Professionals Need to Protect the Fire Industry’s Image

I was involved in drafting the Regulatory Reform Fire Safety Order (RRFSO), and one of the suggestions I put to the committee dealing with this was that they should put third-party accreditation of fire risk assessors into the legislation.

I keep telling people (even now) what the answer was from the Government side of the committee. They told me quite sternly that this legislation was not to be a consultants’ charter; it was not going to be a burden on industry, and the idea was that anyone with enough information would be able to carry out their own fire risk assessment if they so wished!

So, the popular belief cited on the IFSEC Global site by Warren Spencer was much overhyped at the time, as the main notion behind the legislation was that it would definitely not be a consultants’ “free for all”.

Added to this was the scant publicity that was given to the launch of the legislation (what happened to the promised multimillion-pound publicity?) and I think it was the government, and its associated department, at the time that left the fire and rescue service without any formal training or guidance on how their role had changed.

My other suggestion that I put to the committee was that fire risk assessments should be carried out by the Fire Service as an independent income stream (not rocket science really, we had already been doing similar under the FPA for years). Well, I reckon everyone can guess at the reaction to that one!

I don’t think it’s fair of Warren to say that the main causal feature of businesses not employing assessors to carry our FRAs is solely because the costs are prohibitive. The reason they have chosen to carry it out themselves may be because they do not perceive it as important or cost-saving purely as a business imperative.

For those assessors who stepped into the business, I am not sure any of us have made a killing in the money stakes!

Woolly and vague wording
I also don’t think, at the time of drafting, that it was ever the intention of the legislation to perceive an assessor as a “responsible person”. Again, I am sure from my explanation of the initial stages of drafting, it can be seen that the actual mechanics of the legislation and production of fire risk assessments was given scant regard in the scheme of things, hence, they would not put third party accreditation of fire risk assessors into the legislation.

If this had been the case, I would have argued that all assessors be tested in some way to satisfy the legislation. This would satisfy the courts. The problem was, of course, no one wanted to define a competency standard for this, so Article 18 is woolly and vague.

It was the industry itself that recognised the gap (or gaping hole), and managed to get a handle on competency issues by getting together in the form of the Competency Council. The result is that we now have a set of standards of competency.

Testing competency
We also have a few voluntary schemes that are now testing the competency of fire risk assessors to that set of standards.

On top of that, we have professional bodies that run risk assessors registers with tests of competencies as part of admission to them.

So, in my mind, if the industry has done the gap analysis, done something about it by producing standards and trying to implement them, what is the government doing to formally and legislatively back this scheme? What are enforcing authorities and fire and rescue services doing to support this scheme?

Third-party accreditation
The questions that Warren posed about the defense of an assessor apply equally to any expert in any field if they find themselves in court, whether as the accused or an expert witness. It is up to the individual assessor to prove his/her competence in the best way that he/she can. Being accredited by a third-party accreditation scheme is one of the ways to do this.

The assessors themselves have their own part to play by making sure they get qualified. I hear arguments among my colleagues who ask why they should get accredited, since there is no requirement to do so — amazingly, that same argument was put to me by a fire and rescue service not too far from where I live!

Can you blame them though, when this was specifically left out of the legislation when it was drafted?

I also think that assessors need to start to recognise their own levels of competence, or maybe incompetence, so that they don’t take on work that they are not competent to carry out. It’s a matter of morals and ethics. If they can’t provide a suitable and sufficient fire risk assessment like the Nottingham risk assessor jailed for eight months in 2011, well, they deserve to go to court.

With no formal regulation of fire risk assessors (and it is unlikely that this will ever be the case), we will never stop the cowboys. What we can do, and need to do, is persuade those of us in the industry who genuinely care about it as professionals to keep plugging the competency standards.