We had an interesting speaker at our lunch meeting on Monday 20 November. Caroline Tilling is a Fire Safety Inspector with Oxfordshire Fire Service and based in Faringdon. She talked about her role in enforcing and auditing conformance with the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005 (see here).

In particular she talked about the Grenfell tragedy and how it has, to date, affected buildings in Oxfordshire, particularly the five tower blocks in Oxford. The Order regulates fire safety in terms of reducing the risk of fires breaking out, practices to reduce destruction and limit the development of the fire once it has started. Basically any person in charge of any building, including temporary structures, (except his or her own home) must take reasonable steps to prevent fire.

Oxfordshire Fire & Rescue Service are seeking businesses to trial their new online fire protection self-assessment form. The aim of this process is to enable businesses to complete a simple web based form, consisting of some very basic questions to enable a Fire Safety Inspector to make a remote determination as to whether the business represents a lower or higher fire risk and therefore whether a full audit is required.

By the business spending around 15 minutes completing the form our aim is to reward fire compliant businesses by them not having the interruption associated with a fire safety inspector attending the premises.

The ultimate aim is that those businesses that are compliant/ low risk will only have to complete the form, they will then be informed at the end of the process by an automatic response which is sent immediately upon submitting the form informing them of such and detailing that they will need to resubmit in two years’ time. When that period arrives the business will be sent an email advising them of the need to revisit their self-assessment. Higher risk premises will still be visited by a member of the Fire Protection Team.

The self-assessment is administered for the Fire & Rescue Service by our County Council web services team, and therefore each business would need to complete a very simple registration (again online) to get access to the form. Your username and password will remain with you, and you can then update any details very quickly and easily.

Our principal objective in the design and roll out of this self-assessment is to enable the finite resource of our Fire Safety Inspectors to focus solely on those businesses that are either higher risk, or are not managing their fire safety measures appropriately.

We would be extremely grateful if you could assist us in the final development arena of this tool by undertaking the self-assessment and then providing us with feedback as to how it worked for you.

To participate in this final development trial please email the Fire Protection Manager at david.bray@oxfordshire.gov.uk who will then instruct the Oxfordshire County Council web team to get in touch with you and set up the process. Please include a name, phone number and email address of the most appropriate person for us to contact within your business.