The court heard, in mitigation, that Munir had made an early guilty plea and was of previous good character. But the judge said Munir had put the needs of the business over employee safety. As well as the suspended sentence, Munir was also ordered to carry out 180 hours of unpaid work, and pay £4,000 in costs.

After the case, Neil Williamson, Notts Fire and Rescue Service’s fire protection manager, said: “We are here to advise and give support to local businesses and are always willing to help make sure they comply with fire safety legislation. However, the public should continue to be reassured that we take any breaches of fire safety very seriously and will use legal sanctions where necessary. In this case, my officers had previously spent some time ensuring that the occupier was aware of his responsibilities and duties to ensure the safety of employees and it is disappointing that he chose to place people at risk from fire. The absence of a fire risk assessment is a particularly bad aspect of this case, especially after numerous reminders.”

Notts Fire and Rescue Service is reminding business owners of their legal responsibility to protect staff and customers from the risk of fire.

A second document, ‘Fire Risk Assessment – A Guide for Businesses’ is in the drafting process and could be available at the end of January 2012. The guide is anticipated to be the signpost, used by all the major industry stakeholders, to finding ‘competent’ fire risk assessors and links in with the criteria document.

The FIA has worked hard, along with the rest of the Competency Council members, to develop the much needed ‘standard/bench mark for competency’ for fire risk assessors and are delighted that the Competency Criteria has finally been published. With the Warrington Certification FRAC scheme already available and the BAFE SP205 scheme anticipated to be available at Easter 2012, the Fire Risk Assessment sector is ‘getting its house in order’ to provide the public with a route to establish independent proof of competency, and therefore adding comfort that they can select a competent Fire Risk Assessor, should they require this service.

To read the Competency Criteria clickhere:  http://www.fia.uk.com/filemanager/root/site_assets/technical/fire_risk_assessment_competency_document_-_21_12_11_final_version_.pdf.

Hei Ting Cheung was fined £1,150 and ordered to pay costs of £150 by magistrates after Bath & North East Somerset Council found his property at The Oval in the city violated Section 30 of the Housing Act 2004, reports thisisbath.co.uk.

Following an inspection of the property, the council’s Housing Services Team found that the fire alarms did not work, there was no door to the kitchen to prevent the spread of fire and the door locks could cause residents to become trapped in the event of a fire.

Councillor Tim Ball, cabinet member for housing and planning, urged landlords to ensure that their housing is in safe condition or risk feeling the “full force of the law”.

He said: “A worrying trend with many of these cases is the use of deadlocks on fire doors by landlords which turn the house into a death trap. This must stop and we will take action against those who put their tenants in danger,” quotes the news provider.

Bath & North East Somerset Council conduct around 1,000 property inspections every year, with 500 landlords and tenants requesting advice on how to comply with housing regulations.

Fire safety officers found there were “virtually no fire safety features inside”, including fire protection between different floors, and poor means of escape.
An LBF spokesman said: “Inspectors predicted that a more serious blaze could have easily taken place and ripped through the entire building, and residents would have struggled to escape.”  As officers investigated the owner of the property, they discovered another building on the nearby Beresford Avenue. When they visited the offices on November 9, which are situated above a garage, they found similar “potentially lethal conditions” providing housing for 21 people, including three children.  The brigade was then alerted to four more properties in the area housing a total of around 80 people.

London Fire Brigades assistant commissioner for fire safety regulation, Steve Turek, said: These buildings are potential death traps and its lucky nobody was killed as a result. Officers visiting these premises have described the breaches of fire safety as some of the worst they have ever seen.  We immediately issued prohibition notices on all six buildings to stop them being used as living accommodation. Building owners must understand the responsibilities they have under fire safety law. If we find that people are putting lives at risk by blatantly ignoring them we will have no hesitation in prosecuting.  London Fire Brigade is continuing to investigate other conversions in the area and is working with Brent Council and other agencies to rehouse those affected.

