Responsible Person, Fire Safety and Your RTM Company Duties
The right to manage (RTM) paperwork is signed, the freeholder’s agent has handed over the keys to the fire panel cupboard and you and the other directors of the new right to manage company – all volunteers, all leaseholders themselves – go back to your day jobs. Nobody mentions that, from that exact date, you – or one of your co-directors – may now be carrying a fire safety duty under the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005. Responsible person fire safety is not a phrase anyone put in the RTM company’s welcome pack, but it describes a role that has very likely just landed on your desk, with no grace period to read up on it.
This article is for directors of a right to manage company running a residential block of flats in England. England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland do not share the same rules here – Scotland and Northern Ireland have entirely separate fire safety legislation and even Wales, which shares the Fire Safety Order with England, does not share the England-only regulations covered below. Everything in this article is written for England.
Responsible person fire safety: who usually takes on the role when a right to manage company takes over
Under the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005 (RRFSO, often shortened to “the Fire Safety Order”), the responsible person is broadly whoever has control of the premises in connection with managing it. For the common parts of a block of flats – the hallways, stairwells, lobbies, plant rooms and shared external areas – that duty follows whoever is actually managing those parts, not necessarily whoever owns the freehold.
When a right to manage company successfully acquires the right to manage under the Commonhold and Leasehold Reform Act 2002, the landlord’s management functions – repairs, maintenance, insurance arrangement and day-to-day running of the building – transfer to the RTM company on completion. In practice, this is widely understood to carry the responsible person role for the common parts across with it: once the RTM company is the body actually managing and controlling those shared areas, it will typically take on responsible person duties for them. If nobody flagged that at completion, that’s not unusual – the transfer notice deals with management functions and service charges, not fire safety law, so nobody signs anything when the duty passes.
That said, this is genuinely not a tidy, one-line legal rule and it would be wrong to present it as one. Messy, but real. The Fire Safety Order does not mention RTM companies anywhere and nothing in the published guidance gives a definitive, universal answer to exactly how responsible person duties split between an RTM company, a freeholder who has retained responsibility for elements of the structure and leaseholders inside their own flats. The Order does not apply inside an individual leaseholder’s own dwelling, behind their own front door, so a leaseholder’s private living space sits outside its reach regardless of what happens with the common parts. For the structure, external walls and common parts, the RTM company stepping into the landlord’s management functions is the trigger that, in most cases, brings the responsible person role with it. But there’s an exception worth checking for. If any element of the structure or external envelope was never transferred to the RTM company’s remit – a freeholder retaining direct responsibility for major structural repairs under the lease, for example – duties for that element may not have moved at all. A First-tier Tribunal decision concerning Globe View House, an 86-unit building in London, illustrates the point. The tribunal found that once the RTM company had taken on the repairing obligation for the common parts, the head leaseholder was no longer the accountable party under a related piece of legislation. It’s a useful illustration of how the transfer is being interpreted in practice, but it is a first-instance tribunal ruling, not binding appellate law, so treat it as illustrative rather than a settled rule for every block.
The practical takeaway: assume, from day one of RTM completion, that your company is very likely the responsible person for the common parts. Then get independent confirmation of where the boundaries sit for your specific lease and structure. This is a legal question – worth a conversation with a solicitor experienced in leasehold and right to manage law before you finalise who does what.
Getting this wrong carries real consequences. Article 32 of the Fire Safety Order makes it an offence to fail in the responsible person’s duties where that failure places someone at risk of death or serious injury – the penalty is an unlimited fine and/or up to two years’ imprisonment for the individuals found responsible. In November 2022, Portsmouth Crown Court sentenced a company and its former director to a combined £100,040 in fines and costs after a fire risk assessment at Forbes Court, a three-storey residential block in Hilsea, Portsmouth, was found to fall “far short of the appropriate standards.” The Hampshire and Isle of Wight Fire and Rescue Service’s area manager said, after sentencing, that the defendants “had no idea if Forbes Court was a safe place for those who lived there.” Not knowing is not a defence. That’s the detail worth sitting with: the court did not need to show the defendants had ignored a known risk, only that they held the responsible person duty and failed to find out what the building’s own fire risk assessment should have told them. It’s a stark illustration of what an inadequate assessment can cost – and a reminder that the duty to get the assessment right sits with whoever holds responsible person status, whether or not they fully understood they held it.
