Fire risk policies have rarely been higher up the agenda for Residents Management Companies and their agents, but how do you ensure that the message reaches all residents?
Ian Hollins of Clear Building Management explains the importance of ensuring you have a direct line through to the tenants in your development.
The RMC and its directors are ultimately responsible for enforcing the fire policy at a development. Regular fire risk assessments will usually throw up additional areas for consideration, be they keeping corridors free of clutter, maintaining clear access to fire escape routes and so forth.
Enforcing the fire safety policy usually requires positive action and support from all residents, and tried and tested methods for communicating fire safety policies include signs on the noticeboards, email reminders, and updating the development’s website and social media pages.
This is fairly straightforward when you are talking to leaseholders, but what about tenants?
How do you get the required buy-in from tenants if you have no relationship with them, nor hold their contact details? Without their contact details you can’t send them fire policy information and emergency response procedures are hampered.
Indeed, should the unthinkable happen, would you be able to quickly ascertain who is resident in your development?
Whilst the RMC and its managing agent will have an up to date list of all leaseholders, it can be harder to secure the contact details for tenanted apartments.
Tenants simply can’t be ignored
At Clear Building Management we manage a large variety of developments, including some large blocks, where the majority of residents are tenants.
Our view is that tenants simply can’t be ignored when it comes to communicating the fire safety policy. When taking over the management of a new development we usually find that tenant contact details are, at best, patchy.
Our first port of call is of course the landlord (the leaseholder who is letting out the apartment) and we issue regular reminders for landlords to keep us updated with tenants contact details.
It is generally however not enough to rely on the landlords and so we invest time in building tenant relationships, explaining how and why we need their contact details. This is essential in implementing an effective fire safety policy.
Fire safety is an essential part of block management.
In addition to the signs, website updates and email reminders, we would always seek to hold a residents meeting to communicate the policy and any changes and, additionally, we create signs that can be affixed to the back of apartment doors.
These signs give us a valuable opportunity to visit each apartment (it may be time consuming but it is rarely wasted time) to hand over the sign and talk through the detail with the residents. This is also our chance to build a relationship with the tenant that then leads on to better engagement and communications throughout the block.
Fire safety is an essential part of block management. By involving tenants as well as leaseholders, you have the tangible safety benefits of knowing who is in your block, together with better engagement with all residents.