Kenan Olmez, owner of Best Favourite Fried Chicken in Market Street, was prosecuted by Wiltshire Fire and Rescue Service. Mr Olmez pleaded guilty to failing to undertake a suitable and sufficient fire risk assessment, storing combustible materials and obstructing the means of escape in a fire.

Magistrates heard the takeaway’s final fire exit had been locked with a key and so was not easily and immediately available. Mr Olmez also admitted having an internal fire door on an escape route locked with a key. A fire door between the kitchen and a fire escape was wedged open and missing a self-closing device, and a door jamb, smoke strips and door seals were also missing.

Mr Olmez pleaded guilty to not complying with a prohibition notice issued after an inspection in February 2009, and was fined £1,100 for each offence. This was reduced to £742 for each offence in recognition of an early guilty plea

Shahbaz Fazal, 31, also known as Mohammed Shahbaz Khan, of Hale Road, Hale, pleaded guilty to nine offences brought by Greater Manchester Fire and Rescue Service (GMFRS) at an earlier hearing and was sentenced to three months imprisonment on Tuesday (October 18).

Israr Fazal, 55, – also known as Ihsan Perveen – of Brooks Drive, Hale Barns, who helped his son in the running of the eight first floor flats on Stockport Road, Longsight, as well as a cash and carry shop on the ground floor, also received three months imprisonment after also pleading guilty at the earlier hearing to six offences.

Both men were also ordered to pay £8,975 costs.

Prosecuting for the Fire Service, Mr Joseph Hart, explained to the court, that there was a systematic failure to carry out a suitable and sufficient fire risk assessment, failure to ensure escape routes could be used quickly and as safely as possible and failure to co-operate with officers carrying out their lawful duty.

Prohibition notices were issued by the Fire Service to prevent use of the flats and the shop until the dangerous conditions were improved. These were ignored and both men were convicted of failing to comply with them. Further offences, under the Bail Act, occurred after the men turned up late at court back in June.

Speaking after the sentencing, Peter O’Reilly, Director of Prevention and Protection at GMFRS, said: “In blatantly disregarding their duties and legal obligations as landlords, these two men have been irresponsible and reckless in the extreme.

“There was no means of raising the alarm if a fire started in these properties and, even if someone had been alerted to a fire early on, their escape route would have been blocked by refuse and discarded furniture. Badly maintained electrical systems and serious structural defects meant that, if a fire had broken out, the chances of survival for any of the residents – which were families with young children – would have been extremely low. It is a fair comment to use the term ‘death-trap’ in relation to the upkeep of these premises. The fact that both Israr and Mohammed Shabaz deliberately ignored attempts to make these flats safe and mislead the authorities underlines the contempt they had for the law and their legal responsibilities.”

In July 2009 a fire broke out at Lakanal House, a tower block in Camberwell, south London. Six people were killed and at least 20 injured as the fire spread through a number of flats in the 12-storey block. Since the tragic events of 2009, the issue of fire safety in tower blocks, particularly in the social housing sector, has been revisited as landlords assess their current levels of safety precautions and strive to improve them. In Southend, our arm’s length management organisation has embarked on a project to reach new heights in fire safety.

South Essex Homes manages 6,700 properties and 13 tower blocks on behalf of Southend borough council. Following the implementation of the regulatory reform (fire safety) order in 2005, the organisation made a commitment to improve and modernise the tower blocks it manages and to equip them with the latest fire safety measures at a cost of £3m over the next four years.

Safety in Southend

The project aims to make Southend’s tower blocks some of the safest in the country by installing new fire prevention features and educating tenants on the role they can play in preventing fires. We are encouraging tenants to take a number of simple steps: ensuring fire doors are not left open; burning material is not thrown into waste chutes; domestic rubbish is not left in communal areas. Like many parts of the country, Southend has a very high population density and tower blocks were identified as the only realistic solution to help meet the demand for social housing in the late 1960s. Although the Lakanal House tragedy has caused concern among many tenants about the safety of tower blocks, recent reports have identified that there is no evidence to suggest that tower blocks are less safe in the event of a fire. Tenants will still need to be housed in tower blocks, but these buildings can be made as safe as possible by the installation of modern safety measures. Communicating this message to tenants – along with providing education on what to do in the event of a fire and how to plan their means of escape – is a key feature of the project that can be replicated by housing providers across the country.

