Smoking and Vaping at Work
A smoking shelter at the back of an industrial unit, tucked between two bin stores, sees its metal ashtray overflow over a long weekend. On the Tuesday morning, the cleaning round has not yet caught up, and a cigarette that is not quite out goes into the bin liner next to it. By early afternoon the bin store is alight, and by the time anyone notices, the fire has run up the cladding and into the unit. This is not a hypothetical. Some version of it happens, somewhere in the UK, several times every year, and it is among the most consistently preventable causes of serious commercial fires on the fire and rescue services' annual statistics.
The other version of the story is newer and is about vapes rather than cigarettes. A disposable e-cigarette is left on charge in a desk drawer overnight, the battery fails, and the heat and smoke from a lithium-ion thermal runaway set off the office fire alarm at three in the morning, if not something worse. London Fire Brigade has reported a sustained rise in fires involving e-cigarettes and their batteries over the last several years, and the trend lines across other UK fire services are broadly similar. Both risks sit quietly at the edge of most workplaces, both are routinely underestimated, and both are within the direct control of the responsible person if the problem is thought about properly. This article is about what that looks like in practice.
What the law actually says
The indoor smoking ban in England is set out in the Smoke-free (Premises and Enforcement) Regulations 2006, made under the Health Act 2006, with parallel legislation in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. Smoking tobacco in substantially enclosed public or workplace premises is unlawful, regardless of whether the employer would otherwise permit it, and signage requirements and enforcement powers sit alongside the prohibition itself. The Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005 then places the broader duty on the responsible person to identify and control fire risks from whatever sources arise on the premises, which in practice means that smoking outside the building, smoking materials disposal, and anything else in the smoking orbit falls to be considered within the fire risk assessment.
Vaping is a different legal position and worth stating plainly, because it catches employers out. E-cigarettes are not covered by the smoke-free legislation, which means the decision about whether vaping is allowed indoors in a given workplace is one the employer has to make deliberately rather than assuming the law has made it for them. Most employers sensibly choose to treat vaping in the same way as smoking for fire safety, air quality and policy-consistency reasons, but the choice is theirs, the reasoning should be recorded in the fire risk assessment, and the rules should be communicated clearly to staff.
Why smoking is still a significant workplace fire risk
Smoking rates in the UK have been falling for decades, and it is tempting to assume the fire risk has fallen proportionally. It has not, for a handful of related reasons. Discarded smoking materials retain the ability to ignite combustible waste for much longer than most people assume, cigarettes can smoulder undetected in soft furnishings or bin contents for hours before flaming combustion begins, and external smoking areas tend to accumulate the combustibles that make ignition easy, including paper, packaging, waste oils and dried vegetation. London Fire Brigade has consistently identified smoking materials as one of the leading accidental causes of fatal fires in Greater London, and the picture nationally is similar.
The failure modes we see most often on fire risk assessments are not people deliberately flouting the rules. They are thoughtful enough staff disposing of cigarette ends into a bin that looks metal but is actually lined with a combustible insert, shelters that have drifted closer to waste stores because the original layout has been quietly reorganised, or wooden pallets accumulating near a designated smoking point because nobody has walked round with a critical eye in a while. The risk comes from the interaction of ignition sources and combustibles, and it accumulates slowly enough that people stop seeing it.
Designated smoking areas and shelters
A properly designed external smoking area is a discrete piece of fire safety infrastructure, not an afterthought behind a wheelie bin. Its location and construction both matter, and both should be covered in the fire risk assessment for the premises.
On location, a smoking area should sit well away from the building envelope, with particular attention to doors, opening windows, air intakes and ventilation louvres, because smoke entering the building is both a nuisance and a trigger for the detection system if optical smoke detectors are fitted in the relevant areas. It should sit well clear of combustible storage, waste compounds, gas meter installations, LPG cylinders, parked vehicles and anything else that would convert a discarded cigarette into a significant fire. It should not obstruct escape routes or final exits from the building, and it should be positioned so that staff using it do not routinely stand between the building and its escape provision.
On construction, smoking shelters should be built from non-combustible or limited-combustibility materials, with a design that does not allow waste to accumulate underneath or behind the structure. The ashtray or disposal point should be a proprietary metal smoking bin with a self-extinguishing design, permanently fixed, of adequate capacity, and serviced as part of the routine grounds maintenance schedule rather than when someone happens to notice it is full. Overflow into adjacent general-waste receptacles is one of the classic routes to a serious fire and should be designed out rather than managed around.
A practical check. Walk from each external door of the building to its nearest designated smoking area, look at the route and the area itself as though you had never seen them before, and ask whether someone disposing of a cigarette there could realistically start a fire that would reach the building, the waste store, a vehicle or stored goods. If the answer is yes, or even probably, the arrangement needs revisiting before the next fire risk assessment cycle.
Disposal, servicing and the bin question
Cigarette disposal is the single most frequent weakness identified on fire risk assessments covering smoking arrangements. The correct arrangement is a purpose-designed metal smoking bin with a self-extinguishing internal configuration, typically baffled or sand-filled, emptied on a defined schedule by someone whose job it is to do so, and with clear written instructions prohibiting the use of general waste bins, planters, drain covers or ad hoc containers for disposal. The emptying frequency should reflect usage rather than a calendar default, with busier sites needing more frequent service, and emptying itself should be into a metal container held somewhere safe, never directly into a general waste stream that may still be holding a live ember.
