Landlords and freeholders in England must ensure a written fire risk assessment of the communal areas is carried out and kept up to date, act on its findings, maintain fire doors, alarms and escape routes, and — for buildings over 11 metres — carry out quarterly communal fire door checks, annual flat entrance door checks, display wayfinding signage and give residents fire safety instructions. The duty sits with the 'responsible person' under the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005, and failure to comply can lead to enforcement notices, unlimited fines and imprisonment.
The Order is the core piece of legislation and places the duty on the 'responsible person' — usually the freeholder, the managing agent acting on their behalf, the landlord, or an employer in a workplace. You must assess the fire risk, put in place general fire precautions proportionate to that risk, and review the assessment regularly and after any material change. Since the Fire Safety Act 2021 clarified the scope, the structure, external walls (including cladding, balconies and insulation) and individual flat entrance doors of residential buildings are explicitly within scope of the Order, closing a long-running ambiguity that had been exploited after Grenfell.
The Fire Safety (England) Regulations 2022
These came into force in stages from January 2023 and added specific, checkable duties on top of the Order's general requirement to carry out a 'suitable and sufficient' assessment. They are the reason a competent assessor now asks about building height at the very start of a scoping call, since the duties scale sharply once a building crosses 11 metres and again at 18 metres.
All relevant buildings: the fire risk assessment, and the identity and qualifications of the person who carried it out, must be recorded in writing.
Over 11 metres: quarterly checks of all communal fire doors, including self-closing devices, and at least annual checks of flat entrance doors that lead onto a common area.
Over 11 metres: wayfinding signage identifying flat and floor numbers, visible in low light, on each storey.
Over 18 metres (higher-risk buildings): up-to-date floor plans and a secure information box for the fire and rescue service.
Over 18 metres: monthly checks of lifts intended for use by firefighters and any other lifts, plus checks of essential firefighting equipment, with faults reported to the fire and rescue service.
All residential buildings with two or more sets of flats sharing a common area: fire safety instructions and information provided to residents, including what to do in a fire and how to report defects.
Who counts as the 'responsible person'
There can be more than one responsible person for the same building — for example a freeholder for the structure and communal areas and a head tenant for a specific block within it. Where duties overlap, each responsible person must take reasonable steps to cooperate and coordinate. Managing agents are very often the ones carrying out these duties in practice on the freeholder's behalf, but the legal liability generally still sits with whoever has control of the premises, and cannot simply be delegated away in the event of a serious failure. This is a common point of confusion on London blocks with layered ownership structures — a head lease, an intermediate management company and a resident-led right-to-manage company can all be operating on the same building at once, and each needs to be clear which parts of the duty are theirs.
Freeholders retain ultimate responsibility for structure and shared parts even where a managing agent is instructed
Managing agents can be treated as the responsible person where they have been given control of the relevant premises
Right-to-manage companies take on the responsible person role for the areas within their remit once RTM is exercised
Head tenants can be a separate responsible person for a demised block within a wider estate
Employers are the responsible person for any workplace premises within a mixed-use building
The buildings behind this advice
Penalties for getting it wrong
Enforcement is tiered and fire and rescue services increasingly use the full range following Grenfell. Options include an informal notification, an alterations notice where planned changes would make the risk worse, a formal enforcement notice with a compliance deadline, a prohibition notice restricting or closing use of the building where risk to life is judged serious and imminent, unlimited fines on conviction, and imprisonment of up to two years for the most serious breaches under Article 32 of the Order.
Prohibition notices can be served immediately and are not always appealable before they take effect.
Fines are unlimited in the Crown Court and can run into hundreds of thousands of pounds for corporate landlords.
Directors and officers of corporate freeholders can be personally prosecuted where the offence was committed with their consent, connivance or neglect.
The commercial consequences beyond enforcement
Separately from prosecution, insurers can decline or reduce a claim where no valid, in-date fire risk assessment existed at the time of a fire, and buildings insurance renewal is increasingly conditional on evidence of one. Lenders and their solicitors routinely request the current fire risk assessment and action plan as part of any remortgage, sale or refinancing of a block, and a missing or overdue assessment can delay or derail a transaction. In practice this is often the more immediate and painful consequence for freeholders than the risk of prosecution, since a stalled sale chain affects every leaseholder in the building, not just the freeholder.
London-specific pressures on landlords
London Fire Brigade has been notably active in enforcement since Grenfell, and boroughs vary in how closely they coordinate licensing conditions for HMOs and selective licensing schemes with fire safety compliance. A landlord letting a converted Victorian house as an HMO in a borough with additional or selective licensing will typically find fire safety evidence requested as part of the licence application itself, which means the fire risk assessment stops being a background compliance document and becomes a gating item for being allowed to let the property at all.
