Risks | The Law | Solution | Services

If your premises were built and are being used in line with modern building regulations, the structural fire precautions should be satisfactory, but you still need to do a risk assessment.

The recommended way to carry out a risk assessment is to follow a step-by-step process.

Identify the hazards

Hazards include:

• anything that can start a fire, such as naked flames, heaters or commercial processes such as cookers or hot-air dryers
• anything that can burn in a fire, including piles of waste, display materials, textiles or other flammable products
• oxygen sources such as air conditioning, medical products or commercial oxygen supplies which might intensify a fire

Identify people at risk

These include:

• people who work close to or with fire hazards
• people who work alone, or in isolated areas such as storerooms
• children or parents with babies
• elderly people
• disabled people

Evaluate, remove or reduce the risk

You should:

• where possible, get rid of the fire hazards you identified - eg remove build-ups of waste - and reduce any hazards you can't remove entirely
• replace highly flammable materials with less flammable ones
• keep anything that can start a fire away from flammable materials
• have a safe-smoking policy for employees or customers who want to smoke in a designated area near your premises (a ban on smoking within enclosed spaces is in effect in Scotland from 2006, Wales and Northern Ireland from April 2007 and England from July 2007)

Once you've reduced the risk as far as practical, you need to look at any risk that can't be removed and decide what fire safety measures to provide.