Fire risk assessments in multi-occupancy buildings: who's responsible for what

Multi-occupancy buildings — blocks of flats, mixed-use developments with commercial units below residential floors, shared office buildings with several tenant businesses — create a specific and recurring problem: fire safety responsibility that's genuinely split across several parties, in a way that makes it uncomfortably easy for each party to assume someone else has it covered.

Where the FRA boundary usually sits

In a typical block of flats, the fire risk assessment required under the current Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005 covers the common parts — corridors, stairwells, communal fire alarm systems, plant rooms, shared bin stores — rather than the inside of individual private flats, which generally fall outside its scope in most residential arrangements. In mixed-use buildings, commercial units typically need their own separate FRA covering their own demise, in addition to whatever assessment covers the shared structure.

Who actually holds the duty

The responsible person for the common parts is usually whoever has control of those areas — often a freeholder, a managing agent acting on the freeholder's behalf, or a resident management company. Where a managing agent is involved, it's worth being precise in the management agreement about exactly what fire safety duties have been delegated and what hasn't — delegating the task doesn't automatically delegate the underlying legal responsibility.

Where the gaps tend to open up

• –A change of managing agent, where fire safety records and outstanding actions don't get properly handed over
• –Commercial and residential elements of a mixed-use building each assuming the other's FRA covers the shared structure
• –A resident management company assuming the original developer's or freeholder's assessment still applies unchanged
• –Leaseholder alterations to communal areas that aren't reflected in the current assessment
• –Multiple contractors servicing different systems in the same building without a single point tracking whether everything's actually covered

Why hand-offs are the highest-risk moment

The single riskiest moment for a multi-occupancy building's fire safety records tends to be a change of managing agent or freeholder representative. Outgoing agents don't always hand over a complete, current set of records, and incoming agents don't always know what to ask for. A building can go through several such transitions over its life, and each one is an opportunity for an outstanding action, or even the FRA itself, to quietly fall through the gap.

Making the handover less risky

The buildings that handle this well tend to keep fire safety records — the current FRA, the action plan, door and equipment servicing history — in a form that isn't tied to any one person's inbox or filing cabinet, so a change of agent is a login change rather than a records recovery exercise. That's a large part of the practical case for a shared, portfolio-level system rather than records living wherever the last person who managed the building happened to keep them.

The precise split of responsibility in any given building depends on its lease structure, ownership and the terms of any management agreement in place — this is genuinely worth checking against the current RRFSO and, where there's ambiguity, a solicitor or fire safety professional familiar with the specific building.