Fire safety tips for before and during the firefighters’ strike

Please read and share this information about the firefighter strike and precautions you can take from Allianz.

You are probably already aware that, following a ballot, members of the Fire Brigade’s Union (England and Wales) will go on strike on Wednesday 25th September.  In the parts of the U.K. affected, it may well be that the fire and rescue services will not be able to respond to 999 calls, or if they are, the time taken to arrive at the scene of an incident may be much longer than normal, and the resources which they are able to deploy severely curtailed. Where they can respond, with their limited resources, priority will be given to incidents where lives are at risk. This means that they may not be able to respond to incidents where only property is being damaged.

For these reasons it is very important that, during strike periods, businesses make every effort to reduce the chance of a fire occurring and to reduce its ability to spread quickly, should one happen. Lives may depend upon how good precautions and fire safety management procedures are.

The Government and the individual fire and rescue services (F&RS) may publish fire safety advice for the strike periods.

In the interim, to help you make preparations, we have produced the attached Fire safety tips for businesses before and during a firefighters’ strike

Please note that this list is not definitive, it is important that the relevant persons responsible for premises fire safety ensure that competent persons review the fire safety risk assessments for each premises and make suitable emergency arrangements based on those re-assessments and any relevant current government and F&RS advice which may be in force at the time.

For additional free risk management advice please get in touch with us at Greenfield Insurance.