Cooperation between responsible persons: what Article 22 of the Fire Safety Order now requires
Many buildings have more than one responsible person. The Fire Safety Order has always required them to cooperate; the Building Safety Act 2022 has turned that broad duty into a set of specific, recordable obligations that came into force in October 2023.
Most responsible persons think of themselves as singular. They are the managing agent, or the freeholder, or the employer — the person who commissions the fire risk assessment, arranges the fire alarm test, and fields calls from the fire authority. The idea that there may be other responsible persons in the same building, each holding independent legal duties, and that the law now requires all of them to actively identify and engage with one another, has not yet fully registered in a lot of buildings.
It should have. Section 156 of the Building Safety Act 2022, which came into force on 1 October 2023, significantly amended Article 22 of the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005 — the provision governing cooperation and coordination between responsible persons. What had been a broadly worded duty to cooperate, widely honoured in the breach, was replaced with a set of concrete, sequenced obligations, each of which is capable of being checked by an enforcing authority and, where breached, prosecuted. The Hartlepool prosecution in 2023, in which one of the offences admitted was a specific failure to cooperate and coordinate with other responsible persons, showed that fire authorities are willing to treat these duties seriously.
When does more than one responsible person exist?
The first step the amended Article 22 requires is establishing whether this situation applies at all. Under Article 22(A1), inserted by the Building Safety Act, every responsible person must now take reasonably practicable steps to ascertain whether any other responsible person shares, or has duties in respect of, the same premises. That is an active duty to look, not a passive assumption that you would know if someone else were involved.
Multiple responsible persons arise more often than is commonly appreciated. In a mixed-use building — commercial units on the ground floor with residential above — there will typically be at least one responsible person for the commercial part, at least one for the residential common parts, and potentially the building owner holding residual duties for the structure and shared elements. In a multi-let office building, each employer is a responsible person for their own demise, while the landlord or managing agent holds duties for the common parts. In a large HMO, there may be both a freeholder and a management company, each exercising some degree of control over different parts of the premises.
The question is not whether someone else owns or occupies part of the building — it is whether anyone else has control of any part of the premises to any extent, because that is what gives rise to responsible person status under the Fire Safety Order. In buildings where this has never been mapped out, the exercise of doing so is itself a compliance step.
The specific obligations under the amended Article 22
Once the existence of another responsible person has been established, a set of duties follows. These are no longer simply to cooperate in a general sense, but to do specific things that can be documented and verified.
What Article 22 now requires where multiple responsible persons share a building
- Identify yourself. Each responsible person must inform the others of their name and a UK address at which they, or someone acting on their behalf, will accept notices and documents. This must be kept as a written record.
- Demarcate your area. Each responsible person must inform the others of the part of the premises for which they consider themselves responsible, and keep a record of that information. This forces a clarity of boundary that many buildings have never had in writing.
- Cooperate. Each responsible person must cooperate with the others so far as is necessary to enable compliance with the Fire Safety Order. In a building with a shared fire alarm or common escape routes, this is not a formality — it has direct operational consequences.
- Coordinate measures. Each responsible person must take all reasonable steps to coordinate the fire safety measures they implement with those being implemented by the others. Two fire risk assessments that contradict each other, or two evacuation procedures that have never been reconciled, are a compliance failure.
- Share risk information. Each responsible person must take all reasonable steps to inform the others of risks arising from their own activities or area of the premises. A ground-floor tenant who installs a new kitchen or changes their storage arrangements has an obligation to tell the responsible person for the rest of the building.
Article 22A: when a responsible person changes
Article 22A, also inserted by the Building Safety Act, addresses a specific and previously unregulated situation: what happens to fire safety information when one responsible person is replaced by another. The outgoing responsible person must give the incoming responsible person any relevant fire safety information they hold. That information is defined in the Order to include the fire risk assessment and its findings, details of the person or organisation that carried it out, any emergency plans, records of maintenance and testing of fire safety equipment, and, for higher-risk buildings, the identity of any accountable person.
This matters most in management changes. When a block of flats moves from one managing agent to another, or when a commercial tenant vacates and a new occupier takes on responsibility for a demise, the obligation to pass fire safety information across is now statutory. An incoming responsible person who receives nothing from their predecessor is not thereby absolved of their own duties, but they are entitled to ask for the information, and an outgoing responsible person who withholds or loses it is in breach of the Order. Where the outgoing responsible person cannot identify who the incoming one is, the guidance suggests providing the information to the building owner or manager to forward on, and making a written record of having done so.
What counts as relevant fire safety information under Article 22A?
The Order defines this to include: the fire risk assessment in full, including all findings; the name and, where applicable, the organisation of the person who carried out or reviewed the FRA; emergency plans and procedures; records of maintenance, testing and inspection of fire safety equipment and systems; and, for higher-risk buildings, the identity of any accountable person. Records of fire door checks under the Fire Safety (England) Regulations 2022 are also good practice to include, given they form part of the building's fire safety compliance history.
Article 22B: the accountable person layer
For higher-risk buildings — those at least 18 metres in height or at least seven storeys, containing at least two residential units — there is a further obligation under Article 22B. The responsible person must take reasonable steps to identify the principal accountable person and any other accountable persons in relation to the building, and must then cooperate with them to enable them to carry out their duties under the Building Safety Act.
