If you’re responsible for fire safety in your business, do you fully understand your duties?
Fire safety awareness has grown. This is good news for everybody. As awareness has risen, so has the level of priority afforded to fire safety within businesses. This has led to heightened focus on fire safety and in turn, to increased action. It’s the best kind of domino effect.
But there is a stumbling block.
Whilst businesses are realising the importance of fire safety and investing more time and money in this area, it’s not always being put into the right things. And this is down to leaders not fully understanding their fire safety duties. In fact one in seven people identified as the Responsible Person is not fully confident in their understanding of the role’s legal requirements.
The findings of a joint report published by the Fire Industry Association (FIA), the BAFE, NSI and Sapio Research highlight a shortfall in understanding. Knowing of something (having awareness) is not the same as understanding it.
79% of business leaders expect to invest more in fire safety in the coming 5 years, so its crucial that the gap in understanding is closed.
Do you understand your fire safety duties?
So you understand that fire safety is important. But do you understand your duties as the responsible person?
Many of those responsible for Fire Safety in their business know that it is a high priority, but don’t fully understand their obligations. One such responsibility is checking the competence of the fire safety contractors you enlist. Only half of the leaders surveyed recognised this as one of the requirements of the responsible person.
One way to ensure that businesses are appointing competent contractors is through third party certification. This is a legal requirement in some industries. But fire safety isn’t one of them. Many within the industry have been arguing that third party certification should be mandated, and there is much support for it. However at present it is merely a recommendation. This leaves the responsible person at risk of investing in services which don’t meet the required standards.
BAFE’s campaign “Don’t just specify, verify” already took steps to encourage due diligence when enlisting fire safety contractors. But this report takes the next step, presenting the support for mandating certification and the data to highlight the gap between the desire for fire safety and the understanding of what is required in a competent person. The report makes recommendations for the UK Government including
The UK Government requires Responsible Persons to use third-party certification from UKAS-accredited certification bodies as the means of verifying a fire safety provider’s competence
The Fire Safety Competence Gap – Report 2026
You can read the full report and recommendations here: The Fire Safety Competence Gap
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