Posted By Ian P I would say a definite no. Part of being competent is training as well as experience and a fire risk assessment requires a competent person to carry it out. The level of training will vary by the type of location and what goes on in it.

Posted By Ashley Wood If the person who has been given the form feels that they are not 'competent' and have received insufficient training, then they should say so to the management. It is better to do that than do it wrong. I have spoken to several fire service enforcement officers over the past few weeks and they are reporting that a vast amount of assessments are not 'sufficient and suitable'. Also, we are now starting to see cases of prohibition and prosecution as the regulations start to bite! I agree that if your question related to a small retail outlet i.e news agent, corner shop etc then you may get away with not having training as most of what is asked for is common sense. However, if it is a large building, factory, warehouse or many lives are involved, give it back to the issuing manager and tell them that you have a duty to inform your employer that you are not competent and need training. No reasonable person would hold this against you.

Posted By David c Wilson Hi Ged, I would say a definite NO, especially premises that are accessed by the public or people sleep there. I am an operational firefighter of 21 years as well as a H&S practitioner and i find fire risk assessments very challenging. What is challenging is preparing a fire safety strategy to fully understand buildings and the fire safety systems and equipment giving you a holistic approach to fire safety. You then have to demonstrate that all the potential hazards and risks have been given due consideration and then come up with substantiated solutions. You have to understand how fire evolves, behaves & spreads.How flammable are the materials, are there holes, gaps where heat, smoke and fire will spread? I think it is too much for one person with no training to attempt especially if the building has public access, even small newsagents.

Posted By Pete48 Ged, you paint a very simple picture. Totally untrained employees, technical risk assessment. If that is the case, you know the answer because it is exactly the same as any other risk assessment area. On the other hand, I can think of many situations in which the process of using non specialist employees with their basic training on tings like "office fire safety" would be perfectly acceptable. Please do not let us be pushed down the road of over complicating this area of risk assessment just because the consequence of failing to have a "s&s" assessment is currently seen as living dangerously. If you are working in a building/environment that was there before the law changed and you were doing what was required under the previous regs, what are you actually assessing in this current exercise??

Posted By Ian P I agree that there has to be a sense of proportion and my "definite no" reply has maybe come from personal experience. My area of work has gone through a great deal of debate about not only who is competent to carry out fire risk assessments but also who is competent to train them. Much of it has been caused by an inspection agency who categorically stated that untrained personnel were not fit to carry out fire risk assessments. I don't know how far this extended to their own inspectors though, one recently spent his time standing at fire doors with a stop watch timing the speed at which they closed. In my opinion that is not only out of proportion but a useless exercise, as long as they close fully they are fine. However residential accommodation is involved and I don't feel that handing a service manager a checklist and expecting them to produce a S&S fire risk assessment without them having some basic fire safety training is realistic either. Sorry if I have generalised but this is still a very "hot" topic for me, especially after a number of well publicised serious incidents. PS I carry out our fire risk assessments and have had some training. I am shortly starting the Nebosh Fire RA Cert to back this up and am not a great fan of training for it's own sake.

Posted By J Knight Hi Folks, Can I add my twopennorth to this debate? We have two distinct types of workplace; on the one hand we have large, often old healthcare premises with people sleeping in them. On the other hand we have small retail units, often one or two rooms. What we do is assess our care centres using NHS Firecode in the hands of experienced Estates managers who have had additional training; no, they're not fire officers, but they do understand how buildings work, and how fire and smoke can spread in them. On the other hand our shops are assessed using a tick-box pro-forma by retail managers who have had some training. We are under considerable pressure from consultants to get our shops assessed using a bespoke methodology of some sort or another by ex-fire officers or the like. Its not necessary, and I think there is nothing in the law which says it is. Yes, fires are possible in the shops, and in fact we have had many more than we have ever had in the Care Centres. They have all had one of two causes; electrical faults or arson (malicious and accidental). We don't need an ex fire officer to tell us how to avoid these. People in retail premises are either shop workers, who know the drill, or they are members of the public. Members of the public will leave by the exit they entered by; we don't need complex methodological fire modelling to tell us that. In other words, in simple premises the assessment can be simple, and consultants running round obfuscating and complicating the issue are doing nobody any favours. I believe that our simple retail FRAs will reduce the number of non-malicious fires we experience to zero, and will ensure that any arson attempts will probably fail. The ones that do succeed will cause no injury or loss of life. What else are we to achieve with a risk assessment? The purpose of RA is to reduce harm, not to keep consultants in work. Sure, in complex high-risk environments (people sleeping, hot work, high risk processes etc) and in large sites (such as a couple of our shops, our warehouse and all our care centres)a knowledge of fire behaviour and so on is really needed. But its like COSHH; if you're employing domestics to clean floors is the WEL of floor cleaner relevant? I would emphatically say no (though other measures will of course be needed); the same goes for FRA. Its horses for courses, innit? John

Posted By J Knight Just to be quite clear; both premises are care centres and were assessed in the same way using guidance from HTM84 scotland edition, John

Posted By Peter Leese Was that in Pudding Lane Shaun? I seem to remember it.

Posted By David c Wilson I agree whole heartedly with Shaun, it is not a tick sheet exercise especially in shops. Anywhere the dear old public enter beware - they are capable of almost anything. Storerooms are normally a fire waiting to happen and i think of many ignition sources x shelves of combustibles. As Shaun states how fire redardent is the ceiling? I would need to spend 3-4 hours in a small shop to ensure my report is suitable & sufficiant, so please make sure your assessments are at least adequate.

Posted By Ashley Wood John, I think you may have a phobic problem with consultants by the sounds of things! Regarding door closers etc. In a sheltered housing or residential scheme if a door closing mechanism shuts very quickly this could cause injury to infirm persons. That's probably what the guy was looking at rather than how long the door took to close.

Posted By anon1234 FRA is only complex if you want to make it complex - clearly a level of competence is required and what is deemed to be an acceptable level of competence will depend on the nature of the installation being assessed. I must admit I get very concerned about so called fire safety experts saying that no-one (except them) is competent to do FRAs - this is not a dig a Shaun who I beleive mentioned above that you don't have to employee a fire safety consultant. As other responders have said, you need to determine what level of competence is required for the installation being assessed and then stick to that rather than forever raising the 'standard of competence' just in case.

Posted By J Knight Hi Folks, Yes, we have had some pressure from consultants, usually employed by landlords. As I say, it is the output of the RA that matters. Storerooms are full of combustibles, granted, in fact, as Charity retailers we sell combustibles. But we know very well how to control the resulting fire hazards, using the same techniques which will reduce trip hazards and so on. How fire retardant are our ceilings? Well, they're (usually) not our ceilings, so if we determine that there is a problem, we can't fix it; and we do always have property surveys carried out (using a Chartered Surveyor) which do evaluate details of construction. My question is, does 3 hours in a typical shop generally result in any significant changes to the fire management regime? We do consider fire-fighters; it is in the RR(FS)O as Shaun says, but the emphasis of fire RA must be on fire prevention, and we can do that, and we will, John PS in our Care Centres we do rely on fire engineering companies to evaluate things like the timing of fire doors; it is important.