Phoenix Journal · Fire Safety
Letting a unit to a catering business does not hand your fire duties to the tenant with the keys. The kitchen raises the whole building's fire load, and its extract runs through your structure.
Letting a unit to a catering business does not hand your fire safety duties to the tenant along with the keys. A commercial kitchen raises the fire load of the whole building, its extract usually runs through your structure, and the moment the unit falls empty the responsibility lands squarely back on you. For a landlord, the question is never whether you have duties, only which ones, and the lease is where the answer starts.
The Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005 attaches fire safety duties to whoever has control of the premises, so in a let building the responsibility is usually split. The tenant, as the employer running the kitchen, is the responsible person for the space they occupy and control. The landlord is normally the responsible person for the common parts and the shared systems: the entrance, corridors, staircases and lobbies, the escape routes serving the whole building, the fire alarm and any shared fire protection, and often the structure and compartmentation. Both duties exist at once, and the first reference for deciding exactly where the line falls is the lease, not an assumption.
Where the split sits
Even where a lease pushes internal fire safety onto the tenant, a set of duties stubbornly remains with the landlord. The common escape routes that a tenant's staff and customers use to reach the street have to be adequate, clear and protected, and that is the landlord's fire risk assessment to make. Shared alarms, emergency lighting and extinguishers in common areas, the fire doors and compartmentation that separate one part of the building from another, and the overall fire strategy of the building typically sit with the landlord too. These cannot be signed away, because they protect people the landlord's building puts at risk.
The catering tenant brings a specific complication: the kitchen extract. Grease laden ductwork rarely stays inside the demised unit. It commonly leaves the tenant's space and rises through risers and voids that the landlord controls before it discharges at roof level, which means a fire in that duct is a fire travelling through the landlord's structure and threatening every other part of the building. Who cleans and maintains that run, and to what standard, is one of the most important things a catering lease has to settle, because a vague clause leaves a grease filled fire path with no clear owner.
That reversion is the trap landlords forget. When a lease expires, is surrendered or is forfeited, or simply while a unit sits empty between tenants, the landlord becomes the responsible person for the whole of it again, including a kitchen extract system that may be months overdue for cleaning. Fire precautions have to be maintained between tenancies, not just during them, and a landlord who inherits a greasy, neglected duct with no maintenance record has inherited a live fire risk and the legal duty that comes with it.
Two responsible persons
Where the landlord and the tenant are both responsible persons, the law requires them to cooperate and coordinate, a duty made explicit by Section 156 of the Building Safety Act 2022. In practice that means identifying each other, sharing fire risk assessments and emergency arrangements, and making sure nothing falls into the gap between the demised unit and the common parts. For a catering let, the extract that crosses that boundary is the classic gap, so it helps for both parties to be clear on who the responsible person is under fire safety law for each part of the run, rather than each assuming the other has it covered. A coordinated approach is the only one that actually protects the building as a whole.
Write the duct into the lease
The single most useful thing a catering landlord can do is ensure the lease says, in plain terms, who is responsible for cleaning and maintaining the kitchen extract along its whole length, including the part that runs through the landlord's risers, and to what standard and frequency. Left unwritten, it becomes the thing nobody does. Getting this right sits alongside the wider question of repair obligations in a catering lease, because the extract is both a repair item and a fire safety one. A landlord who pins down the duct in the lease, keeps a copy of the tenant's cleaning records, and knows the system is clean when a unit changes hands has closed the gap that most often turns a kitchen fire into a whole building loss.
Questions
Usually in part. The tenant is the responsible person for the kitchen they control, while the landlord is responsible for the common parts, shared systems, escape routes and often the structure. The lease sets where the line falls, and both parties must cooperate.
They revert to the landlord. When a lease ends, is surrendered or forfeited, or while a unit sits vacant, the landlord becomes the responsible person for the whole unit, and must maintain its fire precautions, including a kitchen extract system that may be overdue for cleaning.
Whoever the lease says, which is why it must say. Because the duct often runs from the tenant's unit through landlord controlled risers, both parties should agree in writing who cleans the whole run, to what standard and how often, so no length of greasy duct is left unowned.
Phoenix Duct Clean · by the numbers
Phoenix cleans the kitchen extract along its whole length, including the run through your risers, to TR19 Grease, with documentation that gives landlord and tenant one clear maintenance record.