Do My Staff Need Fire Marshal Training?
Picture a fire alarm going off in a four-storey office on a Tuesday afternoon. Most people file out of the building without much fuss, although a handful stay at their desks because they assume it is another test. A visitor who arrived ten minutes earlier heads the wrong way down a corridor looking for the exit she came in through, and someone steps into the lift before a colleague can stop them. The second-floor meeting rooms go unchecked, nobody has a list to work from at the assembly point, and it takes the best part of twenty minutes before anyone is reasonably sure that the finance team made it out. The building empties, more or less, but what has happened is not really an evacuation so much as a crowd leaving a building in its own time.
This is the scenario that Fire Marshal training is designed to prevent, and it is also the scenario that fire and rescue inspectors, insurers and, if things go badly wrong, coroners and the Crown Prosecution Service will reconstruct in forensic detail after the fact. When employers and property managers ask us whether their staff need Fire Marshal training, the question behind the question is usually whether their evacuation arrangements actually work when the alarm sounds for real, or whether those arrangements only work on paper, in the fire safety folder, during the quiet stretches of the year when nobody is testing them.
What a Fire Marshal actually does
A Fire Marshal, sometimes called a Fire Warden, is a member of staff given a defined role within the building's fire strategy. The title is informal and varies between organisations, but the responsibilities are reasonably consistent wherever the role is taken seriously. A marshal understands the specific fire risks of their area of the building, knows how the alarm system behaves and what its various signals mean, carries out sweeps of assigned zones where it is safe to do so, directs staff and visitors towards the correct exit routes and assembly points, supports the roll call once everyone is outside, and reports back to whoever is coordinating the incident on the ground.
Most of this is unglamorous work, which is part of why it gets neglected in planning and overlooked in training budgets. The job of a marshal is to impose calm structure on the first few minutes of a fire, because those first few minutes are when the majority of evacuation failures happen. Marshals are not first responders, they are not expected to tackle anything beyond very small, incipient fires where doing so is clearly safe, and they are certainly not substitutes for the fire and rescue service. What they are is the difference between a building that empties in three minutes and one that empties in eight, or doesn't empty cleanly at all.
What the law actually says
UK fire safety legislation does not use the words "Fire Marshal" or "Fire Warden" anywhere, and this is the detail that most often leads responsible persons to the wrong conclusion. The law does not need to name the role, because it requires the function.
Under the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005, the responsible person must carry out a suitable and sufficient fire risk assessment, put appropriate fire safety arrangements in place in light of its findings, and provide staff with adequate fire safety training. Article 18 goes further and requires the responsible person to appoint one or more competent persons to assist in undertaking the preventive and protective measures identified by the assessment, where competence is defined as having sufficient training, experience, knowledge and other qualities to do the job properly.
In most workplaces of any size, the competent persons helping to manage an evacuation are, in everything but name, Fire Marshals. Calling them something else, or calling them nothing at all, does not change the underlying legal position. If the fire risk assessment concludes that staff need to help direct evacuation, manage a roll call, sweep areas or communicate with the fire service on arrival, then those staff need to be competent to do so, and competence of that kind is not something anyone acquires from sitting through the fire safety section of a general induction.
The Fire Safety (England) Regulations 2022, which came into force following the recommendations of the Grenfell Tower Inquiry, have tightened the expectations further, particularly for higher-risk residential buildings, and enforcement across all premises has been correspondingly firmer since. Prosecutions under the Fire Safety Order continue to turn, year after year, on whether staff had been properly trained for the parts they were expected to play.
The practical test is a simple one. If your fire strategy assumes that staff will do specific things during an evacuation, and those staff have not been trained to do them, then what you have is not really a strategy at all, it is an assumption dressed up as one.
Which British Standards and guidance apply
British Standards are not law, but they describe what the sector regards as reasonable practice, and enforcing authorities and the courts treat them accordingly when things are being picked over after an incident. The most directly relevant document for our purposes is BS 9999, the code of practice for fire safety in the design, management and use of buildings, which sets out in considerable detail the expectation that management procedures, trained staff and clearly defined responsibilities are what underpin safe evacuation. The government's sector-specific fire safety guides, issued to support the Fire Safety Order, make much the same point in plainer language for offices, hotels, care premises, HMOs and the rest.
The common thread running through all of this guidance is that where a fire risk assessment concludes your evacuation depends on named staff performing defined roles, appropriate training for those staff is treated as an expected control measure rather than as an optional extra that can be skipped if budgets are tight.
How many Fire Marshals do you need?
There is no fixed ratio, and anyone offering you one without looking at the building first is guessing. The number of marshals a premises needs depends on its footprint and layout, the number of floors and separate fire compartments, how many people are on site at peak occupancy, whether visitors or members of the public are present in significant numbers, shift patterns and out-of-hours working, and, above all, the risks flagged by the fire risk assessment.
