The requirement for fire extinguishers will come from your fire risk assessment. The current level of cover may/should be written into your most recent fra? I suspect this will be another interesting debate.

Smith, Chris is bang to rights (he usually is on fire matters); it does depend on the findings of your fire safety risk assessment. However, you would be mistaken if you just looked at your workplace and made a rough guess based on nothing more than your own experience and knowledge. There is guidance available, such as that on the Fire and Resilience web-pages of the Department of Communities website, and your risk assessment really has to take official guidance into account. The law in question, since you ask, is the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005, you can find it on goevernment databases and it is available free for downloading. Article 13 of this order says 'the responsible person must ensure that— (a) the premises are, to the extent that it is appropriate, equipped with appropriate fire-fighting equipment and with fire detectors and alarms Appropriate is the key word here, and that's where you risk assessment findings come in, but as I have said, those assessment findings must be based on applicable guidance, even if in your assessment you make a decision not to accept that guidance. Your assessment has to be carried out by a competent person, and there isn't an agreed definition of what a competent person is. You may need to get outside help, John

Cost cutting and fire safety…? Smith24525, you must get a suitably competent professional to undertake your fire risk assessments. You only have to look at the recent cases such as Marks & Spencer and the Coop to ascertain how important this is.

Good thinking Jay. Smith also check to see if the building has a fire cert, this will again stipulate what you must have in terms of minimum (legal) requirements.

What is a fire cert? Since the introduction of the fire safety order any fire certificate ceases to have any effect. I would say, however that any fire certificate will be a good starting point as it was probably issued by the authority that now enforces fire regulations.

Look out for the blonde health and safety people now :-)

Worked for a company that had fire extinguishers because it is a legal requirement to have them, did not train anyone to use them, in fact discouraged anyone using them because the first priority was people safety and folowed the evacuation process by ensureing everyone was out of the building to the assembly point and left the fire for the fire brigade (trained for this task) to deal with the fire and any damage was repaired under insurance. Bad way possibly but no one was killed or injured.

What does the manager think is high cost. We're currently paying £4 an extinguisher with £1 for a Fire Blanket. We have in the region of 150 extinguishers over 11 depots. I might have found somewhere to do it for £3.50. If we can reduce either the cost or the number of extiguihers we will, but not if it puts any staff in danger.

be aware times have changed considerably since fire certs , do not base your provison on them.