Do you know who your Responsible Person is?

Do You Know Who Your Responsible Person Is?

A plain English guide to fire safety duties for anybody running a school, who was never told what they were holding.

Ivan Young, Principal Designer (Building Regulations), PAS 8671 England. Edition 1, 2026. 73 pages.

Do you know who the responsible person is at your school?

If you had to name them today, in writing, could you?

At a great many schools the honest answer is no. Not because anybody is careless, but because the law does not produce a single tidy name, and nobody has ever sat down and worked it out.

It might be the local authority. It might be the governing body. It might be the academy trust. At some schools it is genuinely two of those at once, each responsible for what they control.

And since October 2023 there has been a legal duty to find out, and to make contact with the others. Almost nobody has done it.

Who this is for

You run a school, or part of one, or an estate of them. You are a business manager, a bursar, an estates lead, a headteacher or a trust officer.

Fire safety has landed with you, possibly without anybody saying so. You have a folder of documents, a building nobody fully understands, and a suspicion that something is not right.

This book is written for you. Not for a fire engineer. For you.

Why you are in this position

There is no point in this system where anybody contacts a school and explains its fire safety duties. The fire service does not write to you unless they are inspecting. The Department does not. Nothing arrives in the post.

In most schools the duty attaches to an organisation rather than a person, and organisations do not read books. So the person who ends up holding it is usually somebody it was delegated to informally, years ago, without a conversation.

And whatever is wrong with your building was almost certainly done before you arrived, by contractors nobody remembers, under managers who have retired.

This book is not written to tell you off.

What is in it

A twenty minute check. Twenty questions you can answer yourself with no technical knowledge and no documents to hand. Count your no answers and the book tells you where you stand.

Who is actually responsible. The two limbs of the test, who the employer is for each type of school, why the published guidance contradicts itself, and why at many schools there is more than one responsible person.

What you actually have to do. Seven duties, each set out the same way. What the duty is, why it exists, what happens if it was not done.

Why your building has drifted. Thirty years of cabling, subdivision, refurbishment and temporary buildings, each done by a different contractor with nothing recorded. The five things that break compartmentation, and why the parts most likely to be wrong are the parts you cannot see.

When you do building work. The second set of duties that lands on you as the person paying for it. Appointments, competence, and the fire safety information you are entitled to at the end and probably never received.

What you personally carry. How enforcement escalates, what an enforcement notice actually says, and what a prohibition notice would do to a school that cannot open.

What can be fixed and what cannot. With a single test: can it be created now, truthfully?

What to do now. Three lists. This week, this term, this year. The first six cost nothing and take about a day.

Six forms. The control matrix, the assessment record, the arrangements register, the fire door register, the alterations history, and the written position you take to your governing body when you ask for money.

The forms

These are the difference between a book you read and a book you use.

Completed, they produce the written position the book keeps referring to. What you know, what you do not know, when the gap starts, and what you are asking for.

A school with a dated survey, a prioritised list and a programme is in a defensible position even if the list is long. A school with nothing is not, even if its building happens to be fine.

How it is written

Every term is explained the first time it appears and again in a plain English glossary. Every Part ends with a short version in five or six lines. There is a two page summary of the whole book at the front.

If you read only the summary and the short versions, you get the whole argument in about eight pages.

Where a rule is named, that is so you or your adviser can look it up. You do not need to read any of them to use this book.

What it does not do

It tells you where you stand. It does not tell you how to carry out a fire risk assessment, how to inspect a fire door, or how to specify remedial work. Those are a competent person's job.

Where you reach one of those points, the book says so.

Scope and honesty about it

England. Wales operates separately and the detail differs.

Not legal advice. A plain English description of regulatory duties. Where your position is serious, take advice from somebody competent.

And one point carries a date. Article 9A of the Fire Safety Order, which will require the responsible person to appoint only a competent person to assist with the fire risk assessment, had not been commenced as at April 2026. A Government consultation on regulating fire risk assessors closed in June 2026, so that may have moved. The book says so, in terms, and tells you to check it.

A book that is right about most things and tells you which part it could not verify is worth more than one that is silent about the gap.