What Fire Safety Signage Do You Need in an HMO?
The most common signage problem we find in HMOs is not that there is too little. It is that there is too much of the wrong kind, in the wrong places, on the wrong doors. A hallway covered in laminated A4 sheets and a bedroom door labelled Fire Door Keep Shut are not evidence of good management. They are evidence of someone trying to be helpful without understanding what the signage is actually for.
Fire safety signage in a house in multiple occupation has a single job: to help a person who does not know the building get out of it, in the dark, possibly in smoke, possibly in a language that is not their first. Everything that serves that job belongs in the building. Everything that does not is visual noise, and in a fire visual noise gets people killed.
This matters more in HMOs than in almost any other residential building type. Tenants arrive and leave on short notice. They often have no induction, no fire drill, no reason to know where the back stairs lead. They may share the building with people they have never met. Some will be working night shifts, some will have hearing impairments, some will have been drinking. The signage is often the only thing that will tell them what to do when the alarm sounds at two in the morning.
What the law actually requires
Two pieces of legislation apply. The Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005 requires the responsible person to provide appropriate fire safety signs where the findings of the fire risk assessment identify the need. The Health and Safety (Safety Signs and Signals) Regulations 1996 set out how those signs must look, specifying colours, shapes and symbols consistent with the European Signs Directive and aligned with BS EN ISO 7010. Between them they produce a simple principle: signs must be provided where they are needed, they must comply with the recognised standards, and they must do their job in the conditions in which they will actually be used.
Two British Standards flesh the principle out. BS EN ISO 7010 governs the graphical symbols, the ones everyone recognises, the running figure through a door, the flame on a red background. BS 5499-4 is the code of practice for how escape route signage is designed and positioned: where to place signs, at what height, at what size for the viewing distance, and at which decision points. The first tells you what the signs look like. The second tells you where they go. The original piece on this subject cited the first but not the second, and the second is where most signage problems actually arise.
For HMOs, the applicable guidance documents are the LACORS Housing Fire Safety Guidance and the local housing authority standards that sit on top of it. These will usually set out the signage expectations for licensable HMOs in your area, and they are what an LHA inspector will be looking at when they visit.
What you actually need
Fire action notices
A fire action notice tells occupants what to do when the alarm sounds. It must reflect the actual fire strategy for the building. In most HMOs that means simultaneous evacuation, but some larger or converted buildings operate on a progressive or stay-put basis, and the notice must say so. A generic "on discovering a fire" notice downloaded from the internet and stuck on the wall without reference to the building's strategy is worse than useless; it tells people the wrong thing. Fire action notices should appear on every floor, in the main circulation areas, near the final exit, and in communal kitchens. One per floor, visible from the point a tenant would stop to read it, is the standard expectation.
Escape route signs
BS 5499-4 requires that escape route signs are positioned so that, from any point on the escape route, the next sign is visible. A sign should appear at every change of direction and every change of level. The mounting height matters: signs above doors should sit between 2.0 and 2.5 metres above the floor, wall-mounted signs between 1.7 and 2.0 metres. Height should be consistent throughout the route, so that occupants' eyes know where to look.
In small terraced HMOs, the escape route is often a single straight corridor with stairs at one end. The number of signs needed is correspondingly small. In larger converted houses, flats-over-shops or purpose-built HMOs with more than one staircase, the signage is more substantial. The rule in both cases is the same: if a tenant running from smoke could reach a point where they might hesitate, a sign goes there.
Where lighting could fail, escape route signs must remain visible. This is usually achieved through BS 5266-compliant emergency lighting illuminating the signs, or through photoluminescent signage that glows after the lights go out, or a combination. A power cut with no emergency lighting and no photoluminescent signage leaves a corridor invisible to the people in it.
Fire door signs
Fire door signage is where most HMOs get it wrong. The rules are narrower than many landlords think.
Doors on protected escape routes, typically doors between the circulation space and the staircase, doors from communal kitchens into the hallway, and doors to risers and service cupboards, should carry the appropriate label. "Fire Door Keep Shut" on doors that open and close in normal use. "Fire Door Keep Locked" on cupboards, meter rooms and risers that should never be open. "Automatic Fire Door Keep Clear" on any door fitted with a hold-open device.
