Offices, multi-tenant buildings and hybrid teams, UK wide
Professional and Financial Services Health and Safety
Professional and financial services firms rarely own the building they occupy, rarely control the fire strategy that protects them and increasingly cannot say where their people are working on any given day. AL23 Safety provides health and safety, fire safety and fire engineering support to law firms, accountants, consultancies, insurers, asset managers and their managing agents across the UK.
Why it matters in professional and financial services
The risks are real and so are the duties
The single-office duties are the easy part. Desk assessments, fire drills and first aid provision are set out on our office health and safety page and most firms have them broadly under control. What tends to be missing is the layer above that: what happens when you occupy four floors of somebody else's building, in three cities, with half your people at home on a Wednesday.
Office activities are a Schedule 1 main activity under the Health and Safety (Enforcing Authority) Regulations 1998 so the local authority is your health and safety regulator, not HSE. Local authority interest in offices is low volume and largely reactive. Your real inspection exposure is the fire and rescue authority. Since 1 October 2023 section 156 of the Building Safety Act 2022 has given its inspectors a direct question to ask in a multi-let building: who are the other responsible persons here and where is the record of your co-ordination with them. Most tenants cannot answer it. The health exposure is different again. HSE's 2024/25 labour force survey data recorded 964,000 cases of work-related stress, depression or anxiety and 40.1 million working days lost, alongside 511,000 musculoskeletal disorder cases. In this sector those two numbers are the whole risk profile.
The main risks
Where the harm comes from
Evacuating a building you do not control
Your staff use stairs, lobbies and final exits that belong to the landlord, on an alarm strategy you did not design and often have not been shown.
Work-related stress
Utilisation targets, always-on client expectations, regulatory deadlines and restructuring cycles produce a health risk that the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999 require you to assess, not merely to support.
Display screen work across two settings
A user with a properly assessed office workstation and a kitchen table at home is still a user and your duty follows them.
Lone working out of hours
Deal closings, month end, early and late trading shifts, cleaners and security staff who are frequently the only occupants of a floor.
Fit-out and contractor control
Tenant alterations that penetrate compartment walls, alter the base build alarm or wedge fire doors are the most common route to building-wide non-compliance.
Low occupancy building services
Hybrid working leaves water outlets stagnant and ventilation rates set for a population that no longer arrives, which creates legionella and air quality risks the firm did not have in 2019.
The regulations that apply
Your legal framework, in plain terms
The Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974 and the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999 set the base duties, including the regulation 3 duty to assess risks to health, which covers work-related stress. The Health and Safety (Display Screen Equipment) Regulations 1992, as amended by the Health and Safety (Miscellaneous Amendments) Regulations 2002, govern workstation analysis, breaks, eye and eyesight tests and information and training, with ACOP L26, the short guide INDG36 and the CK1 checklist as the working tools. The Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005 applies to your demise and to the building, with article 22 imposing the co-operation and co-ordination duty between responsible persons. Section 156 of the Building Safety Act 2022 added the duty to identify other responsible persons, exchange contact details and record the arrangements. The Construction (Design and Management) Regulations 2015 apply to fit-out. The Health and Safety (Enforcing Authority) Regulations 1998 decide who inspects you. Financial services conduct regulators do not regulate health and safety, though operational resilience expectations pull business continuity into the same conversation.
Article 22 and who owns what in a multi-let building
Article 22 requires each responsible person in shared premises to co-operate with the others so far as is necessary for compliance, to take reasonable steps to co-ordinate their measures and to inform the others of the risks arising from their own undertaking. In practice the split that survives a fire and rescue service inspection looks like this.
Landlord or managing agent
Fire risk assessment of the common parts and the building as a whole, the base build alarm and detection system and its maintenance, emergency lighting in common parts, means of escape, smoke control and firefighting shafts, compartmentation between demises and at riser penetrations, the external wall system and the building evacuation strategy.
Tenant
Fire risk assessment of its own demise, fire loading and housekeeping, fire door and escape route integrity inside the demise, fire wardens and roll call, personal emergency evacuation plans for its own staff and visitors, extinguishers and training.
Both
An agreed drill programme, agreed alarm cause and effect, an agreed hot works and contractor access procedure and a written co-ordination protocol. Article 22 is discharged in minutes and a shared document. It is not discharged by assumption.
