Fire Risk Assessment for a Flat Above a Shop: Who's Responsible?

A prohibition notice can stop your flat being lived in tomorrow. If the fire and rescue service inspects a parade of shops with flats above and finds the residential escape route running straight through the retail unit, it can serve a notice that bars the flat from being occupied until the work is done, or an enforcement notice that forces costly building work on a short deadline. The flat above shop fire risk assessment is the document that is supposed to catch this long before an inspector does, and skipping it, or treating the flat and the shop as if they were separate worlds, is one of the quickest ways to land a landlord in real trouble.

Mixed-use property is where fire safety gets messy, because more than one law and more than one duty-holder sit on top of each other. Fire safety in a flat above commercial premises depends on getting three things right: the means of escape, the compartmentation between the shop and the home, and a clear answer to who is legally on the hook. Get any of those wrong and you are exposed, whether you own the whole building, rent out just the flat, or trade from the shop below.

What the law actually covers in a flat above a shop

The Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005 (the RRO 2005) is the law that bites here, and it applies in England and Wales. It covers non-domestic space: the commercial unit, and the common parts that serve the flat, such as a shared entrance hall, a staircase, or a rear escape passage. The inside of a single private flat is domestic and sits outside the RRO, but the moment there is a shared route or a shared structure, the Order is in play.

The individual flat still carries its own duties through other routes. If it is let, the landlord has repairing and safety obligations, and where the property is an HMO the Housing Act 2004 and the HHSRS apply on top. In Scotland the equivalent regime is the Fire (Scotland) Act 2005 and the Fire Safety (Scotland) Regulations 2006 rather than the RRO, so if your building is north of the border the duties are broadly similar but named differently. Wales follows the RRO 2005 as England does.

The practical point is that fire safety in a flat above commercial premises is almost never a single tidy assessment. The commercial part usually needs its own fire risk assessment, and the residential parts and common parts need theirs, with the two joined up rather than done in isolation.

Your flat must not depend on the shop to escape

This is the single biggest failing in mixed-use buildings, and it is the one that gets people killed. The residential flat needs a protected means of escape that does not run through the commercial unit and does not rely on it being open, staffed, or safe. If the only way out of the flat is down a staircase that opens into the shop floor or the back of a takeaway kitchen, that is a route through the highest-risk part of the building, and fire and rescue services treat it as a risk to life, not a technicality.

A common dangerous layout is a single unprotected timber staircase leading from the flat down into the retail or kitchen area. A fire starting below, exactly where the ignition sources cluster, fills that staircase with thick smoke and cuts off the only exit. The fix is a protected route: the stairway enclosed in fire-resisting construction, certified fire doors that are kept shut, and the escape passage kept clear at all times. Where the flat and the shop genuinely share a route, fire doors must separate the two, and they must be proper certified doors, not ordinary internal ones. The same principles that govern fire escape routes in HMOs apply here, because a flat above a shop is a sleeping risk sitting above a commercial fire load.

Ideally the flat has its own independent entrance and stair, separated from the shop from front door to street. Where that is not possible in an older building, the assessment has to work much harder to prove the shared route is genuinely protected.

Compartmentation between the shop and the flat

Compartmentation is the fire-resisting barrier, the floors, walls, and ceilings, that holds a fire in one part of the building long enough for people above to get out. In a flat above a shop it is critical, because the fire is most likely to start below and rise. The floor between the commercial unit and the residential accommodation should typically hold fire back for 60 minutes.

That 60-minute standard can sometimes be reduced to 30 minutes, but only where a suitable automatic and interlinked fire alarm system is fitted that detects a fire in the commercial premises and sounds in the flat, and the other way round, and only if the fire risk assessment supports it. This is not a free downgrade. It is a specific engineered trade-off that has to be justified in writing. The detail of how these barriers work, and why 30 and 60 minutes matter, is covered in our guide to fire compartmentation and fire resistance.

Real buildings undermine compartmentation constantly. A shop-fitter runs cables or a new extract duct through the floor and leaves the hole unsealed. A suspended ceiling hides a gap above the party wall. A service riser links the shop and the flat with no fire-stopping. Every one of those is a hidden path for smoke and flame, and every one should be picked up by an assessment that actually looks above the ceiling tiles and behind the counter, not just at the parts on show.

Who is the Responsible Person?

This is where mixed-use ownership tangles up, because there is rarely just one duty-holder. Under the RRO 2005 the Responsible Person is whoever has control of the premises. In a flat above a shop that usually splits several ways:

• The shop occupier (the business trading from the unit) is the Responsible Person for the commercial premises they control.
• The freeholder or block owner is typically the Responsible Person for the common parts: the shared hall, the staircase, the structure, and the compartmentation between units.
• A landlord who lets the flat carries duties for the residential letting and, depending on the lease, may share responsibility for parts of the escape route.

Leases muddy this further. Who is contractually responsible for maintaining the protected staircase, or for the fire doors on the shared route, is often buried in the lease and does not always match who has practical control on the ground. The law looks at control, so a freeholder cannot simply write the risk away in a tenancy agreement and assume the shopkeeper below will handle it. Working out who holds which duty is worth doing properly, and our explainer on the Responsible Person under UK fire safety law walks through how control is decided when several parties are involved.

Why coordination is where these buildings fail

When a building has several Responsible Persons, the RRO 2005 does not let them ignore each other. Article 22 requires them to co-operate and co-ordinate: each must work with the others so far as is necessary to comply, share information about the risks their activities create, and tell the others who they are and which part of the building they consider themselves responsible for. That last duty means a record has to exist of who covers what.

In practice this is exactly where things break down. The shopkeeper changes the kitchen layout and adds a fryer without telling the freeholder. The freeholder replaces a fire door on the common stair without knowing the flat tenant has wedged it open every day. Nobody owns the gap between the shop's fire risk and the flat's escape route, so the interface between the two goes unassessed. A fire does not respect the boundaries of a lease, and neither does the law. If the escape route or the compartmentation fails because two duty-holders each assumed the other was dealing with it, both can be held to account.

The heightened focus on mixed-use since serious fires

Fires in buildings with sleeping accommodation above commercial units have repeatedly shown the same pattern: a fire starting in the shop or basement, an unprotected staircase acting as a chimney, and residents above trapped by smoke. That track record is why fire and rescue services pay close attention to shops with flats above, and why the enforcement stance has hardened.

The wider legal direction has moved the same way. The Fire Safety Act 2021 confirmed that the structure, external walls, and flat entrance doors of multi-occupied residential buildings fall within the fire risk assessment, and the Fire Safety (England) Regulations 2022 added duties around information and, in taller blocks, escape plans and door checks. The Building Safety Act 2022 layered on further duties for higher-risk buildings. None of that lets a mixed-use landlord treat the flat above the shop as an afterthought. If anything it confirms that the interface between commercial and residential is exactly where scrutiny now sits.

Next steps

If you own or let a flat above a shop, do not assume the commercial fire risk assessment covers you, and do not assume the shopkeeper below has it handled. Establish in writing who the Responsible Person is for each part of the building, check that the flat has a protected escape route that does not depend on the shop, and get eyes on the compartmentation between the two, including above the ceilings and inside the service risers where the gaps hide.

A structured assessment is the way to catch these problems before an inspector does. FRASafe guides you through a BS 9792:2025-aligned fire risk assessment, free to complete, with a council-ready PDF for £45. It prompts you on escape routes, fire doors, compartmentation, and the split of responsibility, so nothing in the mixed-use grey area gets missed. For more on the wider duties, browse the rest of the FRASafe fire safety blog.