It is one year since the introduction of new fire safety legislation for Northern Ireland and Northern Ireland FRS, the enforcing authority, is reminding people who are responsible for non-domestic premises that they must hold a valid Fire Risk Assessment.  

Chief Fire Officer Peter Craig said: "The new fire safety legislation came into effect on 15th November 2010 replacing and simplifying the previous legislation. In the last year we have been working extremely hard to educate and inform people who are responsible for non-domestic premises about the requirements of the new fire safety legislation and how this affects them. 

"To date we have audited over 3,000 premises right across Northern Ireland to ensure that the required fire safety standards are being met and we have been working closely with premises owners and managers providing free fire safety advice to ensure their premises are up to standard.

"As we move into the second year of the legislation our approach to enforcing the legislation will become much more stringent to help protect our community. We will continue to work with premises owners to provide advice but we will also issue enforcement notices to those premises who repeatedly do not comply with the required fire safety standard and in the most serious cases of failure to comply we will pursue prosecution.

"The fire safety legislation supports us in preventing fires and promoting fire safety awareness in businesses, schools, offices, factories and public buildings across Northern Ireland and by working together with those responsible for non-domestic premises we can reduce the risk of fire and ultimately save lives."

The new Fire Safety Regulations (NI) 2010 gave effect to EU Health and Safety directives and brought Northern Ireland into line with England, Scotland and Wales.

For more information visit: www.nifrs.org/firesafe 

 

Posted November 18th, 2011 at 0930 by Andrew. Comment by emailing: andrew.lynch@pavpub.com