Fire safety for London shops and retail units

No, and this is the most common enforcement point in retail. Article 14 of the Fire Safety Order requires that emergency exits can be opened easily and immediately by any person who may need to use them, in the direction of escape, whenever anybody is on the premises. A key behind the counter does not satisfy that, because the person who needs the door may be a customer at the back of the shop and the key may be in a pocket that has gone to the stockroom. Where security is the genuine concern, the answer is a panic bar with an alarmed door contact, or a green-break emergency release, not a lock.

Enough competent people to implement the evacuation procedure, which in a small shop usually means everyone who works a shift alone or in charge. That comes from Article 15 of the Fire Safety Order rather than from a separate marshal law, which is why nobody can tell you a fixed number. The practical test is whether the person on the floor at four o’clock on a Sunday knows what to do, where the exits are, how to sweep the fitting rooms and where the assembly point is. Retail turnover means this needs re-doing far more often than most other sectors, and a record of who was trained and when is part of it.

The stockroom is normally the reason a shop is not a simple system. It holds most of the combustible material, it is often where the electrics and the chargers live, it is unoccupied for long stretches, and in many units the fire exit route runs through it. That combination makes it the named high-risk area which takes a system from L3 to L2. It is also the room where a fire will develop unnoticed for longest, which is the whole argument for detecting it rather than relying on somebody smelling smoke from the till.

The centre management is normally the responsible person for the malls, the service corridors and the centre’s own alarm and evacuation strategy, and you are the responsible person for your unit. The centre will usually require your system to interface with theirs so that an activation in your unit is known to their control room, and their evacuation strategy may be phased rather than simultaneous. Ask for the strategy and the interface requirement in writing before any work is specified, because a system that cannot talk to the centre’s panel will have to be revisited.

Siting and selection come from BS 5306-8 and the servicing from BS 5306-3, and the number follows from what is in the unit rather than from its floor area alone. A shop with a stockroom, a small kitchen area and a bank of chargers has three different fire types to cover, so the answer is rarely "two water extinguishers by the door". We work it out on the survey and tell you if what is already installed is adequate, which it sometimes is.