Residential landlords are stepping up their campaign to prevent local authorities from requiring higher fire safety standards to those recently agreed at a national level.
The LACORS guidelines – recently published in conjunction with the Chief Fire Officers’ Association and the Chartered Institute of Envrionmental Health – are the first attempt at providing national guidance for the private rental sector. But the Residential Landlords Association is concerned that some local authorities and fire services will insist on their existing, tougher regulations.
“Local councils and fire brigades must resist the temptation to ‘gold plate’ the LACORS guidelines by unnecessarily imposing higher local requirements,” said Richard Jones of the RLA, whose members own over 100,000 private rented properties throughout the UK.
“We have already seen local authorities exceeding the guidelines by demanding inappropriately higher fire safety improvements as a condition of a landlord’s licence to rent out shared ‘houses in multiple occupation’ – such as a typical student house. There needs to be a whole new approach to fire risk assessment because the Housing Health and Safety Rating System, which underpins fire safety enforcement, is out of date and does not take into account recent significant reductions in the number of deaths from fire.”
The RLA is seeking assurances from central government, local councils and fire brigades that if landlords work in line with LACORS they will not then be expected to carry out additional work to meet a higher local requirement.
“The enforcement of fire safety has changed a lot in the last few years and people like environmental health officers and fire officers who enforce legislation are not necessarily up to date with the latest technological developments,” added Mr Jones. “There needs to be major changes in the way they are trained and educated and this is as important as it is for landlords too. The RLA will play its part by publishing guidance for members as to what needs to be done to comply with the very detailed LACORS document. We will analyse, distil and do everything we can to ensure our members understand the issues better.”
The association is also concerned that as the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety)Order can apply to the common parts of residential accommodation, there are two sets of legislation and enforcement bodies for them to deal with.