The fire risk assessment is not the only Fire Safety Order duty that follows the responsible person role. Article 17 requires the responsible person to ensure that “general fire precautions” – the fire detection and alarm systems, emergency lighting and firefighting equipment serving the common parts – are subject to a suitable system of maintenance and are kept in efficient working order. BS 5839-1 is the code of practice most commonly used to specify and maintain a common-parts fire alarm system and BS 5266-1 plays the same role for emergency lighting on escape routes; neither is itself a legal requirement, but both are recognised ways of evidencing that the Article 17 maintenance duty has been met.
Fire risk assessment for flats: what has to be covered and how often it should be reviewed
Every responsible person has a duty, under Article 9 of the Fire Safety Order, to make a “suitable and sufficient assessment of the risks” to the people who use the building – the fire risk assessment. For a fire risk assessment block of flats scenario, the scope is wider than many directors expect.
Since the Fire Safety Act 2021 (in force in England from 16 May 2022), the Fire Safety Order’s scope has been clarified – not newly created – to make explicit that, in a building with two or more sets of domestic premises, the assessment must cover:
- The structure of the building.
- The external walls, including cladding, insulation, fixings and anything attached to the exterior such as balconies.
- All Flat entrance doors that open onto the common parts.
- The common parts themselves – stairwells, corridors, lobbies and shared plant and service areas.
Flat entrance doors matter here because they are the barrier between a private dwelling and the escape route everyone else relies on – which is also why they come up again under the Fire Safety (England) Regulations 2022, below.
A fire risk assessment for flats block has to be a recorded assessment, in full, regardless of how many people live there. This recording duty was broadened by section 156 of the Building Safety Act 2022, in force 1 October 2023. The same section also provides for a competence duty – whoever is appointed to carry out or assist with the assessment must be competent to do so – but the government has not yet brought that specific requirement into force. Once it is, the law will require the assessor to be competent without naming a certification scheme, though certification is already a recognised way to show competence.
On review frequency, the Fire Safety Order itself does not set a fixed interval. Article 9 requires the responsible person to review the assessment “regularly,” and whenever there is reason to think it’s no longer valid or there’s been a significant change to the building or how it’s used – a refurbishment, a change of use in a ground-floor unit, new cladding work or a near-miss, for example. Rather than invent a single number, the safest position is this: review regularly, review after any material change and follow whatever interval the fire risk assessment itself recommends for your specific building.
Getting your fire risk assessment done
The fire risk assessment should be carried out by a competent, independent fire risk assessor – someone with the training, experience and (ideally) third-party certification to demonstrate they can assess a residential block properly, including the structure, external walls and flat entrance door elements now explicitly within scope. When appointing an assessor, it is worth asking:
- What qualifications and certification do they hold and does that certification cover residential blocks of flats specifically? Third-party schemes worth asking about include BAFE SP205 and the Institution of Fire Engineers’ register of fire risk assessors.
- Can they provide examples of assessments carried out on comparable buildings?
- Will the written record include the scope assessed, the hazards identified, the actions needed, a timescale for each action and a clear statement of who is responsible for each one?
- Do they carry professional indemnity insurance?
The written record is the document that matters most in practice. A thorough fire risk assessment will not just list findings – it will set out clear, prioritised actions with target dates and it will specify what review interval it recommends given the building’s age, height and construction. Many assessors structure that written record against BS 9792:2025, the British Standards Institution’s published methodology for fire risk assessment of housing – which replaced the former PAS 79-2:2020 methodology – a recognised way of evidencing a thorough process, though following it is not itself a legal requirement. That recommended interval, together with the Fire Safety Order’s own “regularly and after material change” standard, should set the review rhythm for the block going forward – rather than any assessor’s blanket industry rule of thumb. It’s also the fire risk assessment, not any separate document, that sets the block’s evacuation strategy; that’s a decision for the competent assessor, made in the context of this specific building.
Fire doors in flats regulations: what the law requires and from when
Fire doors in flats regulations in England come from a specific, dated instrument: the Fire Safety (England) Regulations 2022 (SI 2022/547), which came into force on 23 January 2023. These Regulations apply in England only – they do not extend the same duties to Wales, even though Wales shares the underlying Fire Safety Order.
Regulation 10 sets specific, dated duties for buildings above 11 metres in height containing two or more sets of domestic premises:
- Communal fire doors – checks at least every three months, including testing self-closing devices.
- Flat entrance doors – checks on a “best endeavours” basis at least every 12 months. This is explicitly not an absolute duty: government guidance is clear that existing flat entrance doors aren’t expected to meet current new-build standards and the absence of intumescent seals or formal certification does not, by itself, mean a door is unfit for purpose.