The accountable person is a Building Safety Act concept, distinct from the responsible person under the Fire Safety Order. Broadly, an accountable person is any person who holds the legal estate in possession in any of the common parts of the building, or who is under a repairing obligation in respect of them. In a typical residential block, the freeholder will be the accountable person; the managing agent acting on their behalf will be the responsible person for Fire Safety Order purposes. These roles may be held by the same organisation or by different ones, but either way the cooperation duty under Article 22B requires the responsible person's FRA for the common parts to be shared with the accountable person, so that it can feed into the safety case report that the Building Safety Act requires for higher-risk buildings. The intention, as government guidance puts it, is a whole-building approach to fire safety in which the Fire Safety Order and the Building Safety Act regime are not treated as separate systems operating in isolation.
Where cooperation fails in practice
The practical failure modes in multi-responsible-person buildings are not usually wilful non-cooperation. They are more often structural: arrangements that have never been established, assumptions that someone else is dealing with something, and information that has never been shared because nobody thought to ask for it. The following scenarios are representative of what turns up in fire risk assessments and enforcement action.
The management change with no handover
A block of flats changes managing agent. The outgoing agent holds the FRA, the fire door inspection records, the maintenance contracts, and the emergency procedures. None of this is formally passed to the incoming agent. The new agent commissions a fresh FRA some months later, but in the interim is operating without knowledge of the building's compliance history and without the information the Fire Safety Order requires them to have received. Under Article 22A, the outgoing agent was obliged to transfer that information. Under Article 22, the incoming agent was entitled to it and should have asked.
The mixed-use building with unreconciled FRAs
A building has commercial units on the ground floor and residential flats above. The commercial tenant has had a fire risk assessment carried out for their demise. The managing agent for the residential common parts has had a separate FRA done for those. Neither party has seen the other's assessment. The commercial tenant's FRA identifies a significant storage risk adjacent to a wall shared with the residential staircase. The managing agent's FRA has no record of this, because the assessor was not told about it. Under Article 22(1)(c), the commercial tenant had an obligation to inform the other responsible person of that risk. Under Article 22(1)(b), both parties had an obligation to coordinate their fire safety measures. Neither obligation was met.
The freeholder and the managing agent, each assuming the other has it covered
A freeholder appoints a managing agent to manage a residential block. The managing agent assumes that because the freeholder commissioned the original FRA, the freeholder is dealing with the compliance programme. The freeholder assumes that because the managing agent is on site and manages the day-to-day operation of the building, the managing agent is doing the quarterly fire door checks. In fact, neither is doing them. Both hold responsible person status to some degree. Neither has established in writing which parts of the premises each considers themselves responsible for, as Article 22(1)(zb) now requires. The demarcation that would have resolved the confusion has never been made.
What good practice looks like
The obligations under the amended Article 22 are not especially burdensome to discharge, provided they are approached deliberately. The starting point is a written record of all responsible persons in the building: their names, their UK contact addresses, and the parts of the premises for which each considers themselves responsible. For most buildings, this document does not yet exist, and creating it is itself a meaningful compliance step.
Beyond that, the coordination duty requires that fire risk assessments for different parts of the same building are either carried out together or at minimum shared between responsible persons so that each assessor has the full picture. An FRA that is carried out without knowledge of the risks in the parts of the building outside the assessor's direct scope is an FRA with a structural gap. Similarly, any significant change in one responsible person's area — a new process, a change of use, a significant increase in the number of occupants — should be communicated to the others promptly, not stored up for the next FRA review cycle.
For management transitions, Article 22A is most easily complied with by treating the fire safety information package — FRA, maintenance records, emergency procedures, fire door inspection history — as a formal handover document that is produced and receipted at the point of transition, in the same way that other management information is transferred. An incoming responsible person who asks for this and does not receive it has both a legal entitlement and a practical reason to escalate, since they cannot properly discharge their own duties without it.
Where a dispute arises between responsible persons about cooperation duties that cannot be resolved directly, government guidance is clear that the matter should be referred to the relevant enforcing authority — the local fire and rescue service in most cases. That is not a comfortable step for most managing agents or landlords to take, but it is the prescribed route, and the alternative of a cooperation failure that contributes to a fire safety incident is considerably worse.
The role of the fire risk assessment
A well-conducted fire risk assessment for a building with multiple responsible persons should do more than assess the risks within a single demise or the common parts in isolation. It should establish who else holds responsible person status in the building, note what is known about fire safety arrangements in those other areas, and identify any gaps in the coordination between responsible persons that constitute compliance risks in their own right. An FRA that treats the building as if it has only one responsible person when it plainly has more is an FRA that has missed a material part of the compliance picture.
This applies across the range of premises types we work with — residential blocks managed by managing agents, mixed-use commercial and office buildings, HMOs, hotels, and care homes where the building owner and the care provider may each hold distinct duties. Part of what Fletcher Risk does in conducting fire risk assessments is establishing the responsible person landscape from the outset: who holds duties, for which parts of the building, and whether the cooperation obligations under Article 22 are being met. Where they are not, we can advise on what needs to be put in place. For managing agents who have recently taken on a new building, or who are unsure how the amended Article 22 duties interact with their existing arrangements, a conversation before the next FRA review is likely to be more useful than discovering the gaps at the point of enforcement.
More general guidance on fire safety duties and current legislation is available on our fire safety advice page. If you are unsure whether your building is covered by the cooperation duties described in this article, our fire risk assessment service is the right starting point — and we cover Chester, the Wirral, the wider North West, and North Wales.
Fire risk assessments and compliance advice for multi-responsible-person buildings
If you manage a building in Chester, the Wirral, or the wider North West where more than one responsible person holds duties — or where you are simply unsure how the cooperation obligations under Article 22 apply to your arrangements — we can help. We carry out fire risk assessments and fire door inspections across the full range of residential and commercial premises, and can advise on the record-keeping and coordination arrangements the law now requires.
To discuss your building's requirements, please get in touch.