Where you can stick your smoke alarms!
We had a query from a member with a 5-bed HMO asking about fire safety requirements after a Licensing inspection. Do you know what your property needs, even if it is not an HMO?
What was the discussion....
The inspection report requested a smoke alarm to be fitted in the communal room, over and above the hall / landing and in the kitchen. It also 'Recommended' that alarms be fitted in each bedroom.
Obviously, your 1st step is to check your Fire Risk Assessment for the property – first that it is still valid (it will be if there have been no regulatory changes since it was created, the property has not been altered and the number and type of tenants is the same).
Every property is different and identical properties will have very different fire risks depending on tenants (for example a home for teenage arsonists will have a much higher risk than the same house occupied by 3 elderly ladies who refuse to have anything electrical in the house and who do all of their cooking outside – we know, the example is a bit extreme, but you get the idea).
Anyway, one of our members said, "Just do what they have requested – it must be cheaper than arguing the toss". Sadly, this is not true. Inspectors appear to award themselves brownie points for every 'hazard' reported / rectified, hence we have reports of gaps above doors being measured and 16" washbasins being replaced with 18" ones for example. Our advice is to always challenge or check anything that appears illogical – it may cause you grief at the time, but if it discourages the ever increasing creep of new rules and ever more extreme interpretation of existing rules, it will save you time, money and pain in the longer term. It also helps the rest of us.
Another member suggested that it was good practice to put smoke alarms in bedrooms in HMOs but that they did not need to be interlinked. Obviously, it depends on the tenants and the reason for the alarms – in some cases it will be because there are cooking facilities or a fire in the room, so there is an increased chance of a fire starting in that room. In other cases, it could be that the fire doors and intumescent seals mean that an alarm outside the room may not be heard – in both these cases, it would make more sense for the alarms to be interlinked with others in the house.
We also suggested that the wording of the inspection report needed to be checked, as if it really advocated smoke alarms in a kitchen, that was bad practice and only 'heat sensor' alarms/detectors should be used in kitchens, otherwise alarms all over the house will go off every time someone fries something, and people will ignore them. Remember the example of our member who faced a £70,000 insurance claim for fire damage after a tenant ignored the alarms assuming it was 'someone cooking' and he was only saved when the fire crew came in through his doorway using a fire axe!
Finally, a member suggested that alarms in bedrooms would only be needed if tenants in an HMO were on individual contracts. We understand the logic – a group of mates sharing a house will look after each other and alarms in communal areas are probably enough, whereas a collection of strangers each living in their own room in a property will not automatically think to warn others. Even if this logic is correct (and we would challenge it as an unreliable generalisation) we MUST NOT make the same mistake authorities always seem to make, which is that there is any relationship between how people contract for a property and how they live together.
As an example, all of my HMO tenants are on individual tenancies yet I never ask strangers to live together – too risky – and I would rather leave a house empty if I cannot find a group of friends who want to share it. Yet, I can name 4 or 5 members who I know ask all their tenants to sign a joint tenancy regardless of whether they know their housemates before moving in or not. I can see the point – much, much less paperwork, more clearly shared responsibilities and also an assumption that they will face less pain in terms of Council Tax and the authorities generally – but the key point here is that how people contract has nothing to do with how they live. So please don't let anyone in authority make that assumption unchallenged.
If you have read this far, hopefully you will have learnt 3 things:
- Everyone has a different point of view when it comes to fire safety
- It is very difficult to know precisely what you need to do in your own property
- You really need to attend our next meeting to get up to date on Fire Safety! (The festivities will be led by our own High Priestess of Fire Risk, Alice Ibbotson)