The phrase “Responsible Person” appears throughout UK fire safety legislation, but it is one of the most commonly misunderstood concepts in the entire regulatory framework. Identifying the Responsible Person for a building isn’t an administrative formality — it determines who carries the legal duty for fire safety, who can be prosecuted if things go wrong, and who needs to commission the assessments, training and equipment maintenance that keep a building compliant. This article explains who the Responsible Person actually is, what their duties involve, and what to do when responsibility is shared. If you need professional support to discharge those duties, our fire safety and protection services provide qualified fire risk assessors, FPA-trained fire wardens, and fire extinguisher servicing carried out to the BS 5306 examination standard across the UK.
The Responsible Person is defined in Article 3 of the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005 (the “Fire Safety Order” or FSO). The definition has three limbs:
That definition does most of the heavy lifting, but its application in real buildings is rarely as clean as the wording suggests.
For a small business operating from a single unit — a shop, a café, an independent office — the Responsible Person is almost always the employer. If the business is owner-occupied (the owner runs the business and owns the premises), the same person carries both layers of responsibility.
This is the simplest scenario. The employer must commission a fire risk assessment, implement its findings, train staff, and maintain the building’s fire safety provisions.
This is where the picture gets more complicated, and where most disputes arise.
In a typical multi-let office building, you will have:
Article 22 of the FSO requires these parties to cooperate and coordinate. In practice, that means the landlord’s fire risk assessment of the common parts has to take account of how each tenant uses the building, and each tenant’s assessment has to take account of how the common parts function.
Where this fails — where a tenant assumes the landlord is dealing with everything, or vice versa — the Fire and Rescue Service will take a dim view, and both parties can end up enforced against.
For blocks of flats, the position was clarified by the Fire Safety Act 2021 and the Fire Safety (England) Regulations 2022. The Responsible Person for the common parts and the building structure is typically the freeholder, head leaseholder, managing agent, or Right to Manage company — whichever has actual control of the common parts.
The 2021 Act and the 2022 Regulations imposed substantial new prescriptive duties on these Responsible Persons in residential buildings, particularly those above 11 metres or 18 metres in height. We cover the regulatory framework in detail in our companion article: Fire Safety Regulations Explained: A UK Business Owner’s Guide.
Construction sites are workplaces, and the FSO applies. The Responsible Person is typically the principal contractor under the Construction (Design and Management) Regulations 2015. In practice, fire safety duties on a live site are often shared between the principal contractor (who controls the site overall) and individual subcontractors (who control their own work areas and bring their own ignition risks). The Joint Code of Practice on the Protection from Fire of Construction Sites and Buildings Undergoing Renovation (10th edition, August 2022, with Amendment 2 published in 2025 — known as edition 10.2 or the “JCoP”) — published by RISCAuthority with the support of the Fire Protection Association, the Association of British Insurers, the National Fire Chiefs Council and the Contractors Legal Group — provides the framework that most insurers expect to see followed for projects with a main contract value of £2.5m or above.
When a building is unoccupied, the FSO still applies. The Responsible Person is normally the owner, because the workplace and “person in control” limbs of the definition no longer fit. Empty buildings carry disproportionate fire risk — arson is the leading cause of fires in vacant property — and the Responsible Person’s duties continue regardless of occupancy status.
Identifying the Responsible Person is the first step. The next is understanding what the law expects them to do. The principal duties under the FSO are:
Article 8 — General fire precautions. The Responsible Person must take general fire precautions to ensure, so far as is reasonably practicable, the safety of any of their employees and any other persons who may be lawfully on the premises.
Article 9 — Fire risk assessment. Carry out a suitable and sufficient assessment of the risks to which relevant persons are exposed. Following the changes brought in by Section 156 of the Building Safety Act 2022, this assessment must now be recorded in full, regardless of the size of the business — the previous five-employee threshold has gone.
Article 11 — Fire safety arrangements. Make and give effect to such arrangements as are appropriate for the effective planning, organisation, control, monitoring and review of preventive and protective measures.
Article 13 — Firefighting and fire detection. Ensure that premises are equipped with appropriate firefighting equipment, fire detectors and alarms, and that non-automatic firefighting equipment is easily accessible, simple to use and indicated by signs.
Article 14 — Emergency routes and exits. Ensure routes to emergency exits are kept clear, that exits lead directly to a place of safety, that doors on escape routes open in the direction of escape, and that emergency lighting is provided where necessary.
