Action Plan

Upon completion of your Fire Risk Assessment and your Significant Findings you may need to prepare an Action Plan.

The action plan will focus on the areas where risk has been identified, detailing the preventative and protective measures required to reduce risk to an acceptable level. The measures identified will be carried out, in order of priority, and a reasonable time scale for completion of each will be detailed. Where the Enforcing Authority agrees to such a plan, then this should be formally agreed and signed up to, by both parties.

Where the Enforcing Authority disagrees with the findings of the risk assessment, negotiation with the responsible person will commence so it can be agreed what preventive and protective measures should be implemented within an agreed time scale. The inspector having discussed, modified (where necessary) and agreed the measures and time scales proposed, may confirm these facts to the responsible person in the form of an action plan prepared by the Authority.

Where an action plan exists or is proposed, the relationship between the inspecting officer and the ‘responsible person’ must be viewed as a partnership. As part of this partnership, both sides need to be in a position to agree to accept the findings of the fire risk assessment and the projected time scale for completion/implementation of the measures identified in the action plan. These will need to be placed in order of priority for completion, and may include interim measures prior to long term or permanent measures being implemented.

An Action Plan must ensure that:

• Immediate failures to control risk or comply with the law are dealt with.
• The cause of the risk has been addressed.
• The action details the most serious risks in order of priority, and in appropriate timescales.
• Any underlying problems are adequately addressed.

The Action Plan must also target the actions; i.e.

• Take account of the scale of the failures, e.g. were they simple, single or multiple failures, and
• deal with the fundamental cause of the problem(s), e.g. inadequate fire precautions, risk control systems or management arrangements.

Finally, the Action Plan must set realistic timescales which should reflect:

• The nature of the imminent risk, and
• the resource impact to the responsible person.