Liverpool in Focus: Fire Safety, Risk and Compliance
Liverpool is one of the most commercially and architecturally varied cities in the North West. Its city centre, running from the waterfront at Liverpool ONE through L1 and L2 and north into Everton and Vauxhall, contains a dense mix of hospitality venues, creative industries, offices, student accommodation and converted historic buildings, many of them multi-storey and multi-occupier. The inner suburbs — Kirkdale, Kensington, Toxteth, Wavertree, Smithdown — carry one of the highest concentrations of houses in multiple occupation in England, with Liverpool City Council's selective licensing scheme covering most shared houses of three or more unrelated persons across a substantial portion of the city, including L1, L2, L3, L4, L5, L6, L7, L8, L11 and parts of L13 and L15. The city's logistics and industrial base is concentrated in Speke, Aintree and along the Edge Lane corridor. The waterfront continues to add new buildings through Liverpool Waters and the ongoing development of Kings Dock. The city's heritage stock, from its UNESCO World Heritage-designated waterfront to the Victorian terraces of the inner suburbs, brings its own set of fire safety considerations.
For responsible persons across all of these premises — whether employers, landlords, managing agents or building owners — the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005 places a direct legal duty to carry out a suitable and sufficient fire risk assessment and to keep it under regular review. If you manage or occupy premises in and around Liverpool and need to commission or review that assessment, our fire risk assessments in Liverpool page sets out how we work and what to expect. Three incidents across different parts of the city, each with confirmed footage, illustrate the range of fire risk profiles responsible persons here are managing.
Takeaway Fire, Smithdown Road, Liverpool L15 — May 2026
On the evening of Sunday 10 May 2026, Merseyside Fire and Rescue Service were called to a fire on Smithdown Road, near its junction with Barrington Road. Crews were alerted at 22.04 and on scene by 22.10. The fire started at a takeaway on the street and spread via the chimney into the roof space above, involving the upper floors of the building. Eight fire engines and one aerial appliance attended. Firefighters in breathing apparatus were committed internally while crews also worked from outside, the incident having been sectorised as it developed. Merseyside Police attended to manage traffic, and a number of nearby residents and businesses were evacuated as a precaution.
The fire was not extinguished until 00.27 the following morning, following an overnight operation. Crews removed roof tiles to check for hotspots and monitor temperatures throughout, before completing a full search of the property and handing over the scene to Merseyside Police at 03.58. An investigation into the cause was ongoing at the time of publication. Merseyside Police confirmed the fire had started at a takeaway on the street.
Emergency services on Smithdown Road following the fire, 10 May 2026. Video: Liverpool Echo / YouTube.
Smithdown Road is representative of a building type found throughout Liverpool's commercial streets: a ground-floor food or retail unit, with residential or commercial accommodation above, connected by a shared staircase, chimney breast or roof void. The chimney is one of the most common pathways for fire spread in these buildings. Grease accumulates in commercial kitchen canopies, filters and flue runs over time, and once that grease ignites, fire can travel into the chimney void and then into the roof space above without triggering any detector within the affected area — and without giving occupants upstairs adequate warning. A fire risk assessment for a takeaway or any food premises must specifically address canopy and flue cleaning frequency, the means of detection in void spaces, and the adequacy of the escape route for anyone in accommodation above. Where there are people sleeping over a commercial unit, whether tenants, HMO occupiers or staff accommodation, the fire safety profile of that building is materially different from a single commercial unit, and both the assessment and the evacuation plan must reflect that. Landlords of mixed-use buildings with commercial ground floors and residential above should ensure that fire safety obligations are properly understood and met by both the commercial occupier and themselves as building owner, particularly where the kitchen extraction runs through shared voids.
Major Fire, Fox Street, Liverpool L3 — January 2024
On Saturday 27 January 2024, Merseyside Fire and Rescue Service were called to a large fire on Fox Street in the Everton area of Liverpool, shortly before 2.20pm. Twelve fire engines and two aerial appliances attended. Crews arrived to find a four-storey building measuring approximately 100 metres by 50 metres well alight. The incident was declared a major incident at 4pm, with the building showing signs of structural collapse and fire crews evacuating surrounding buildings. Roads including Fox Street, Great Homer Street, Rose Place, Great Richmond Street, Richmond Brow and Netherfield Road South were all closed. Residents and businesses across a wide area were asked to close windows and doors. By early evening the main body of fire had been extinguished and the incident was downgraded. No casualties were reported.
The building was a stalled residential development, a four-storey shell intended to form part of the Fox Street Village scheme, 138 apartments which had been under construction since 2019 but had remained incomplete and unoccupied for several years. Merseyside Police commenced a joint investigation with MFRS to establish the cause, with CCTV enquiries and witness appeals issued. No cause was publicly confirmed. Liverpool City Council's building control team subsequently assessed the structure and confirmed it was stable, while monitoring continued.
