Fire Safety Regulations Guide

Remove or Reduce the Risks to People

Having evaluated and addressed the risk of fire occurring and the risk to people (preventative measures) it is unlikely that you will be able to conclude that no risk remains of a fire starting and presenting a risk to people in your premises.

You now need to reduce any remaining fire risk to people to as low as reasonably practicable, by ensuring that adequate fire precautions are in place to warn people in the event of a fire and allow them to safely escape.

The rest of this step describes the fire protection measures you may wish to adopt to reduce the remaining fire risk to people

The level of fire protection you need to provide will depend on the level of risk that remains in the premises after you have removed or reduced the hazards and risks.

Flexibility of Fire Protection Measures

Flexibility will be required when applying this guidance; the level of fire protection should be proportional to the risk posed to the safety of the people in the premises. Therefore, the objective should be to reduce the remaining risk to a level as low as reasonably practicable. The higher the risk of fire and risk to life, the higher the standards of fire protection will need to be.

Your premises may not exactly fit the solutions suggested in this guide and they may need to be applied in a flexible manner without compromising the safety of the occupants.

For example, if the 'travel distance' is in excess of the norm for the level of risk you have determined, it may be necessary to do any one or a combination of the following to compensate:

• Provide earlier warning of fire using automatic fire detection.
• Revise the layout to reduce travel distances.
• Reduce the fire risk by removing or reducing combustible materials and/or ignition sources.
• Control the number of people in the premises.
• Limit the area to trained staff only (no public).
• Increase staff training and awareness.

Note: The above list is not exhaustive and is only used to illustrate some examples of trade-offs to provide safe premises.

If you decide to significantly vary away from the benchmarks in this guidance then you should seek expert advice before doing so.