Fire safety in professional and financial services
The strategy stops at your front door and the fire does not
The recurring finding in this sector is a competent, well-written tenant fire risk assessment that stops at the demise line. It says nothing about how a phased evacuation actually works, whether the floor below will move before you do, who is at the assembly point marshalling four tenants or what happens to the visitor in a wheelchair on floor eleven. That gap is not the landlord's problem alone. Article 22 makes it yours as well.
Three practical points. First, the building evacuation strategy has to be a decision, recorded and understood, rather than whatever the alarm panel happens to be programmed to do. Simultaneous, phased and staged strategies place very different demands on stair capacity and on staff. Second, personal emergency evacuation plans have to exist for staff and visitors with mobility, sensory or cognitive impairment. The refuge and evacuation lift arrangements they rely on are usually base build. Our personal emergency evacuation plans service covers both sides of that. Third, drills that only ever involve one tenant prove very little about a building with nine.
Two further items are now live. Martyn's Law reaches ground floor public-facing space, auditoria and event space within professional services buildings once the 200 threshold is met. The responsible person for that space is often the landlord rather than you. In mixed-use buildings with residential above commercial, the Fire Safety (Residential Evacuation Plans) (England) Regulations 2025 took effect on 6 April 2026 and change what the landlord must produce for the residential part.
How we help
Built around your operation
We work at firm level rather than building level, which suits an organisation with several offices, one policy and no in-house safety team.
- Multi-site health and safety management, including a single policy set that works across offices with different landlords and different building strategies.
- Tenant fire risk assessments written to interface with the base build strategy, plus article 22 co-ordination protocols and the section 156 responsible person record.
- Landlord and managing agent support, covering common parts fire risk assessment, the building evacuation strategy and building-wide drill programmes.
- Display screen equipment programmes covering office, hot desk and home settings, with self-assessment, employer review and escalation for the cases that need a specialist assessment.
- Stress risk assessment using the HSE Management Standards framework across demands, control, support, relationships, role and change.
- Lone working arrangements for out of hours occupation, including last person out procedures, lift entrapment and the treatment of a partially disabled alarm during maintenance as a prohibited state.
- Business continuity and emergency planning, delivered through our emergency planning and business continuity service and aligned to ISO 22301 where you want a certifiable system.
- Client audit and supply chain assurance support so the safety questionnaires that arrive from regulated clients and panel appointments can be answered with evidence rather than promises.
Why AL23 Safety
Sector-aware support that gets used
Accountable
If your fire risk assessment stops at the demise line and nobody has ever spoken to the managing agent, we will say that plainly rather than reissue the same document with a new date.
Practical, not just compliant
A business continuity plan and an emergency evacuation plan solve different problems. Most firms have one document dressed as the other. We separate them.
One team, three disciplines
Health and safety, fire safety and fire engineering in-house. When a landlord's evacuation strategy looks wrong, the person who can interrogate it sits in the same office.
Nationwide
We support professional and financial services firms across the UK, from single offices to multi-city estates.
Get in touch
Send us the estate, not just the head office
Tell us how many offices you have, who your landlords are and how your people split between office and home. We will tell you where the real gaps sit.
Common questions
Answers, up front
Cannot see your question? Get in touch and we will answer it directly.
Contact usOnly partly. The landlord is a responsible person for the common parts and the base build systems. You are a responsible person for your own demise. Article 22 of the Fire Safety Order requires both of you to co-operate, co-ordinate your measures and inform each other of relevant risks. Since section 156 of the Building Safety Act 2022 took effect on 1 October 2023 you must also identify the other responsible persons and keep a record of the arrangements.
Yes, where that person is a user. HSE's position is that the duty does not stop at the office door. The workable model is a self-assessment for the home setting with employer review, provision of equipment where the assessment shows a need and re-assessment when the setup, the role or the person's health changes. Genuinely short-term or occasional homeworking is treated proportionately.
It is a legal requirement. Regulation 3 of the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999 requires assessment of risks to health. Work-related stress is one of those risks. HSE has been explicit on the point. The Management Standards give you a defensible framework across six areas, which is what an inspector or a claimant's solicitor will look for.
It depends on the number of offices, whether you are tenant or landlord and whether you need the fire side as well. A single office with a straightforward lease is light work. A ten-office estate with a hybrid workforce and client audit demands is better handled on a retainer so the documents stay current between reviews. Our Core retainer starts at £250 per month and Advanced from £550 per month, with ad hoc work at £95 per hour or £695 per day plus VAT.
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