What are the Fire Safety (England) Regulations 2022?
The Fire Safety (England) Regulations 2022 place specific duties on responsible persons for multi-occupied residential buildings in England, including information for residents and, for taller buildings, information for the fire and rescue service.
They translate general duties into named, checkable obligations — what residents must be told, what checks must be made on certain doors, and what information must be provided and kept current for the fire and rescue service.
Several duties are tiered by building height, so what applies to a given block depends on where it falls. Establishing that first avoids both over-compliance and gaps.
Because the duties are specific and evidenced by records, they are among the easiest to be found in breach of, and among the easiest to demonstrate compliance with if the records exist.
In practice
A block where residents have never been given fire safety instructions.
The strategy is stay put, the notices are in the lobby, and nothing has ever been provided to individual households.
The regulations introduced specific duties about information to residents, door checks and information to the fire and rescue service, several of which are about communication rather than construction.
They apply to particular building types, which is the first thing to establish.
What goes wrong in practice
- Duties assumed to apply uniformly regardless of building height.
- Resident information sent once and never repeated or updated.
- Door checks carried out without records identifying which doors and when.