Fire Safety Fails at the Interfaces

One of the recurring themes emerging across fire safety investigations is that significant problems often develop at organisational boundaries rather than within a single discipline.

Responsibility for fire safety can become fragmented between designers, contractors, managing agents, maintenance providers, housing teams and building operators. In temporary or rapidly changing accommodation arrangements, this can become particularly pronounced, with uncertainty over who is responsible for reviewing risk assessments, managing occupancy changes or ensuring that fire safety measures remain appropriate over time.

Buildings rarely fail because nobody was responsible for safety. More often, they fail because responsibility became diluted across multiple organisations and processes.

The Building Safety Act has placed far greater emphasis on dutyholders, accountability and the “golden thread”, but legislation alone cannot solve the problem. Effective fire safety governance still depends upon organisations understanding how decisions are made, how information is transferred and who retains ownership when circumstances change.

Fire safety management is ultimately a coordination exercise as much as a technical one.

None of this is intended to suggest that complex projects can or should avoid shared responsibility. Modern buildings demand multidisciplinary collaboration. The challenge is ensuring that collaboration does not result in gaps appearing between organisational interfaces.