Article 15 — Procedures for serious and imminent danger. Establish appropriate procedures, including safety drills, to be followed in the event of serious and imminent danger.
Article 17 — Maintenance. Ensure that the premises and any facilities, equipment and devices provided in respect of the premises are subject to a suitable system of maintenance and are maintained in an efficient state, in efficient working order and in good repair.
Article 18 — Safety assistance. Appoint one or more competent persons to assist in undertaking the preventive and protective measures.
Article 21 — Training. Ensure that employees are provided with adequate fire safety training. For most commercial premises, this means a structured fire warden programme.
Article 22 — Cooperation and coordination. Where two or more Responsible Persons share or have duties in respect of premises, each must cooperate with the other so far as is necessary to enable them to comply with their duties.
The Responsible Person carries the legal duty, but they are not expected to be a fire safety specialist. The FSO recognises this. Article 18 requires the appointment of one or more competent persons to assist in carrying out preventive and protective measures, and Article 9 requires that fire risk assessments are carried out by a competent person.
A “competent person” is someone with sufficient training, experience, knowledge and other qualities to enable them to discharge the relevant function. For fire risk assessments in particular, post-Grenfell case law and Home Office guidance have made clear that competence has to be demonstrable — qualifications, recognised registrations and ongoing CPD all matter. BS 8674:2025 — Built environment. Framework for competence of individual fire risk assessors. Code of practice is the new authoritative standard on FRA competence, published in 2025 in response to the Grenfell Tower Inquiry Phase 2 recommendations. Multiple competence registers exist — operated separately by the Institution of Fire Engineers (IFE), the Institute of Fire Safety Managers (IFSM, which runs the National Fire Risk Assessors Register / NFRAR), and the International Fire Professionals Organisation (IFPO) — and BAFE SP205 is the recognised third-party certification scheme for organisations carrying out life-safety fire risk assessments.
For fire extinguisher servicing, the relevant competence framework is the BAFE SP101 scheme, which sets out the required competency criteria for portable fire extinguisher technicians and the organisations that employ them. We cover this in How Often Do Fire Extinguishers Need to Be Serviced? (BS 5306 Explained).
A Responsible Person can — and in most cases should — engage external professionals to carry out specific tasks: the fire risk assessment, the fire warden training, the alarm system maintenance, the extinguisher servicing. Each of those is a legitimate appointment of a competent person under Article 18.
What the Responsible Person cannot do is delegate the underlying legal duty itself. If a competent person is engaged and provides poor advice, or if a contractor fails to carry out maintenance properly, the legal liability still sits with the Responsible Person. That is why selecting credible, accredited contractors matters. It is also why post-handover record-keeping is so important — the Responsible Person needs to be able to demonstrate that they took reasonable steps to discharge their duties through competent appointees.
Failure to comply with the FSO is a criminal offence. The penalties depend on which article has been breached, but they include:
Recent enforcement cases have seen six- and seven-figure fines and bespoke remediation orders. The pattern is clear: the courts treat fire safety failings as serious offences, and the financial cost of cutting corners far outweighs the cost of compliance.
Veritech Security works with Responsible Persons across the UK — employers, building owners, managing agents, and principal contractors — to deliver the fire safety regime required under the Fire Safety Order, the Fire Safety Act 2021, the Fire Safety (England) Regulations 2022, and the Building Safety Act 2022. Our services relevant to Responsible Person duties include fire risk assessments delivered by our in-house Vulcan Fire-trained Advanced Fire Risk Assessor; FPA syllabus fire warden and fire marshal training delivered by our FPA-trained trainer at our in-house training facility; fire extinguisher supply, commissioning, and ongoing servicing to BS 5306-3:2017 and BS 5306-8:2023 by an experienced Fire Extinguisher Technician trained to the BS 5306 examination; temporary fire alarm system installation for construction and refurbishment projects; and integrated manned guarding, CCTV monitoring and access control services that work alongside the fire safety regime on your premises.
We are members of the Fire Protection Association and the Fire Industry Association, and we hold SIA Approved Contractor status (ACS Pacesetters), ISO 9001, ISO 14001, Constructionline Platinum, SafeContractor, CHAS, RISQS, Achilles and Cyber Essentials accreditations — the credentials that insurers and enforcing authorities expect to see.
If you’ve been identified as the Responsible Person and need support discharging your duties, speak to Veritech.
Call: 0800 799 9800 (available 24/7) Email: info@veritech-security.com Or request a fire safety consultation online.
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