Most guidance for Responsible Persons concentrates on what you must do inside your own building. Three articles of the Fire Safety Order deal with something harder to spot: what you owe to the other people with duties over the same premises — and what you owe the person who takes over from you when you leave.
They are quietly some of the easiest duties to breach, because nothing in a building reminds you of them.
Article 22 — you must go looking for the others
Article 22 is headed "Co-operation and co-ordination between responsible persons", and it opens with an obligation most people miss entirely. Article 22(A1):
A person who is a responsible person in relation to any premises must take such steps as are reasonably practicable to ascertain whether any other responsible person shares, or has duties in respect of, the premises.
That is an active duty to find out. Not "co-operate with anyone you happen to know about" — take reasonably practicable steps to establish whether they exist. In a mixed-use block with a commercial ground floor, a separately managed car park, or a freeholder and a managing agent with divided responsibilities, that question has a real answer and somebody has to go and get it.
Where there are two or more of you, each of you must then:
- tell the others your name and a UK address at which you will accept notices and documents;
- tell them which part of the premises you consider yourself responsible for — and keep a record of that information;
- co-operate so far as is necessary for each of you to comply with the Order;
- co-ordinate your fire safety measures with theirs; and
- take all reasonable steps to tell them about the risks to people arising from what you do.
Note the record-keeping obligation sitting inside the second of those. The demarcation of who is responsible for which part is not an understanding between colleagues. It is a record you are required to keep, and the moment it matters is the moment somebody disputes whose door it was.
Article 22A — you cannot leave empty-handed
When a Responsible Person is replaced, article 22A requires the outgoing person to give the incoming one the relevant fire safety information they hold — including the fire risk assessment and the identity of whoever made or reviewed it.
In practice this is where the golden thread breaks. An agent loses a contract, the files go into a folder on a server nobody has access to, and the incoming agent starts again from an empty desk — commissioning a fresh assessment which, having no history, records the building as if it had none. Two years of remedial action tracking evaporates, and nobody has committed an offence anybody will notice until something goes wrong.
If you are on your way out of a building, the handover is a duty. If you are on your way in, the information is your entitlement, and asking for it in writing is worth doing on day one.
Article 22B — higher-risk buildings and the Accountable Person
Where the premises include a residential unit in a higher-risk building, article 22B requires the Responsible Person to take reasonably practicable steps to establish whether there are Accountable Persons for the building, and to co-operate with each of them so they can carry out their duties under the Building Safety Act 2022.
The same shape as article 22: find out who they are, then work with them. The two regimes were written separately and land on the same building, and this is the seam between them.
Where these came from, and when
Articles 22A and 22B were inserted by section 156 of the Building Safety Act 2022, in force from 1 October 2023, along with the additions to article 22 quoted above. If your fire risk assessment or your management arrangements predate that and have not been revisited, they predate these duties.
What to actually do about it
- Establish, in writing, whether anyone else has duties over your premises. Keep what you find.
- Exchange names and service addresses with them, and record the demarcation — which part each of you is responsible for. This is the record article 22 requires.
- If it is a higher-risk building, identify the Accountable Persons and open a line to them.
- Keep the handover pack current, on the assumption that you will one day hand it over at short notice and without goodwill.
None of this needs software. All of it needs somebody to have written it down and to be able to find it years later, which is the part that usually fails.