Morning all. I have a legal question which I am forever bumping heads with a lot of our landlords. A lot of our branches are commercial units within larger complexes with a landlord fire alarm covering the whole complex. There is only 1 control panel normally in a common area. Some of our landlords carry out the weekly testing of the manual call points (BS-5839) in the common areas only. My argument is that they should also be testing the call points in the individual units. We cannot test our own call points as we do not have access to the panel let alone know how to use it. The landlords acknowledge that it is their system as they have the whole system serviced including all the individual units, but just simply refuse to do the weekly tests. My question is on a case of legality. An enforcement officer visits our branch and notes that the call points are not being tested in the branch. Who is legally responsible to do this? Where I get annoyed it that a lot of our branches do not need an alarm (good fire compartmentation, means of escape, travel distances etc). The alarms are only needed to warn other occupants in the complex who are not our tenants. One of our landlords has now asked that we have an independant system installed and want to charge us for an engineers time to link it into their system. This is rediculous. Talk about cracking a walnut with a sledge hammer!! Thanks if someone can help.

OK it's in BS5839 but is it actually a legal requirement to do this? I am in the same situation. We test our callpoints and those in the common area. Landlord and other tenants are not interested.