What is a responsible person?
The responsible person is the individual or organisation carrying the legal duty for fire safety in a building — typically the employer, owner or occupier who controls the premises.
The duty attaches to control of the premises rather than to a job title. In a workplace it usually sits with the employer; in a building with several occupiers it can be shared, with each party responsible for the parts they control and a duty to cooperate on the rest.
The role cannot be delegated away. A responsible person can appoint a competent person to carry out an assessment and a contractor to do the work, but the duty to see that it happens stays where it started.
In practice the hardest part is not identifying the duty holder but keeping the evidence they would need. The measures, the assessment, the checks and the actions taken are what demonstrate the duty was met.
In practice
An office block with a landlord, a managing agent and four tenant employers.
Each believes somebody else holds the duty for the common parts, and two of them are also responsible persons for their own demise.
Duties attach by control rather than by agreement, and where more than one person holds them they are required to cooperate.
The gap is almost never the fire risk assessment nobody did. It is the one everybody assumed somebody else had.
What goes wrong in practice
- A building with several occupiers where everyone assumes the landlord holds the duty for the common parts and nobody has confirmed it.
- A named responsible person who has left the organisation, with the records still addressed to them.
- Appointing a contractor and treating that as discharging the duty rather than as help in meeting it.