What is the Fire Safety Act 2021?
The Fire Safety Act 2021 clarified that the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005 applies to the structure, external walls and flat entrance doors of buildings containing two or more domestic premises.
Its effect was clarification rather than new duty. It settled an ambiguity about how far the Order reached in multi-occupied residential buildings, and the answer brought external walls and flat entrance doors clearly within it.
The practical consequence for responsible persons was that fire risk assessments for those buildings had to consider parts many had previously treated as outside scope.
It sits alongside subsequent regulations that set out specific duties in more detail, so it is rarely the only thing a responsible person for a residential block needs to read.
In practice
A managing agent working out what changed for their blocks.
The clarification about structure, external walls and flat entrance doors brought parts of buildings into assessments that had excluded them.
For many blocks the practical effect was that the external wall construction became something the assessment had to address rather than note as out of scope.
Assessments produced before it that are silent on those elements are not current.
What goes wrong in practice
- Assessments for residential blocks still scoped to common parts only.
- Flat entrance doors treated as the leaseholder's business alone.
- The Act read in isolation from the regulations that followed it.