Phoenix Journal · Fire Safety
Several hot kitchens, shared extract routes, crowds who do not know the exits, and no single person in charge. That is exactly where food court fire safety falls into the gaps.
A food court concentrates several hot kitchens under one roof, feeds them into shared or neighbouring extract routes, and fills the floor with crowds who are there to eat, not to memorise the exits. It also has no single person in charge of fire safety. That combination, many dutyholders and shared infrastructure, is exactly where fire safety tends to fall into the gaps between businesses.
Under the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005 there is rarely a single responsible person in a food court. Each operator is the responsible person for the unit they control, while the landlord or managing agent is responsible for the common parts: the seating concourse, the escape routes, the shared alarm and smoke control, and the risers and voids that services run through. None of them can manage fire safety in isolation, because a fire in one unit, or in a shared duct, threatens everyone. The law anticipates this by requiring the various responsible persons to work together rather than each guarding their own boundary.
A legal duty to coordinate
Since Section 156 of the Building Safety Act 2022 amended the Fire Safety Order, the duty to cooperate is explicit. Each responsible person must take reasonable steps to identify the others in the building, make themselves known, share relevant fire safety information including their own risk assessment and emergency arrangements, and coordinate their measures so nothing conflicts and nothing is left uncovered. In a food court that means the units and the landlord agreeing one building wide evacuation strategy, one assembly point everybody uses, and an alarm that alerts the whole floor at once rather than unit by unit.
Coordination is usually the weakest link, and enforcing authorities know where to look. A common finding is a set of individual unit plans that each make sense alone but assume different assembly points, or a shared alarm that no single tenant feels responsible for testing. Aligning the testing of alarms and emergency lighting across all the units, and keeping a centralised log of the shared safety arrangements, turns a collection of separate businesses back into one coherent fire safety system, which is what an officer expects to see. In practice, one nominated party, often the managing agent, is best placed to hold that central record and to convene the occasional shared review that keeps every tenant's arrangements pointing the same way.
The kitchens are what make a food court different from a shared office. Several units cook at once, often with frying and chargrilling, and their extract either shares a common system or runs as separate ducts through the same risers and ceiling voids the landlord controls. Grease building up in any one of those runs is not a private problem; it is a fire risk shared by every business under the roof and by the concourse full of customers between them. That is the point where the duty to cooperate stops being paperwork and becomes a maintenance question about who cleans what, and when.
Whose duct is it
When a unit's extract duct leaves its demise and runs through a riser or void the landlord controls, cleaning it is no longer something one tenant can arrange alone. Fire safety guidance is clear that where extract ductwork passes between areas controlled by different responsible persons, they must cooperate so the whole run is cleaned at the same time, not in disconnected sections that leave grease sitting in the parts nobody owns. Working out who is responsible for extraction cleaning in a leased kitchen is therefore central to a food court fire strategy, because an unowned length of greasy duct in a shared riser is a fire path that connects every unit it passes.
Proving the coordination
The failure mode in a food court is quiet: each business assumes someone else is handling the shared parts, and the coordination that the law requires exists only in theory. The fix is to make it documented. A centralised record of the building wide risk assessment, the shared evacuation strategy, the alarm and emergency lighting tests, and the extract cleaning across every unit and shared run is what proves cooperation actually happened, and it is the first thing a fire officer asks for in a multi occupied premises. Building that from a clear list of the compliance documents every facilities manager should keep stops the shared systems drifting into the gaps between tenancies.
Questions
There is usually more than one. Each unit operator is the responsible person for their own kitchen and staff, while the landlord or managing agent is responsible for the common parts, shared escape routes, the shared alarm and the risers and voids that services run through.
Since Section 156 of the Building Safety Act 2022, each responsible person must identify the others, share relevant fire safety information including their risk assessment, and coordinate their measures so there are no conflicts and no gaps, particularly around shared systems and escape routes.
It must be agreed between the parties. Where a duct leaves a unit and passes through landlord controlled risers or voids, guidance requires the responsible persons to cooperate so the whole run is cleaned together, because grease anywhere in it is a fire risk to every unit it passes.
Phoenix Duct Clean · by the numbers
Phoenix cleans extract ductwork across units and shared risers to TR19 Grease, coordinating the whole run so grease does not sit in the parts that fall between dutyholders. UK-wide, with full documentation.