BPB practice advice 11-002 July 2011
Note to readers: practice advice relates to the legislation in force at the time, which may since have been amended. Also, names of organisations and weblinks were correct at time of writing and may have since changed.
Recent examples of fire safety schedules submitted with applications for accreditation do not adequately specify the minimum standard of performance of the relevant fire safety measures that form a component of alternative solutions.
Under clause 168 of the EP&A Regulation, the fire safety schedule issued for a building must include, amongst other things, each relevant fire safety measure as well as the minimum standard of performance for each fire safety measure.
The standard of performance for any fire safety measure that forms a component of an alternative solution must be adequately described.
It is not appropriate to simply specify that the fire safety measure is an alternative solution to a deemed to satisfy provision of the BCA and that the standard of performance is a fire engineering report – in this case the schedule would not be stating what the fire safety measure is and would not clearly indicate what the proposed measure is to provide.
Simply referencing a fire engineering report does not clearly indicate what the minimum standard of performance is required to be.
As a fire safety schedule will be referred to frequently during the life of a building in order to certify the ongoing performance of the fire safety measures, the specific provisions of the fire engineering report that set out the standard of performance for the relevant measure must be stated on the schedule and a relevant extract attached to and included in the fire safety schedule.