The fire on Fox Street, Liverpool, 27 January 2024, declared a major incident by Merseyside Fire and Rescue Service. Video: The Guardian / YouTube.
The Fox Street fire is a reminder that the fire risk to your premises is not limited to what happens within your own four walls. Under the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005, a fire risk assessment must consider all relevant hazards, including those arising from activities in the immediate vicinity of the premises. A large fire at an adjacent vacant or construction-phase building can block evacuation routes, generate dense smoke at short notice, force building evacuations with no advance warning and deny access to emergency services for neighbouring properties. In a city with as much regeneration activity as Liverpool, offices, hospitality venues and residential blocks in L1, L2, L3 and L6 frequently sit adjacent to construction sites or partially completed developments, and the assessment should address what those sites mean for the escape strategy. Does the evacuation plan account for a scenario where the primary exit route is affected by an external incident? Are the assembly points far enough from adjacent buildings to remain viable? These are questions a thorough assessment should answer, and they should be revisited whenever a significant new development or change of use occurs in the immediate vicinity.
Woolton Hall, Speke Road, Liverpool L25 — August 2025
On the evening of Tuesday 19 August 2025, Merseyside Fire and Rescue Service were called to a fire at Woolton Hall on Speke Road in the Woolton area of Liverpool, alerted at 20.09 and on scene at 20.16. Crews arrived to find the three-storey stone manor house, measuring approximately 40 metres by 30 metres, fully ablaze. Five fire engines and an aerial platform were initially deployed, rising to ten engines by 21.30 as the scale of the fire became clear. The roof collapsed during the incident, preventing crews from entering the building, and firefighting was conducted externally throughout the night. Residents nearby were advised to keep doors and windows closed. Crews worked through to the following morning before the fire was brought under control.
Woolton Hall is a Grade I listed building dating from 1704, with interiors by the neoclassical architect Robert Adam, regarded as the finest example of his work in the North of England. The building had been vacant since approximately 2006, and had been placed on Historic England's Heritage at Risk register following a previous fire in 2019. Following the August 2025 blaze, which caused extensive structural damage including the complete collapse of the roof, a 14-year-old was arrested on suspicion of arson, with police noting that a group of youths had been seen in the grounds of the building at the time of the fire. A joint investigation between Merseyside Police and MFRS was ongoing, with the fire believed to be deliberate. The building sustained damage that is likely to be irreversible, with its future uncertain at the time of publication.
Fire at Woolton Hall, Liverpool, 19 August 2025. Video: YouTube.
The Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005 applies to non-domestic premises regardless of whether they are in active use. The owner or person in control of a vacant or partially vacant building remains a responsible person under the Order and retains duties in relation to fire precautions, including the prevention of unauthorised access and the management of arson risk. Woolton Hall had been vacant for nearly two decades and had already suffered a previous fire before the August 2025 blaze. Vacant buildings are disproportionately targeted by arsonists — a pattern that is well documented in UK fire statistics — and the fire risk in an unoccupied building is compounded by the absence of any person to raise the alarm, the deterioration of passive fire protection over time, and the accumulation of combustible material where maintenance has lapsed. For owners or managers of partially vacant commercial or mixed-use premises, the fire risk assessment must address the vacant areas specifically, including their security, the condition of any compartmentation between occupied and unoccupied areas, and whether the detection system covers the full footprint of the building. Liverpool's substantial stock of heritage and Victorian commercial properties — many of them in selective use or partially tenanted — carries exactly this kind of risk, and it should be assessed accordingly. Where a building contains both occupied and unoccupied parts, fire door inspections in the areas separating those zones are particularly important, since a fire originating in an unoccupied section can reach occupied escape routes before any alarm is raised.
Fire Safety Duties for Responsible Persons Across Liverpool
Liverpool's commercial and residential stock creates a wide range of fire safety obligations, and the sectors carrying the highest risk profiles are worth addressing directly.
HMOs and the selective licensing areas. Liverpool City Council's selective licensing scheme covers a significant part of the inner city, requiring most privately rented properties of three or more unrelated persons in the designated areas to hold a licence. For landlords in these zones, the HMO fire safety requirements go beyond the general FSO duties: the licensing conditions specify minimum fire alarm grades, fire door specifications, emergency lighting requirements and means of escape standards that are more prescriptive than the FSO's general "suitable and sufficient" test. A fire risk assessment carried out for a licensed HMO must be consistent with the licence conditions and updated whenever the property changes. The inner-city terraces of L6, L7 and L8 — many of them converted Victorian or Edwardian properties with original staircase configurations, timber floors and limited compartmentation — present a consistently challenging fire risk profile, and the assessor needs to understand that built environment specifically rather than apply a generic residential template.