Doors to bedrooms and individual letting rooms, on the other hand, should generally not carry Fire Door Keep Shut signage, even though they are often FD30 fire doors. These are the doors to someone's private dwelling space. Labelling them as fire doors creates two problems: it gives no useful information to the tenant, who already knows where their own room is, and it generates signage clutter that dilutes the signs that do matter. The convention in residential settings is that fire-door signage is restricted to doors on the common escape route and to service cupboards. This point is explicit in the approach taken by professionally managed estates and universities, and is worth applying in HMOs too. If you want your staircase door to be noticed when the corridor fills with smoke, do not compete with it by labelling every bedroom door on the same corridor.
Fire alarm call points and extinguishers
Manual call points are red and conspicuous by design, which is why BS 5839-1 does not require them to be individually signed in most residential settings where a call point is directly visible at the point a tenant would use one. In larger HMOs with complex circulation, a sign identifying the location of the call point can help. The question to ask is whether a tenant running towards the stairs would see the call point without being told where it is; if yes, no sign is needed.
Fire extinguishers, where provided in communal areas, should be identified by an ID sign above them. Note the direction: the sign goes above the extinguisher, not beside it, so that it remains visible if the extinguisher is temporarily obscured. In many small HMOs, portable extinguishers in communal areas are not required at all, because the fire strategy is to evacuate rather than to fight the fire. Where this is the case, installing extinguishers and signs for them adds risk rather than reducing it, because a tenant who stops to use one is a tenant who has not left the building. Your fire risk assessment should settle the question.
Prohibition and warning signs
"No Smoking" signs are required in communal areas under the Health Act 2006. "High Voltage" or equivalent warning signage belongs on meter cupboards and any enclosure containing electrical intake equipment. These signs have a specific legal basis and are not optional. Other prohibition signage, "no candles", "no naked flames in kitchen", should appear where the fire risk assessment has identified a specific risk it needs to address, not as a general measure.
What you probably do not need
A three-bedroom terraced HMO does not require the signage inventory of a hotel. Common excesses we see, and which make buildings harder rather than easier to evacuate, include:
"Fire Door Keep Shut" signs on every bedroom door. Laminated A4 fire action notices posted every few metres along a short corridor. Extinguisher ID signs above extinguishers that should not be there in the first place. Multiple competing signs at the top of a staircase, one mandated by an old assessment, one added by the alarm engineer, one printed by the landlord after a tenant query. Assembly point signs outside buildings with no designated assembly point, or with a point the tenants have never been told about. Hand-written additions in marker pen correcting or contradicting printed signage. Signs in English only in buildings with a large non-English-speaking tenant population, where an additional pictogram or translated line would do more.
Each of these adds clutter without adding safety, and several actively reduce safety by teaching tenants to ignore the wall.
Quality, durability and photoluminescence
Fire safety signs need to work in conditions that are, by definition, worse than the conditions in which they were installed. A cheap printed sign in a stairwell may look fine for a year and then fade, peel or curl at the corners until it reads as decoration rather than instruction. The standards worth specifying are BS 5499-4 and BS EN ISO 7010 compliance, rigid substrate (not self-adhesive vinyl) for any sign in a public area, and photoluminescent performance to Class C at minimum for escape route signs on staircases and in internal corridors without natural light.
The video below, produced by UK Safety Store, gives a useful overview of the practical differences between signage grades. It is worth watching before any bulk purchase for a portfolio.
Signage in the context of the fire strategy
Fire safety signage is downstream of the fire strategy, not upstream of it. You cannot design a signage scheme without first knowing whether the building evacuates simultaneously or operates a stay-put approach, how many staircases serve it, where the final exits are, and who lives in it. This is why signage is properly specified by a fire risk assessment rather than by an alarm engineer, an extinguisher contractor or the landlord with a label printer. Installers will know the signage relevant to their equipment. They will not necessarily know whether a sign should be there at all.
In HMOs with non-English-speaking tenants, the legal position is that signs must comply with the pictograms in BS EN ISO 7010; this is precisely why the standard exists. The symbol does most of the work. Where written instructions are included on fire action notices, supplementary translations into the languages commonly spoken in the building are a proportionate addition and a helpful one.
How Fletcher Risk can help
We carry out fire risk assessments, fire door inspections and fire safety training for HMOs and residential blocks across Chester, Cheshire, the Wirral, Merseyside, Greater Manchester and North Wales. Our assessments specify signage in a way that matches the building's fire strategy and its actual tenants, identifying both what is missing and what can sensibly be removed. We work with managing agents, landlords and investors who want buildings that are genuinely safer, not just more covered in laminated paper.
HMO fire safety signage that works
If you manage an HMO and want clear, property-specific advice on the signage it actually needs, please get in touch.
Contact Fletcher Risk