Who is the responsible person, and do they know it

A surprising number of compliance failures come down to a single unanswered question: who, by name, holds this duty. The law is rarely vague about it. The Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005 assigns duties to a responsible person. The Building Safety Act 2022 assigns duties for an occupied higher-risk building to an Accountable Person. The gap is not usually in the statute. It is in whether the actual human who carries the role knows they carry it.

The law names the role, not always the person

Fire safety duties in England rest with the responsible person under the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005. In a workplace that is often the employer; in other premises it is whoever has control of the premises in connection with carrying on a trade, business or undertaking. The fire risk assessment is theirs to ensure is carried out and kept up to date, and the Fire Safety Act 2021 clarified that for buildings containing flats this assessment must cover the structure, external walls including cladding and balconies, and flat entrance doors.

For higher-risk buildings, the Building Safety Act 2022 introduces the Accountable Person, and where there are several, a Principal Accountable Person. A higher-risk building in England is one at least 18 metres tall or with at least 7 storeys, whichever is reached first, containing at least 2 residential units. The Accountable Person must register the building, hold a safety case and produce a safety case report for the Building Safety Regulator. These are substantial, named duties.

The statute defines the role with care. What it cannot do is reach into an organisation and tap the right person on the shoulder. That part is on the organisation, and it is where the ambiguity creeps in.

Where the ambiguity hides

The dangerous situations are rarely the ones where someone refuses the duty. They are the ones where everyone assumes someone else holds it.

• A managing agent and a freeholder each believe the other is the responsible person for the common parts.
• A role changes hands when a manager leaves, but the duty is never formally reassigned.
• A building is one of many in a portfolio, and no single person can say with confidence that they own its fire risk assessment.
• An organisation restructures, and the Accountable Person for a higher-risk building is left undefined in the new shape.

In each case the work may still happen for a while, carried by habit and goodwill. But there is no one who can answer for it, and when the question is finally asked, the silence is the problem.

The test is whether they would say yes

A useful way to check is to imagine asking the person you believe holds a duty a plain question: are you the responsible person for this building's fire safety, or the Accountable Person under the Building Safety Act 2022. If the honest answer is a confident yes, with an understanding of what that entails, the role is real. If the answer is a pause, a qualification, or a glance toward someone else, the role exists on paper but not in practice.

That test is worth running deliberately, building by building, rather than assuming the answer. The cost of running it is an afternoon of slightly awkward conversations. The cost of not running it is discovering the gap when something has already gone wrong, at which point the question of who held the duty becomes a question for someone else to decide.

Writing the role down where it lives

Knowing who holds a duty is only half the job. The other half is recording it where the building's information lives, so that the answer survives the people who currently know it. A duty held in someone's head leaves with them. A duty recorded against the building stays.

This is why we treat named responsibility as a property of the building record rather than a fact stored in an org chart that no one consults. Every building should carry, in one place, who its responsible person is, who its Accountable Person is where the building is in scope, and who owns the recurring obligations beneath them. When that is written down, a change of staff or agent becomes a handover rather than a gap. We make the related case for continuity in records that survive a change of managing agent, and clear ownership is the spine of it.

Ownership flows down, not just at the top

The named duty-holder sits at the top of a chain, but the principle runs all the way down. Every recurring task, every inspection, every open action benefits from a named owner in the same way the statutory role does. A deadline that belongs to everyone belongs to no one. The discipline of asking who owns this, and recording the answer, is the same whether the question is about the Accountable Person for a higher-risk building or the person responsible for the monthly check of a firefighters' lift.

The fix throughout is the same and unglamorous. Name the person, record the name against the building, and review it whenever the building or the team changes. The law has already done the hard part by defining the roles. The failure, when it comes, is almost always that nobody made sure the right person knew the role was theirs.