Responsible Person Duties.
What the RRFSO actually expects of a responsible person, in practice.
Fire safety over Christmas: cold weather, decorations and a thinner rota
Winter adds heaters, lights and deliveries to a building at the same time as it takes staff out of it. Here is what actually changes, and what to check before the break.
24 October 2026 · 8 min readMartyn's Law and your fire strategy: invacuation is not evacuation
Martyn's Law requires procedures for evacuation, invacuation, lockdown and communication. Two of those send people the opposite way to a fire alarm, and the building has one set of occupants who have to be told which is which.
24 October 2026 · 8 min readResidential PEEPs: what the 2025 Regulations put behind the acronym
The Fire Safety (Residential Evacuation Plans) (England) Regulations 2025 give residents with disabilities an entitlement to a person-centred assessment, a written statement and information shared with the fire service. In a stay put building that is a harder conversation than it sounds.
11 October 2026 · 6 min readWaking watch: a bridge, not a destination
A waking watch is an interim measure that buys time while a building's fire strategy is restored. Where it becomes permanent, the cost falls on residents and the underlying defect stays unfixed.
1 October 2026 · 6 min readFire drills and evacuation records: what you need to be able to show
A drill that happened and was not recorded is, evidentially, a drill that did not happen. What to capture, what a useful drill actually tests, and why the awkward findings are the ones worth writing down.
6 August 2026 · 4 min readDelegating fire safety duties without delegating liability
A responsible person can hand off the work. What they generally can't hand off is the underlying legal duty — and that gap catches people out.
25 June 2026 · 3 min readWhat records does a responsible person actually need to keep?
The RRFSO's record-keeping duty scales with the building, which is exactly why it's so often under-delivered on smaller, lower-risk premises.
21 May 2026 · 4 min readThe Fire Safety Act 2021: what actually changed for responsible persons
The Act clarified rather than rewrote the RRFSO — but that clarification closed a genuine ambiguity that mattered for a lot of multi-occupancy buildings.
9 April 2026 · 3 min readWhen more than one responsible person shares a building
The RRFSO expects joint responsible persons to cooperate and coordinate. In practice that cooperation is where most of the risk actually sits.
12 March 2026 · 4 min readWhat the RRFSO actually requires, in practice rather than in legal language
The Order itself is written in the language of legislation. Here's what it translates to as a working list of what a responsible person actually needs to be doing.
12 February 2026 · 3 min readWhat managing agents are actually taking on when they accept fire safety duties
Fire safety often sits quietly inside a broader management agreement. It shouldn't — the duties involved deserve to be spelled out explicitly.
15 January 2026 · 4 min readWho is the 'responsible person' under the RRFSO?
It's a legal role, not a job title, and more than one person can hold it in the same building at the same time — which is exactly where confusion tends to start.