doors, dampers and escape routes all have their own regimes.
The risk assessment sits above those and connects them. Maintaining equipment without an assessment saying what the building needs is maintaining an inherited arrangement.
Compartmentation is the part FM most often damages, because every service installation passes through it and reinstatement is somebody's second priority.
In practice
An FM team maintaining fire systems for a responsible person who never sees the records.
Servicing happens, certificates are filed, and the fire risk assessment is reviewed by somebody else entirely.
The maintenance regime and the risk assessment are supposed to inform each other, and in most buildings they are two parallel processes that never meet.
A finding from the assessment that does not reach the planner never gets done.
What goes wrong in practice
- Equipment maintained with no current fire risk assessment behind the regime.
- Contractor works breaching compartmentation with no permit requiring reinstatement.
- Assessment actions held separately from the maintenance system, so neither view is complete.