Can you tell us a little bit about your role at Rowan?

Yes, I’ve recently been employed by Rowan to help clients with their health and safety and fire safety duties and provide that little bit extra advice and support and guidance to reach compliance.

Why has fire safety become so important for apartment blocks?

Well, fire safety statistics show that most fatal fires occur in residential dwellings, so that’s in people’s homes, and obviously apartment blocks consist of people’s homes, so we know that’s where the most dangerous fires occur and risk to life. And particularly vulnerable are the over 80s and single men. But obviously we had the Grenfell tower fire, where 72 people lost their lives, and since that time, and through the inquiry, government inquiry process, there’s been a refocus on residential apartments, particularly high rise, which Grenfell was, but some of the issues that were raised also apply to smaller buildings. And so we want safe buildings where people are living, and we want to ensure they are safe from fire. We want to ensure fire doesn’t start really, but also if in the event of a fire, people are kept safe. So, yes, fire safety has been a focus recently in apartment blocks.

In a nutshell, what is Rowan’s process for fire safety?

Well, we’ve developed a new phase plan, so it consists of four phases, and clients are offered all four of the phases, phase one and two is a really thorough review of the fire risk assessment. It looks through all the tasks and identifies where they might need particular advice or support from myself or from the property managers. And through that, we can then move forward to phase three, and where we’re instructed, I can put together scopes of work, tenders for contractors to come in and remediate some of the tasks on the fire risk assessment. And then phase four is really looking at ensuring that through that process, we have reached compliance, and I can look through all the documents that we’ve received and the certificates that we received for the work to ensure it’s all been signed off correctly. And that’s our four phase plan. So we’re now providing that as an option to all our clients, and they can opt in and opt out. It’s up to them.