At that time of her appointment, the Fire Precautions Act 1971 focused responsibility for fire safety on the fire authority – the local government-controlled fire service – but otherwise much relied on a patchwork of other statutory and common law duties upheld by individuals such as landlords or employers.
Rosemarie Everton obituary When, in 1998, my friend Rosemarie Everton was appointed to the UK’s first ever chair in fire law, at the University of Central Lancashire, it marked the culmination of a 40-year endeavour on her part to establish the study of fire safety law as a serious subject of intellectual pursuit in the UK.
In May 2008, for instance, she suggested in Fire magazine that this cultural shift might come to be criticised if brought under some future public scrutiny, and cause a loss of confidence in fire safety provision – this seems prescient in the light of the Moore-Bick inquiry into the Grenfell Tower disaster.
This was because it effected a radical transfer of responsibility for fire safety, removing it from the fire authority and placing it instead on the “responsible person” – an individual - to be self compliant.
The idea of a coherent structure that lay behind the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005 was therefore to be welcomed.
