Fire Safety in Shared Commercial Buildings: Who Is Responsible?
Shared commercial buildings present one of the most common sources of confusion in fire safety compliance. When a building houses multiple businesses — a ground-floor restaurant, first-floor offices, and a second-floor dance studio, for example — the question of who is responsible for fire safety is rarely straightforward.
The answer matters. Under the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005, the responsible person for fire safety can face unlimited fines and up to two years imprisonment for serious failures. Getting this wrong is not just a compliance gap — it is a personal liability risk.
This guide explains how responsibility works in shared commercial premises across Greater Manchester, who must do what, and how to avoid the dangerous gaps that emerge when nobody takes ownership.
The Concept of the Responsible Person
The Fire Safety Order does not use the word "owner" or "landlord" when defining who must comply. Instead, it introduces the concept of the responsible person — a role that depends on the nature of the premises and who has control.
For a shared commercial building, there are typically multiple responsible persons:
- The building owner or freeholder — responsible for the common areas, shared systems, and the building's structural fire safety measures. This includes communal stairwells, corridors, lobbies, shared plant rooms, external areas, and the building's fire alarm and emergency lighting systems.
- Individual tenants or leaseholders — each business occupying a unit is responsible for fire safety within their own demised area. This means their own fire risk assessment, their own internal fire precautions, and their own staff training.
- Managing agents — if a managing agent is appointed to manage the building on behalf of the freeholder, they may assume some or all of the freeholder's fire safety duties, depending on the terms of their appointment.
Common Areas: The Freeholder's Duty
The freeholder or building owner typically retains responsibility for:
- Communal escape routes — shared corridors, lobbies, stairwells, and any passage that serves more than one unit. These must be kept clear, properly maintained, and adequately signed.
- Shared fire alarm systems — many multi-occupancy buildings have a common fire alarm system that serves the entire building. The freeholder is responsible for maintaining, testing, and servicing this system to the required standards.
- Shared emergency lighting — emergency luminaires in common areas, stairwells, and escape corridors fall under the freeholder's responsibility.
- Fire doors in common areas — fire doors separating units, protecting stairwells, and serving communal corridors must be maintained by whoever controls those areas. Defective fire doors are one of the most serious findings in multi-occupancy buildings.
- External fire safety — external wall systems, cladding, and any features that could contribute to external fire spread are the freeholder's responsibility, particularly following the Fire Safety Act 2021 and the Building Safety Act 2022.
- The building's fire risk assessment — the freeholder must commission and maintain a fire risk assessment for the common areas and the building as a whole. This does not replace individual tenant assessments, but it covers the shared infrastructure.
Individual Units: The Tenant's Duty
Each tenant is responsible for fire safety within their own unit. This includes:
- Their own fire risk assessment — every business must carry out a suitable and sufficient fire risk assessment for its own premises. This covers the internal layout, fire hazards specific to the business, evacuation procedures for their staff and visitors, and internal fire precautions.
- Internal fire detection — if the building's communal system does not extend into individual units, or if additional detection is needed for the specific use (for example, a kitchen requires heat detectors), the tenant must provide it.
- Internal emergency lighting — lighting within the unit that supports evacuation from the unit to the communal escape route.
- Fire extinguishers and equipment — portable fire-fighting equipment appropriate to the risks within the unit.
- Staff training — all employees must receive fire safety training appropriate to their role, including evacuation procedures, fire warden duties, and how to raise the alarm.
- Maintaining their own fire doors — internal fire doors within the demised area, and often the entrance door to the unit (which serves as the boundary between the unit and the communal area).
The Dangerous Gaps
Problems arise when responsibilities overlap or fall between two parties. These gaps are where fires cause the most damage and where enforcement action is most likely:
Gap 1: Nobody maintains the communal fire alarm. The freeholder assumes the managing agent handles it. The managing agent assumes the largest tenant handles it. Nobody has a maintenance contract. The system fails to detect a fire in a communal area. This scenario is disturbingly common in smaller multi-occupancy buildings with passive or absent freeholders.
Gap 2: Fire doors between units and communal areas are neglected. The tenant thinks the door belongs to the building. The freeholder thinks the door belongs to the unit. Neither inspects it. Over time, self-closers fail, seals deteriorate, gaps widen, and the door no longer provides the fire resistance it was designed for.
