Know Your Building
In the event of a fire, current regulation rightly focuses on the protection of life. But what about the impact on businesses and essential services who face long-term downtime – jeopardising livelihoods, housing, and access to healthcare and education? How can organisations ensure they have robust measures in place to remain resilient?
At the Fire Protection Association, we are passionate about improving the quality of the built environment and our goal is to make it a safer place to live and work. In celebration of the FPA’s 75 years in industry in 2021, we launched our year-long ‘Know Your Building’ campaign, an initiative aimed at improving fire safety standards across the sector by helping building owners and managers achieve stronger business resilience against the threat of fire.
Know Your Building supports the conclusions and recommendations of the Hackitt Review, which highlighted a general lack of understanding of fire risks, mitigations and management arrangements by building owners and the construction industry.
Campaign aims
- For sprinkler systems to be a regulatory requirement for commercial buildings such as care homes, schools, hospitals, and healthcare premises
- For all businesses to have a fire strategy as part of a robust business continuity plan
- For third party certification to be a regulatory requirement for all fire safety services and products, including fire risk assessors, sprinkler installers and maintainers, fire door installers and maintainers, and fire alarm installers and maintainers
FPA Managing Director, Jonathan O’Neill OBE said: “Many organisations wrongly assume that the law is there to protect their assets in the event of fire, but this is not the case – once fire and rescue services have evacuated building occupants, they are not obliged to prevent loss of a building and its contents.
“We are urging organisations to go above and beyond their legal requirements to ensure they are more resilient to fire. This involves having a sound knowledge and understanding of a building including how it is constructed, the fire protection systems that are required, and the competency of individuals responsible for installing and maintaining them.”
Campaign assets
In line with the campaign’s primary aim to improve understanding of fire-related risks, we have produced the following tools and guides to support building owners and those responsible for fire safety:
- Fire Risk Blind Spot Calculator designed to highlight building knowledge and fire safety awareness gaps to enable building owners and managers to address key areas and help raise standards across the UK
- Is your organisation resilient to fire? This mini paper highlights the true cost of fire and mitigating the risk of fire damage
- Are you confident over competence? This mini paper considers the actions building owners or managers can take to ensure competency in fire safety
- Assembly Point: The FPA’s podcast provides a collective space in which industry leaders can explore the most pressing issues in fire safety and share expert information and advice.
More about Assembly Point
Now in its second series, Assembly Point has a growing audience of 600 listeners and aims to move the debate on fire safety forwards by identifying new ways to work together to improve standards.
Featuring leading experts from across the sector and hosted alternately by the FPA’s respected fire safety professionals, series 2 also includes video footage so you can now watch as well as listen to the monthly discussions.
To subscribe and listen, simply search ‘Assembly Point’ on all major podcast platforms including Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, and Google Podcasts, or watch the episodes here.
Campaign supporters
The FPA would like to thank its Know Your Building supporters:
- ABI
- Allianz
- Aviva
- AXA
- BAFE
- British Automatic Fire Sprinkler Association
- Business Sprinkler Alliance
- Construction Industry Council
- Fire Industry Association
- Lloyd’s
- National Fire Chiefs Council
- Nebosh
- NSI
- Smoke Control Association
- The Institution of Fire Engineers
- UL
- Zurich