Every village hall in England and Wales must have a fire risk assessment. That has been true since the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005, but a change that took effect in October 2023 caught a lot of committees out: the assessment must now be written down in full, whether or not your hall employs anybody.
That change matters more to village halls than almost any other kind of premises, because most halls have no employees at all. Under the old rules, that meant you had to do the assessment but did not have to record it. Under the current rules, you do. If your hall is relying on a conversation somebody had in 2019, you are not compliant.
Who is responsible?
The Fire Safety Order puts the duty on the "responsible person", which is whoever has control of the premises. For a village hall that is normally the management committee or the trustees. It is not the caretaker, and it is not the hirer using the hall on a Tuesday, although both have parts to play.
Responsibility sits with the committee as a body. In practice most halls appoint one trustee to own fire safety and report to the committee, which is sensible, but it does not move the legal duty onto that person.
What the law actually asks for
A fire risk assessment is a structured look at your building with five questions behind it.
- Identify the fire hazards. Sources of ignition, sources of fuel, and sources of oxygen.
- Identify who is at risk. Everybody who uses the hall, and particularly anybody at greater risk: children, elderly users, wheelchair users, people who are asleep on the premises if you ever allow that.
- Evaluate, remove, reduce and protect. Can the hazard go altogether? If not, how do you reduce it and protect people from what is left?
- Record, plan, inform, instruct and train. This is the part that changed in 2023. The findings must be recorded in full.
- Review. Regularly, and whenever anything significant changes.
What to look at in a village hall specifically
Generic fire safety advice is written for offices. These are the things that come up again and again in village halls.
- The stacked chairs. Almost every hall stores chairs and tables somewhere, and almost every hall has at some point stacked them across a fire exit or in a corridor. This is the single most common finding.
- The kitchen. Cooking is the most likely source of a fire in a hall. Check the extraction, the condition of the appliances, and whether there is a fire blanket somebody can actually reach.
- The store cupboard. Halls accumulate. Old curtains, jumble sale stock, paint, the Christmas tree. A cupboard full of combustible material next to the boiler is a real hazard.
- Portable heaters and extension leads. Especially in older halls with too few sockets.
- Emergency lighting. If your hall is used after dark, and it is, people need to be able to see the way out when the power goes.
- Exit doors. Can they be opened from the inside without a key, by somebody who has never been to your hall before, in the dark? Bolts at the top of a door fail this test.
- Bar and licensed events. More people, more distraction, and sometimes candles or performers with equipment.
- How your hirers know. A playgroup leader running a session alone with fifteen toddlers needs to know where the exits are and where to assemble.
Do you need to pay a consultant?
Not necessarily. The law requires the assessment to be carried out by a competent person, and for straightforward premises that can be somebody on the committee who has read the guidance properly and knows the building. A single storey hall with two rooms and clear exits is not complicated.
Bring somebody in when the building is not straightforward: multiple floors, a hall with residential accommodation attached, unusual construction, a listed building where alterations are constrained, or sleeping accommodation for groups such as Scouts. If your insurer or your local Fire and Rescue Service has raised concerns, that is also a good reason to get a professional assessment.
The Government publishes free guidance for small and medium places of assembly, which covers most village halls and is written to be used rather than admired.
How often should it be reviewed?
The law says regularly, and whenever there is reason to think it is no longer valid. Most halls settle on an annual review, which is easy to attach to an existing committee meeting. Review it sooner than that if any of these happen:
- You alter the building, including anything that changes escape routes
- You change how the hall is used, such as taking on a regular evening group or starting to hold larger events
- You have a fire, or a near miss
- Your Fire and Rescue Service or your insurer raises something
- New guidance or legislation is issued
Scotland and Northern Ireland
The Fire Safety Order applies in England and Wales. Scotland has its own regime under the Fire (Scotland) Act 2005 and the Fire Safety (Scotland) Regulations 2006, and Northern Ireland under the Fire and Rescue Services (Northern Ireland) Order 2006 and the Fire Safety Regulations (Northern Ireland) 2010. The duty to assess and the practical steps are broadly similar in all three, but the wording, the enforcing authority and the recording requirements differ, so use guidance written for your nation.
Keeping it somewhere you can find it
The commonest failure is not the assessment itself. It is that the assessment was done properly in 2021 by a trustee who has since stood down, and nobody knows where the file is. When the insurer asks, or the Fire and Rescue Service visits, the committee cannot produce it and effectively has no assessment at all.
Village Hall Hub keeps your fire risk assessment with the rest of your compliance records, with a review date that reminds the committee before it lapses rather than after. The document stays with the hall rather than with whoever happened to do it, which is the part that survives a change of committee.