Gap 3: Escape routes become storage areas. A tenant stores boxes in the communal corridor outside their unit. Other tenants assume someone else will deal with it. The freeholder visits the building rarely. In an emergency, the blocked corridor prevents evacuation.
Gap 4: Multiple fire risk assessments do not talk to each other. Each tenant has their own fire risk assessment, and the freeholder has one for the common areas. But nobody coordinates them. The tenant's assessment assumes the communal fire alarm works. The freeholder's assessment assumes each unit has adequate internal detection. Neither checks the other.
Gap 5: Building alterations are not communicated. A tenant fits a new kitchen extract system through a fire-rated wall without telling the freeholder. The fire compartmentation is now breached, but nobody knows until a fire risk assessment — or a fire — reveals it.
How to Close the Gaps
Addressing these risks requires coordination, communication, and clear documentation:
Establish a fire safety coordination agreement. For any building with multiple tenants, a written agreement should set out who is responsible for what. This is not a legal requirement, but it is strongly recommended by BS 9999 (Code of Practice for Fire Safety in Buildings) and is considered best practice by Greater Manchester Fire and Rescue Service.
The agreement should cover:
- Who commissions and maintains the communal fire alarm system.
- Who commissions and maintains communal emergency lighting.
- Who inspects and maintains fire doors in common areas and at unit boundaries.
- Who keeps communal escape routes clear.
- Who coordinates the building-level fire risk assessment.
- How building alterations are communicated and approved.
- How fire drills are coordinated across tenants.
Conduct joint fire drills. In a real emergency, every occupant evacuates the building, not just one unit. Fire drills should be building-wide events coordinated between all tenants. This tests the communal alarm, the escape routes, the assembly point, and the communication between different businesses.
Share fire risk assessment findings. Significant findings from any tenant's fire risk assessment that affect the building as a whole — such as high fire loads near the boundary wall or changes to internal layout — should be communicated to the freeholder. Similarly, the freeholder should share relevant findings with all tenants.
Review after every change. Any alteration to the building, any change of tenant, any change of use, and any significant incident should trigger a review of fire safety arrangements and, if necessary, an update to fire risk assessments.
Legal Enforcement in Greater Manchester
Greater Manchester Fire and Rescue Service conducts fire safety inspections across the region and has the power to issue enforcement and prohibition notices. Multi-occupancy buildings are a particular focus because the coordination challenges described above make them higher-risk.
In recent years, enforcement action in the Manchester area has increased. Prohibition notices — which can close a building or prevent its use immediately — have been issued to several multi-occupancy commercial buildings where fire safety failings were severe. These include buildings where communal fire alarms were non-functional, escape routes were blocked, and fire doors had been propped open or removed.
The message for building owners and tenants is clear: shared responsibility is not an excuse for shared inaction. If you are the responsible person for any part of a multi-occupancy building, you must actively discharge your duties.
Manchester-Specific Considerations
Greater Manchester's building stock includes many multi-occupancy commercial buildings with particular challenges:
- Mixed-use buildings — premises with commercial units at ground level and residential flats above require careful coordination between the commercial fire safety regime (Fire Safety Order) and the residential regime (Housing Act, Building Safety Act). The fire risk assessment must address the interface between the two.
- Converted mills and warehouses — Ancoats, the Northern Quarter, and parts of Salford contain former industrial buildings now divided into multiple commercial units. Original construction may lack adequate compartmentation, and retrofit fire safety measures may not meet current standards.
- Older buildings in town centres — Stockport, Oldham, Rochdale, and Ashton-under-Lyne have many terraced commercial properties where adjacent units share party walls. Fire spread between units is a real concern in buildings where the party wall does not extend to the underside of the roof covering.
- Managed office buildings — serviced offices and co-working spaces add another layer of complexity. The building manager provides the fire safety infrastructure, but individual businesses using the space still have responsibilities for their own activities and staff.
Get Expert Advice
If you own, manage, or occupy a unit in a shared commercial building and are unsure about your fire safety responsibilities, professional advice can resolve the uncertainty quickly. Manchester Compliance works with building owners, managing agents, and individual tenants to establish clear fire safety arrangements and close compliance gaps.
Contact us:
- Phone: 0161 312 2930
- Email: hello@manchestercompliance.co.uk
- Address: 25 Holden Clough Drive, Ashton-under-Lyne, OL7 9TH
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