The project also created a very close working partnership between all parties involved in fire safety. Following a recent fire at another tower block, South Essex Homes and the local fire service went door to door visiting every resident in the block to ensure they were aware of our fire safety advice. Last month South Essex Homes’ fire safety measures were recognised by the government’s leading fire and rescue adviser Sir Ken Knight, the author of the interim report into the Lakanal House fire and is the UK’s foremost authority on fire safety in tower blocks.

Lessons learned

To ensure future sustainability from the modernisation programme, South Essex Homes considered the built environment when looking at the fire safety needs. We only chose products that are certified and tested in a full scale fire test and also in a smoke test; we know how the products will perform in the event of a fire. Improvements to Bewley Court included the installation of new equipment including one hour fire resistant communal doors, fire resistant Tor coating paint and automatic bin room sprinklers. Tenants in the blocks had new fire resistant entrance doors fitted to their individual flats. In total, £272,000 was invested on upgrading the tower block.

Although housing organisations are under unprecedented pressure to reduce budgets and to cut spending, South Essex Homes considered these fire safety measures to be of such high importance that budgets were prioritised to ensure that the programme could be completed. Many housing providers will be in a similar position of having to choose between giving tenants a new kitchen or ensuring the safety of their tenants but we took the view that we couldn’t afford not to carry out these works. In light of the Lakanal House tragedy, Local Government Improvement and Development has produced specific guidance on fire safety in tower blocks. The National Federation of Almos has been closely involved in drawing up this guidance and will identify and share good practice within the social housing sector. We hope that the latest initiative from South Essex Homes will set an example to promote high standards in future.

Phil Lyons is chair of South Essex Homes. This article appears in full at http://www.guardian.co.uk/housing-network/2011/oct/06/why-made-fire-safety-priority?newsfeed=true

Manchester magistrates heard bosses at the Salford restaurant had committed three offences. They pleaded guilty to failing to make a suitable and sufficient fire risk assessment, and failing to comply with a enforcement notice issued in January 2010. They also admitted failing to maintain the fire alarm system.

The court was told the fire alarm panel in the restaurant had showed faults since September 2009. An enforcement notice was issued to ensure the restaurant carried out a fire risk assessment. It was done but the restaurant did not implement the recommendations that followed.

And despite visits by a fire brigade inspector in November 2009, January 2010 and February 2010, the faulty fire alarm system had not been attended to.

The restaurant, at The Edge, Riverside, Blackfriars Street, was fined £1,000 on each of the three charges and ordered to pay fire service costs of £5,000.

The charges were brought for seven different breaches at a property in French Horn Lane, Hatfield, which followed an inspection of the property. The defendants pleaded not guilty to all seven offences. The court found Dr Mahmumud and Mrs Feegrado guilty of five offences each.

The court heard how they had failed to ensure there was a clear fire escape and they did not provide fire safety equipment including fire alarms.

For their offences they were each fined a total of £11,500 and each ordered to pay £2,225 towards the council’s costs and a victim surcharge of £15 each. The total amount the pair were fined each came to £13,765, a total of £27,530.

Suhail Sawar and his father Tariq Sawar both pleaded guilty at Manchester City magistrates’ court to several fire safety offences relating to two multi-occupancy units they rented out for commercial use in Derby Road. Suhail was fined £17,500 – plus £3,365 costs – after admitting seven offences under the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005, including failing to provide an appropriate fire alarm and failing to provide an appropriate emergency lighting system.

Meanwhile, his father was fined £7,500, plus £2,480 costs, for fire safety offences including failing to carry out a suitable and sufficient fire risk assessment and failing to comply with an enforcement order.

Peter O’Reilly, Greater Manchester Fire and Rescue Service director of prevention and protection, said: “It was made clear to these two men that they alone were the responsible individuals for ensuring the fire safety of people in the respective buildings they owned. They comprehensively failed to do this, despite enforcement notices being issued.”