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 explains 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 and the Fire Safety (England) Regulations 2022, but will also include associated and emerging legislation and official guidance in relation to fire safety, including gas and electrical safety regulation, as well as the Building Safety Act 2022. 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 explain 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.