How to stay on the right side of it
Have a competent, independently verified assessor carry out the assessment rather than relying on a generic template. Work through the resulting action plan with dated evidence of completion rather than good intentions. Reassess annually as a minimum, or sooner after any material change such as a refurbishment, change of use, or a fire or near-miss. Keep the assessment, the action plan and all associated maintenance records in one accessible place. None of that is expensive relative to the building's value; the failure to do it is.
Building Safety Act obligations that run alongside this
For higher-risk buildings, generally 18 metres or seven storeys and above, the Building Safety Act 2022 introduces a separate and more stringent regime overseen by the Building Safety Regulator, requiring a registered Principal Accountable Person, mandatory reporting of certain safety occurrences and a 'golden thread' of building information maintained throughout the building's life. This does not replace the Fire Safety Order duties described above — it sits alongside them, and for a landlord of a qualifying building both regimes need to be tracked and evidenced separately. The two regimes ask similar questions from different angles: the Order asks whether the building is safe today and whether the responsible person can prove it, while the Act asks whether the organisation managing a higher-risk building has the structure, record-keeping and named accountability to keep it safe over time. Landlords who treat these as one combined compliance programme, rather than two separate box-ticking exercises handled by different people, tend to manage both far more efficiently.
Identify whether your building meets the 18 metre or seven-storey higher-risk threshold before assuming the Act does not apply
Register the building with the Building Safety Regulator where required, before the relevant deadline
Appoint and record a named Principal Accountable Person with clear authority to act
Build and maintain the golden thread of building information from design through to ongoing management
Set up a reporting route for mandatory occurrences such as structural or fire safety concerns that meet the threshold for reporting
What enforcement actually looks like on the ground in London
It is easy to read a list of statutory penalties and picture enforcement as a single dramatic event, but the reality on London blocks is usually more incremental. A typical enforcement sequence begins with an inspecting officer from the local fire and rescue service raising informal concerns during or after a routine audit, often triggered by a resident complaint, a previous incident, or simply the building appearing on a programme of proactive inspections in a borough with a high concentration of older or higher-risk stock. Where the responsible person engages constructively and produces a credible action plan with dates, that is frequently where it ends. Where the response is slow, defensive or evasive, or where the underlying risk is judged serious enough that a response cannot safely wait, the service moves to a formal enforcement notice or, in the most urgent cases, a prohibition notice restricting use of all or part of the building immediately.
Informal contact or an audit letter is usually the first step, not a summons
A credible written response with dates and evidence often resolves matters at this stage
Alterations notices apply where planned building changes would increase risk
Formal enforcement notices set a legal compliance deadline that is not optional
Prohibition notices can take effect immediately where risk to life is judged serious and imminent
Practical steps for a managing agent taking on a new block
Managing agents inheriting a block from a previous agent, or a freeholder switching representation, should treat the fire safety file as one of the first things to audit, not an afterthought once the transition is otherwise complete. In our experience the gap between what a previous agent believed was in place and what documentary evidence actually exists is one of the more common — and most avoidable — sources of risk exposure for an incoming agent who unknowingly inherits someone else's compliance failure. A short, deliberate handover checklist focused specifically on fire safety avoids this trap.
Request the current fire risk assessment, action plan and evidence of completed actions before taking on management
Confirm who has legally been acting as the responsible person and whether that changes on handover
Check fire door, alarm and emergency lighting service records for gaps or lapsed contracts
Identify whether the building is subject to the 2022 Regulations' height-triggered duties and whether these have actually been implemented, not just referenced
Establish a clear record of resident fire safety information already issued, and what still needs to be sent
Duty-holder responsibilities at a glance
Landlords often ask which of the recurring fire safety duties are theirs, which sit with a managing agent and which fall to residents. The table below sets out how responsibility usually divides in a typical London block where a freeholder employs an agent. It is a starting point rather than a legal opinion: the Fire Safety Order places the duty on whoever has control of the premises, so a management contract can move the practical work but not the accountability. If a task is not clearly allocated in writing to someone competent, assume it is still yours and check that it has actually been done rather than assuming silence means compliance.
Duty
Usually carried out by
Legally accountable
Commissioning the fire risk assessment
Managing agent
Freeholder / responsible person
Acting on the action plan
Managing agent, via contractors
Freeholder / responsible person
Quarterly communal fire door checks (over 11m)
Agent or caretaker
Responsible person
Annual flat entrance door checks (over 11m)
Agent, with resident access
Responsible person
Keeping communal areas clear
Residents and caretaker
Responsible person
Alarm and emergency lighting servicing
Specialist contractor
Responsible person
Resident fire safety information
Agent
Responsible person
How fire safety duties typically divide between freeholder, agent and resident
