Protection (Building Safety) Strategy

Our protection priorities are to:

• Reduce the risk to our business community from fire through our programme of audits of higher risk premises
• Use our powers of legal enforcement and prosecution, where this is appropriate to ensure public safety
• Fulfil our duty to respond to statutory fire safety consultations from other regulators
• Work with premises responsible persons to reduce excessive levels of unwanted fire signals
• Expand our protection team competencies and increase our protection activity output
• Improve the effectiveness of our risk profiling and resource targeting
• Implement assurance processes to ensure that our protection activity is effective and consistent

Our approach is to:

• Use an intelligence led, risk-based approach to target premises which pose the greatest risk to life in the event of fire
• Promote regulatory compliance by engaging with and educating local businesses
• Take a consistent, fair, and proportionate approach to enforcement of the Fire Safety Order
• Work together with other regulators and stakeholders to reduce risk
• Maximise capacity and firefighter safety by using operational crews to undertake fire safety checks and audits
• Ensuring all staff undertaking protection activity are appropriately qualified and competent to perform their role
• Ensure continuous improvement through effective evaluation of protection activities
• Align our protection activity to national fire standards and best practice

In discharging our statutory responsibilities under the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005 and the more recent Fire Safety Act 2021 and the Building Safety Act 2022, we will work with our partner including the new Building Safety Regulator, duty holders and, if necessary, use our enforcement powers to make premises safe. This helps to protect people, property, and the environment by preventing fires from occurring and limiting the effects when they do. We maintain a comprehensive database of premises and use a range of data sources to assess their relative risk. Our risk-based inspection programme ensures that our protection activities prioritise those premises where persons are most at risk from fire. To increase capacity, our full-time firefighters undertake basic fire safety checks on lower risk buildings. Our dedicated fire safety inspectors focus on premises that are more complex and higher risk. This makes the most appropriate use of resources we have available, enabling us to ensure we allocate resources according to risk.

We have taken proactive activity within education to improve compliance and community safety. We engage and share information with businesses and the public through:

• Business action days
• NFCC Safety Weeks
• Social media
• Our website
• Attending business, residents, and landlord forums