The most common failures are general waste bins placed too close to smoking areas, in which case the convenience makes misuse almost inevitable, smoking bins allowed to overflow so that disposal reverts to whatever surface is available, and smoking bins emptied by a contractor who does not understand that the contents cannot simply go into the back of a bin wagon without water or smothering. Any of these is a fire waiting for a slow afternoon.
Why vaping is a different problem
The fire risk from vaping is not really about the vaping itself, which produces no combustion products and no significant ignition source in normal operation. It is about the lithium-ion batteries inside e-cigarettes and vape devices, which can fail in ways that traditional nicotine delivery cannot. When a lithium-ion cell is damaged, defective, or subjected to overcharging, external heat, short circuit or mechanical stress, it can enter thermal runaway, a self-sustaining reaction in which the cell heats itself above the point where it can dissipate heat to its surroundings. The result is venting of flammable electrolyte, high temperatures, and in many cases a violent fire with a characteristic jet-like flame and significant quantities of toxic smoke.
Disposable vapes are a particular concern because they are designed to be cheap rather than durable, they contain small but real lithium-ion cells, they are frequently damaged through being dropped, sat on or carried loose in pockets with keys and coins, and they are often disposed of in general waste where they can be crushed inside compactors and trucks. Fires in waste vehicles and at waste transfer stations involving disposable vapes have become routine enough that waste companies have started lobbying for changes in product design and disposal law. Within the workplace, the risks sit with charging, storage, damage and disposal, and each of these is tractable if the problem is understood.
Charging, storage and disposal of vape devices
Charging is where most workplace vape fires originate. The general principle is that devices should be charged only when someone is present to notice a problem, which in practice means during working hours, at a suitable socket with no daisy-chained extension leads, and using the charger designed for the device rather than an unbranded third-party cable of uncertain quality. Overnight charging in a desk drawer, a locker or a plant room is where the most serious incidents occur, because a thermal runaway event at three in the morning with nobody on site produces the worst outcome the system can deliver.
Storage on site should be away from heat sources, away from escape routes, and away from electrical cupboards or plant rooms where an unnoticed battery fire would compromise critical systems. Damaged or visibly swollen devices should be treated as an immediate hazard, isolated in a non-combustible container away from combustibles, and disposed of through the appropriate battery waste route. Under no circumstances should a damaged vape be placed in general waste, because the consequences further down the waste chain can be significant.
Disposal of vapes, whether damaged or simply finished, should go through the electrical and battery waste route rather than the general waste route. Many local authorities and waste contractors now provide specific receptacles for disposable vapes, and workplaces that accumulate them in any volume should arrange a dedicated disposal point with clear instructions. The cost of this is trivial against the cost of a waste fire traced back to the premises, and it is a matter that the fire risk assessment should cover explicitly where vaping is permitted on site or expected to arrive on staff.
Enforcement, supervision and the quiet drift problem
Smoking and vaping arrangements at work are uniquely prone to what might be called quiet drift, which is the process by which well-specified rules gradually become partial rules, then optional rules, then decorative rules, without anyone making a deliberate decision to weaken them. A shelter was built in a safe position five years ago, but the waste compound has since been relocated next to it. A policy said no charging overnight, but a member of staff has discreetly started leaving a vape plugged in at their desk because their home charger broke. Signage has faded, supervision has lapsed, and a near-miss three months ago was not formally investigated because nobody was hurt.
The antidote is periodic inspection against the fire risk assessment, not as a compliance exercise but as a walking-round exercise. A competent assessor or a well-briefed fire marshal can identify the drift in an hour or two, and addressing it early is almost always a matter of restoring arrangements that worked rather than inventing new ones. Any fire, near-miss or significant incident involving smoking or vaping should in any case trigger a review of the assessment under Article 9 of the Fire Safety Order, and that review should ask whether the rules are right, whether they are being followed, and whether the locations and equipment still suit the building as it is actually being used.
Getting the policy right
A workable workplace smoking and vaping policy is short, clear, and traceable back to the fire risk assessment. It should identify the designated smoking and vaping areas and make plain that they are the only places where either activity is permitted. It should address charging and storage of vape devices, specifying when and where charging is allowed and, equally importantly, where and when it is not. It should state what staff should do with damaged devices and how disposal is handled. It should be reinforced in induction training, in periodic refreshers, and in signage that is legible rather than ornamental. And it should be owned by a named manager whose job it is to notice when the arrangements start to drift.
Policies that sit untouched in a handbook do little useful work. Policies that are walked round the building once a quarter with a fire marshal tend to survive contact with the reality of how buildings actually get used, which is the test that matters.
A practical starting point
If smoking or vaping arrangements have not been formally considered in the current fire risk assessment for the premises, or if the assessment pre-dates the current pattern of vape use on site, updating the assessment is the right place to start. A competent assessor will look at the layout, the policy, the signage, the disposal arrangements and the charging behaviour, and will identify any drift between the document and the building as it is today. From there, the policy, the infrastructure and the training follow, and the arrangement becomes something that can be maintained rather than something that has to be remembered.
Fire Risk Assessments and Training in Chester, the North West and North Wales
Fletcher Risk regularly reviews smoking and vaping arrangements as part of fire risk assessments for employers, landlords and managing agents across Chester, Cheshire, the Wirral, the North West and North Wales. We can assess the risks, update the assessment, advise on policy and infrastructure, and deliver the fire marshal and general fire safety training that makes the whole arrangement stick. If you would like to discuss your current arrangements, please get in touch.
Book a Fire Risk Assessment Get in TouchThis article is provided for general guidance only and does not constitute legal or professional advice. Smoking and vaping arrangements, including the adequacy of designated areas, disposal provision, charging policy and device storage, should be considered