- Records must be kept of checks carried out and of any occasion where access to a flat was refused for a check.
Regulation 10’s 11-metre threshold is separate from – and lower than – the 18-metre or seven-storey threshold that triggers a different set of duties under the same Regulations (a secure information box, up-to-date floor plans held by the fire and rescue service, monthly checks on firefighting lifts and equipment and wayfinding signage). The two thresholds matter because they trigger entirely different duties – assume the wrong one applies and you’ll either chase compliance work your block doesn’t need or miss duties it does. All multi-occupied residential buildings, regardless of height, must give residents fire safety instructions and information about fire doors at least annually and promptly to new residents.
Nothing in the Regulations names a specific fire-door rating such as FD30 and nothing mandates a particular British Standard. BS 8214, the code of practice covering Fire Door assemblies, is a recognised way of specifying and evidencing a compliant door – it is not itself a legal requirement and should always be described as a recommended means of meeting the duty rather than a mandate in its own right.
Who is responsible for fire doors in flats
This question splits cleanly into two parts and conflating them is a common source of friction between RTM directors and leaseholders.
Communal fire doors – the doors onto stairwells, between corridors, into plant rooms – sit squarely with whoever is managing the common parts, which for an RTM-managed block will usually be the RTM company. The regulation 10 checking duty and the cost of arranging and recording those checks, falls to the responsible person for those areas.
Flat entrance doors are more layered. The Fire Safety (England) Regulations 2022 put a checking duty on the responsible person – best-endeavours, annual, for buildings above 11 metres, as set out above. But who pays for repairing or replacing a flat’s own front door and who is contractually obliged to maintain it, is usually a lease question rather than a fire safety one. Many leases make the leaseholder responsible for the upkeep of their own flat entrance door as part of their demise (the part of the building let to them under the lease), while the landlord (or RTM company, once in that role) retains a covenant (a binding promise written into the lease) over the frame or the door’s fire-resistance where it affects the common parts. This varies lease to lease and nothing here should be read as specific legal advice on any individual lease – if a dispute arises over who pays for a particular door, that’s a question for the RTM company’s solicitor or managing agent, read against the actual lease wording.
As a general mechanism, costs the RTM company itself incurs in meeting its fire safety duties – arranging the fire risk assessment, commissioning door checks, remedial alarm or emergency lighting work – are typically recoverable through the service charge, where the lease’s repair and maintenance provisions cover it. Above a certain spend per leaseholder, formal consultation requirements can apply too – another reason to check the actual lease wording before assuming a cost will or won’t pass through.
The Building Safety Act 2022: when a second regime also applies
For the great majority of RTM-managed blocks, the responsible person duties under the Fire Safety Order are the whole story. But for taller or larger buildings, a second, separate regime can apply alongside it.
The Building Safety Act 2022 defines a “higher-risk building” as one at least 18 metres in height or at least seven storeys, containing two or more residential units. For buildings meeting that threshold, the Act creates the role of “accountable person” – a distinct role from the Fire Safety Order’s responsible person, built around duties like registering the building with the Building Safety Regulator, maintaining a safety case report and engaging with residents.
Responsible person and accountable person are not competing labels for the same thing – they come from different legislation and both can apply to the same building, held by the same organisation. For a qualifying building, the RTM company can be both the Fire Safety Order’s responsible person and the Building Safety Act’s accountable person, with the accountable person duties sitting on top of – not instead of – the existing fire risk assessment obligation.
The practical starting point: check your own block’s height and storey count against that 18-metre/seven-storey line before assuming either way it applies to you. Height is the dividing line – below it, the Fire Safety Order’s responsible person duties are the whole picture; at or above it, a second layer of Building Safety Act duties applies as well. Once you know which side of that line your block sits on, the rest follows: one clear duty, one responsible person and no second registration or safety case report to chase.
Residential PEEPs: a newer duty some taller blocks now carry
A further layer applies to some blocks from 6 April 2026, when the Fire Safety (Residential Evacuation Plans) (England) Regulations 2025 (SI 2025/797) came into force. These Regulations apply to buildings with two or more sets of domestic premises that are either at least 18 metres in height or have at least seven storeys or are more than 11 metres in height and use a simultaneous evacuation strategy – so, for most RTM-managed blocks, the same height line that decides whether the Building Safety Act’s accountable person regime applies is a useful first check for this regime too.
