Fire Safety Law: A Practical Guide for Leaseholders, Building-Owners and Conveyancers

Fire Safety Law provides building-owners, managers, individual leaseholders, mortgage-lenders, landlords, and anyone involved in the purchase or sale of a flat situated within a multi-occupied block, with practical, yet comprehensive and well-researched information regarding the subject of fire safety and the associated responsibilities, obligations and rights.

V. Charles Ward addresses in practical legal terms: the responsibilities on building-owners to ensure that buildings are fire-safe for people who are living, working, or visiting those buildings and what protections are available to leaseholders faced with the costs of making their buildings fire-safe. The book begins with a summary of the lessons which have come from the Grenfell inquiry, before providing a practical overview of current fire-safety legislation relating to residential and commercial buildings.

This legislative overview will include not only the 2005 Fire Safety Order, as updated by the 2021 Fire-Safety Act but will also include associated and emerging legislation and official guidance in relation to fire-safety, including gas and electrical safety regulation. The book will then pull apart a typical long residential-lease within a high-rise block to identify who is directly responsible for fire-safety and how the costs of making-good the fire-risk from defective cladding might be shared-out between the ground-landlord and individual residential leaseholders.

Having assessed the legal situation as regards existing high-rise leaseholders, the book then addresses the additional ‘due diligence’ required by prospective purchasers of individual high-rise flats as well as estate agents; mortgage lenders; landlords and conveyancing lawyers; to ensure that what they will be buying or lending money on is ‘fire-safe’ and that any associated costs are fully accounted for.