Warehousing and logistics. Liverpool's logistics and manufacturing base, concentrated in the Speke industrial area around the former airport, Aintree, and along the Edge Lane and Dunnings Bridge Road corridors, generates a significant volume of warehouse fire safety obligations. Single-storey distribution units with high-bay racking, polythene-wrapped pallets and combustible packaging carry an inherent fire load that develops very rapidly once ignition occurs, and the FSO requires the assessment to address fire load density, the adequacy of detection and suppression arrangements, evacuation of large open-plan floor areas, and the means of preventing fire spread to adjacent units on shared industrial estates. Where HGV loading areas or external storage present a potential ignition source at the building perimeter, those risks should be explicitly addressed.
City centre hospitality and the night-time economy. The concentration of bars, restaurants, music venues and hotels across L1 and L2, particularly around Concert Square, Bold Street, Mathew Street and the waterfront, creates a demanding fire safety environment. Hotels and hospitality venues with sleeping accommodation carry heightened legal duties under the FSO, and the presence of large numbers of members of the public — some of whom may be unfamiliar with the building layout and some of whom may be impaired by alcohol — requires evacuation plans and staff training to be robustly tested. The fire safety training requirement under Article 21 of the FSO applies to all staff who work in these premises, including part-time and casual workers, and in the hospitality sector — where staff turnover is high and training records are often incomplete — this is one of the most commonly inadequate elements found during enforcement visits.
Managing agents and multi-occupier commercial buildings. The ongoing regeneration of Liverpool's city centre and waterfront has produced a substantial stock of mixed-use buildings — former warehouses, converted civic buildings and new-build blocks — where multiple organisations lease space from a single building owner or managing agent. Under the FSO, where two or more responsible persons share a building, each is required to cooperate and coordinate with the others on fire safety matters under Article 22. In practice, this means that the managing agent or freeholder must ensure a coherent fire safety strategy covers the common parts of the building, that the assessments carried out by individual tenants are consistent with the building-wide strategy, and that emergency procedures are understood across all occupiers. Our service for managing agents is designed specifically for this scenario.
Student accommodation. The two universities — the University of Liverpool in L3 and Liverpool John Moores in L2 and L3 — and their student populations generate a significant demand for purpose-built student accommodation and private-sector HMOs across L6, L7, L15 and L17. Purpose-built blocks are generally subject to tighter fire safety standards as part of their planning and building regulations approval, but the private HMO sector serving students carries the same risks as any other HMO and must be assessed and licensed accordingly. The late-night lifestyle patterns of student populations, combined with cooking in shared kitchens, accumulation of combustible material in communal areas and frequent turnover of occupants, are factors that should be reflected in the assessment and the evacuation plan.
Across all of these sectors, the foundation remains the same. A written fire risk assessment by a competent assessor, a documented fire safety policy, a tested evacuation plan, regular fire door inspections where passive fire protection forms part of the strategy, and fire safety training for all staff. Where any occupants may not be able to self-evacuate, evacuation chair training for relevant personnel is an increasingly expected provision. Merseyside Fire and Rescue Service is the enforcing authority across Liverpool and the wider Merseyside area, and its inspection and enforcement programme covers all of these sectors.
Fire Safety Support for Liverpool and Merseyside
Fletcher Risk Management provides fire risk assessments in Liverpool for responsible persons across the city — from HMO landlords in the selective licensing areas and warehouse operators in Speke and Aintree, to managing agents responsible for mixed-use city centre blocks and hospitality operators in L1 and L2. We cover the wider region through our Merseyside service and our full range of complementary services: fire door inspections, fire safety training, evacuation plans, fire safety policies and evacuation chair training.
If you manage a building with multiple occupiers or are responsible for common parts, our service for managing agents explains how we work and what the process involves. If your premises includes HMO accommodation, our HMO fire safety service covers the specific requirements that apply in Liverpool's licensing areas. For warehousing and industrial premises in Speke, Aintree and across Merseyside, our warehouse fire safety service addresses the specific risk profile of large-footprint logistics and manufacturing buildings.
Fire safety support across the North West and North Wales
Fletcher Risk Management provides fire risk assessments, fire door inspections and fire safety training for responsible persons across Chester, Cheshire, the Wirral, Merseyside, Greater Manchester, North Wales and beyond. To discuss your requirements, please get in touch.
This article is intended for general guidance only and does not constitute legal advice. Responsible persons should seek professional advice tailored to their specific premises and circumstances. Fletcher Risk Management Ltd provides fire risk assessments, fire door inspections, and fire safety training across the North West and North Wales.