Where the Regulations do apply, the responsible person has a duty to identify residents whose ability to evacuate without assistance is affected by a physical or cognitive impairment and to offer each of them a person-centred fire risk assessment (PCFRA). Where mitigating measures are reasonable and proportionate, the responsible person must seek to agree them with the resident and record the outcome in a written emergency evacuation statement, sharing a copy with that resident. This sits alongside the building’s main fire risk assessment rather than replacing it – a further duty for the responsible person to track, not a different role.
FAQ
Who is responsible for fire safety in a block of flats?
Responsibility sits with whoever is the “responsible person” under the Fire Safety Order – broadly, whoever controls and manages the premises. For the common parts of an RTM-managed block, that will typically be the RTM company once it has taken over the landlord’s management functions, though structural elements retained outside that management remit and anything inside an individual leaseholder’s own flat, can sit with a different party. This is genuinely fact-specific and a legal check against the particular lease and management arrangement is worth having rather than assuming a single universal rule.
Does a block of flats need a fire risk assessment?
Yes. Article 9 of the Fire Safety Order requires the responsible person to carry out a suitable and sufficient fire risk assessment and to keep a full written record of it regardless of the building’s size. Since the Fire Safety Act 2021 clarified the Order’s scope (in force in England from 16 May 2022), that duty reaches further than many directors expect – beyond the common parts into the building’s structure, its external walls and every flat entrance door that opens onto a corridor or stairwell. The Building Safety Act 2022 also provides for a competence duty – whoever is appointed to carry out or assist with the assessment must be competent to do so – though the government has not yet brought that specific requirement into force.
How often should a fire risk assessment for flats be reviewed?
The Fire Safety Order itself does not set a fixed interval – Article 9 requires the responsible person to review the assessment “regularly,” and whenever there’s reason to think it’s no longer valid or there’s been a significant change, such as a refurbishment, a change of use, new cladding work or a near-miss. Rather than apply a generic rule of thumb, the safer approach is to follow whatever review interval the fire risk assessment itself recommends for your specific building, given its age, height and construction, alongside that “regularly and after material change” standard.
Who pays for fire doors in flats?
Communal fire doors are normally the responsible party’s (commonly the RTM company’s) cost to maintain and check, recoverable through the service charge where the lease allows. Flat entrance doors are more often the leaseholder’s own responsibility under the lease, though the responsible person still has a checking duty for buildings above 11 metres. Exact liability always depends on the individual lease.
Do flat front doors need to be fire rated?
There’s no blanket legal requirement that every existing flat entrance door be replaced to a specific fire rating. The Fire Safety (England) Regulations 2022 require best-endeavours annual checks of flat entrance doors in buildings above 11 metres and guidance is explicit that older doors are not expected to meet current new-build standards simply because they lack certification or intumescent seals. Whether a specific door needs upgrading is a judgement for the fire risk assessment.
Should blocks of flats have fire extinguishers in communal areas?
The Fire Safety Order requires the responsible person to provide “appropriate” fire-fighting equipment where the risk assessment identifies a need for it – it does not name extinguishers specifically or mandate any particular number or type. Where extinguishers are provided, BS 5306-3 and BS 5306-8 are the recommended codes of practice covering their selection, positioning, commissioning and maintenance, though neither is a legal requirement in itself. What’s actually needed for a specific block is a question for the fire risk assessment.
What are Residential PEEPs and do they apply to an RTM-managed block?
Residential Personal Emergency Evacuation Plans (RPEEPs) are a duty introduced by the Fire Safety (Residential Evacuation Plans) (England) Regulations 2025, in force from 6 April 2026. They apply to buildings of two or more domestic premises that are at least 18 metres tall or have at least seven storeys or that are above 11 metres and use a simultaneous evacuation strategy. Where they apply, the responsible person must identify residents who may need help to evacuate, offer a person-centred fire risk assessment and record agreed mitigating measures in a written emergency evacuation statement for that resident. Whether this applies to your block comes down to height and storey count – check it against the same figures used for the Building Safety Act’s accountable person regime: 18 metres, seven storeys or 11 metres with a simultaneous evacuation strategy.
Before you go
None of this is legal advice and a short blog post can’t replace a proper review of your building’s specific lease, structure and fire risk assessment. A solicitor experienced in RTM and leasehold law, alongside a competent, independent fire risk assessor, are the right people to confirm exactly where your RTM company’s responsible person duties begin and end. What we can help with is everything that follows once that assessment identifies work on your fire alarm system or emergency lighting: putting right what the assessment flags and keeping those systems tested and properly maintained after that. If your fire risk assessment has raised questions about your alarm coverage or emergency lighting, contact us and we can talk you through exactly what needs doing and when.