18 Feb 2018
New fire safety guidance an opportunity to raise awareness.
What is the new guidance, who does it apply to and why has it come about?
The guidance will bring together three existing fire safety guides into one coherent document. It doesn’t apply to housing associations or councils (there are separate guidance and obligations for these providers) but it does cover a significant number of people providing accommodation in existing residential premises, including:
- Hotels, tourism, hostels, refuges
- Holiday lets and holiday complexes, camping and caravan sites
- Bunkhouses, bunk barns
- Sleeping accommodation for pupils, students or employees
- All types of housing in multiple accommodations
- Boarding houses, guest houses and bed and breakfast accommodation.
Post-Grenfell, this is a welcome chance for the Scottish Government to make sure it is doing everything it can to simplify and clarify its guidance for these landlords. Clearly there is still concern among both landlords and the people who use this sort of accommodation and this is an opportunity to make sure everyone understands the guidance and to allay some of those fears.
This is more about refreshing, consolidating and simplifying existing guidance than it is anything new. The one significant difference is that for the first time the government recognises what it calls ‘peer to peer’ accommodation – that means people who rent their accommodation via Airbnb or similar providers. These providers were covered by the existing guidance but they are now mentioned specifically for the first time for the sake of clarity.
Though on the face of it this may seem like not much is changing, this will be an important opportunity for all relevant landlords to familiarise themselves with the guidance and to make sure they are doing everything they can. We know that landlords will want to do exactly that but it’s important that we do all we can to promote the new guidance otherwise there’s a risk that it comes out and people don’t realise it’s there.
Broadly we really welcome this refreshed guidance but we do have a couple of concerns.
First of all we’re really not sure about the use of ‘peer to peer’ to describe the people who offer accommodation through the likes of Airbnb. We think there must be a better way to describe this to make sure that the landlords that come under that banner understand that it refers to them.
Also, the number of landlords who would come under that category has expanded significantly in recent years and we’re not sure that everybody understands that the guidance applies to them. So we’d like to see this used as an opportunity to perhaps run a campaign to reach those landlords to help them understand the guidance and in turn to raise awareness of fire safety among the many people using that sort of accommodation.
The consultation period closed this week and we expect the finished guidance will be published soon. We will be helping to publicise it when it is released to help this new guidance reach as wide an audience as possible.
