Who wants to be responsible for a fire-risk assessment?

The Fire Safety Order (Regulatory Reform Act) 2005 stipulates the legal requirement for businesses to carry out a fire-risk assessment. However despite all the various free guides available how many people within an organisation are really competent to do so? How many really want to do so?
Here is a section from the Home Office guidelines on how to carry out your own risk assessment:

 

Do you have the knowledge to correctly answer that question? Do you know how the Equality Act 2010 has effected the requirement for provision of visual alarms within a fire-detection system? Do you know the change to BS5306 (fire extinguisher servicing) as regards the commissioning of fire extinguishers?

Would you have to guess at questions that ask if your fire extinguishers / alarms are appropriate and sufficient? Do you fully understand escape procedures, travel distances, building regulations and so on?

The law indeed allows for businesses to undertake their own fire-risk assessment but it still requires that the assessment is ‘sufficient’. An insufficient assessment is one of the most common failures sited in fire safety legal proceedings nowadays.

With the fire authority estimating that up to 60% of UK businesses do not understand the fire-safety regulations and are in contravention of it. I wonder of the other 40% how many have really got a ‘sufficient’ fire risk assessment.