EARLIER THIS year, the statutory Primary Authority (PA) scheme was extended to fire safety, following two pilot projects. Designed to deliver benefits for organisations operating across more than one local authority area, it identifies a ‘lead authority’ to set the tone of the enforcement strategy and provide consistent advice. 
Jonathan Herrick, CFOA lead for better regulation, provided background. Fire authorities were exempted from the Regulatory Enforcement and Sanctions Act in 2008, which established the PA scheme administered by the Better Regulation Delivery Office within the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS). Following a review and two trial schemes designed to reinvigorate retail and fire authority partnerships, a statutory rather than voluntary approach was adopted. 
‘Inspection plans’ can be used by the PA to get another authority to focus on particular areas and optimise use of time. ‘Assured advice’ is only assured when the PA and the business agree, then the advice stands and must be heeded. The desired result is advice tailored to the business to improve awareness and consistency, bring procedural efficiencies and ‘earned recognition’. Mr Herrick highlighted the need for the fire service to ensure it’s offering a partnership and not a business relationship.  
 
Enabler of compliance
 
Dave Sibert, fire safety and integrated risk management planning advisor for the FBU, said his involvement with the PA trial in 2013 left him with some reservations, but also hopes for the scheme. Consistency is a long term problem, he said. Everything is now risk assessed, but even similarly trained assessors can have different opinions on solutions. PA partnerships help bring greater consistency and raise standards, but it became clear in the trials that BIS thought differently. Assured advice seems to be more ‘consultation advice’ – the only one who can take action is the PA, which gave advice in the first place. So might this result in consultants without enforcers? CFOA is now working on substandard compliance – PA needs to ensure that people are ‘safe enough’, but was this also not subject to interpretation?
The PA scheme is about growing the economy, but this shouldn’t be at the expense of maintaining the built environment. The fire service sees the PA scheme as an opportunity to make money/sell services to business and is assigning staff to look after the scheme and ensure they don’t lose it, but could the financial incentive compromise standards?
Jon O’Neill, FPA managing director, thought the scheme should be a DCLG, not a BIS function, as BIS has no fire experts. PA is not a threat, but an enabler of compliance and better use of public resources. 
As for assured advice, if you have a business paying for advice, he asked, should that be taken into account? Primary Authorities are not the enforcers, but local authorities must heed assured advice, although they can still challenge it (via an appeals process). The question is how to avoid stepping over the line from assured advice into consultancy.
In the long term, he believed fire authorities will take a greater interest in decisions being made as their understanding of business partners develops. Fire risk assessors should be involved at an early stage