Fire safety for offices

Open-plan layouts mean a fire that starts at one desk has a relatively open path across a floor, with partitioning, storage and furniture rather than solid walls slowing it down. That same openness is usually an advantage for evacuation, since staff are rarely far from a sight line to an exit, but it puts more weight on early detection because there is less compartmentation to contain a fire while people get out.

Electrical and IT equipment is the other defining feature of an office fire risk. Desks running multiple monitors, docking stations, laptop chargers and shared printers concentrate a lot of low-level electrical load into a small footprint, often through extension leads and multi-socket adaptors rather than fixed wiring designed for that density. London Fire Brigade lists electrical distribution and lighting among the leading causes of fire in office environments, which matches what we see when we assess office premises: faults in equipment and its wiring, rather than naked flame, are usually the starting point.

Kitchens and break-out areas add a second ignition source that a purely desk-based assessment can miss. A small kitchenette with a toaster, a microwave and a kettle carries less risk than a commercial catering kitchen, but unattended cooking equipment and faulty appliances are still a recurring cause of office fire incidents, and these areas are often close to the main circulation route rather than tucked away from it.

Multi-tenant and serviced office buildings add a further layer. Where several businesses share a floor or a landlord’s common parts, escape routes, alarm zoning and fire door provision have to work across tenancy boundaries rather than within one company’s control. Each tenant with control over part of the building is a responsible person for that part under the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005, and those responsible persons have to cooperate and coordinate with the landlord and each other, particularly where an alarm system or an escape route is shared.

Occupancy patterns matter too. A floor fully staffed at 10am can be down to a handful of people working late, cleaners on site after hours, or nobody at all overnight, and a fire risk assessment has to account for the building at its quietest as well as its busiest. Lone working after hours changes how quickly a fire might be noticed and how an evacuation or an alarm response actually plays out.

Detection does most of the work in an open-plan office, because the layout that makes evacuation straightforward also lets a fire spread with little to stop it early on. A fire alarm system designed for office use, in line with BS 5839-1, has to account for detector placement across open floors and how the system is zoned where a building has more than one tenant or more than one floor. Clear zone plans let an alarm on one floor or in one tenancy be identified and responded to without evacuating occupants who are nowhere near the source.

Once a system is commissioned, it only stays effective if it is tested and serviced on the schedule BS 5839-1 sets out. Our fire alarm servicing and maintenance covers those periodic visits, and our fire alarm monitoring service extends detection beyond staffed hours, which matters for offices with reduced or no out-of-hours presence.

Fire doors do less obvious work in an open-plan office than in a building divided into cellular rooms, but they still matter wherever a floor is split into separate tenancies, where a staircase or lift lobby needs to stay protected, or where a kitchen or plant room needs to be contained from the rest of the floor. Our fire doors service covers supply, installation and inspection of door sets rated to the level the building needs. One of the most common findings on office premises is a fire door propped open with a wedge, which removes its fire-resisting function for as long as it stays open. In shared buildings, doors onto common escape routes are usually part of the landlord’s compartmentation strategy rather than an individual tenant’s.

Offices left unoccupied overnight, at weekends or during holiday periods carry a security risk that sits alongside the fire risk, particularly where IT equipment, servers or client data are kept on site. Specifying and maintaining a fire alarm and an intruder alarm together makes it easier to keep both systems working reliably, rather than treating them as two unrelated pieces of equipment during a refit or a change of occupier.