The piece of arithmetic we encourage responsible persons to do in their own buildings is the sweep time. If an area needs to be checked and cleared during an evacuation, how long does it realistically take one person to do that, and is that duration acceptable against the rest of the evacuation strategy and the characteristics of the building? A single marshal per floor is common enough in small offices, but larger, more complex or higher-risk premises need considerably more, and every organisation needs enough trained people on its books to cover for holidays, sickness, shift patterns and staff turnover without the whole system resting on one or two individuals who happen to be in that day. In multi-tenant buildings, coordination between tenants' marshals is a subject in its own right, and one that is frequently overlooked until an actual alarm makes the gaps obvious.
Do all staff need Fire Marshal training?
No, they do not. Every member of staff should receive basic fire safety awareness training as part of their induction, covering what to do on hearing the alarm, where the exits and assembly points are, and who to report to once they are out. Fire Marshal training is a step beyond that, and is intended for the staff who have specific duties during an incident. In higher-risk premises, training a broader pool of staff as marshals is a sensible resilience measure, because it means any given shift has adequate cover without the organisation quietly relying on one or two trained individuals always happening to be on the premises when the alarm sounds.
What a good course actually covers
Training varies considerably in quality, and it is worth knowing what you are paying for. A Fire Marshal course that matches the role will cover the behaviour of fire and smoke within buildings, the specific fire strategy of your premises, the alarm system and what its various signals indicate, safe sweep procedures, the appropriate use of firefighting equipment together with the equally important boundary of when not to use it, assembly point and roll call discipline, and liaison with the fire and rescue service on their arrival.
Generic online modules have their place as refreshers between in-person sessions, but they rarely achieve competence on their own, and training that never refers to your actual building, your actual alarm system or your actual evacuation plan is training that will struggle to hold up under scrutiny if something ever goes wrong.
How often should training be refreshed?
- Every one to three years Standard refresher interval, weighted towards the shorter end for higher-risk premises and towards the longer end only where risk is genuinely low and stable.
- After building changes Any significant alteration to layout, use, occupancy or fire strategy, including new tenants, new processes or equipment, or changes to escape routes.
- After staffing changes When marshals leave or change role, or when the organisation restructures in ways that affect cover during normal hours and out of hours.
- After procedural changes When alarm systems, evacuation procedures, assembly points or communication arrangements are updated or replaced.
- After an incident or drill Whenever a real evacuation or a practice drill reveals confusion, delays or near-misses that need addressing in training rather than papered over.
Why this matters when things go wrong
Post-incident investigations almost always examine what staff did on the day, what they had been told to do, and whether they had been trained to do it. The pattern across cases that reach court is consistent and not especially surprising. Evacuations fail because marshals were untrained or had never really been designated in the first place, because roll calls were improvised on the spot, because nobody had been given responsibility for sweeping particular floors, or because staff made reasonable but uninformed decisions that turned out to be the wrong ones. Insurers reviewing claims look for the same patterns, and their position tends to harden accordingly.
Against that backdrop, the cost of training a handful of marshals properly is trivial compared with the cost of a prosecution under the Fire Safety Order, or of a fire that spreads further than it needed to because the building did not empty cleanly. Competence of this kind is among the cheapest parts of fire safety to put in place, and it is also, reliably, the part that most often turns out to have been short-changed.
A practical starting point
The right place to start is always a current and competent fire risk assessment, which should state plainly whether marshals are required, how many, and what level of training is appropriate given the premises and the people in them. Training should then be built around the actual building and its actual risks, rather than delivered as a generic slide deck that could, with a few cosmetic changes, apply to any workplace in the country.
If your assessment does not address the marshal question, or if it was carried out some time ago and the building has changed meaningfully since, then that is the gap to close before anything else. Training delivered on top of an out-of-date assessment is training pointed at the wrong targets, and it is no defence at all if the assessment itself turns out not to have kept pace with the premises.
Fire Marshal training in Chester, the North West and North Wales
We deliver practical, proportionate Fire Marshal training built around real buildings and real risks, rather than tick-box theory that bears no relation to the premises it is supposed to protect. Our courses suit offices, retail and hospitality, industrial premises, residential blocks, care settings and mixed-use buildings. We are based in Chester and work across the North West and North Wales, from Bangor to Bolton and everywhere in between. If you would like to discuss your current arrangements, or book training for your team, please get in touch.
Book Fire Marshal Training Get in TouchThis article is provided for general information only and does not constitute legal advice. Fire safety duties and training requirements depend on the specific risks and circumstances of each premises. A competent fire risk assessor should be consulted to determine appropriate fire safety arrangements.