Defective Fire Alarm causes £15,000 fine!

Hotel fined £15,000 for six breaches of fire safety law

09 April 2010

A Surrey hotel with a non functional fire alarm and disabled self-closures on fire doors throughout the hotel, has been fined £15,000 and ordered to pay costs of £4,800.

Chalk Lane Hotel Ltd pleaded guilty to six breaches of the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005 at Redhill Magistrates Court on 30 March.

Fire and Rescue Service for Surrey investigated the 22-bed Chalk Lane Hotel in Epsom after a guest contacted them who had stayed there. Officers found a fire alarm not working, fire doors held open(disable), and a bolted final exit. There was also no fire risk assessment, inadequate information and training for employees, and no record of a fire drill having been carried out.

This documentation would have highlighted that no fire alarm maintenance had taken place, and that the fire detection within the hotel was not operational. It is so important that a professional fire alarm company such as Fire Systems Ltd are employed to ensure hotels such as these keep within the law, when it comes to fire safety.

Surrey fire safety officer, Nigel Gray, said: “The fire alarm at the Chalk Lane Hotel had been on operation for a considerable length of time and what astonished us most was this followed the very serious and high profile fire cases of Penhallow Hotel fire in Newquay a few months earlier. Chalk Lane Hotel failed to learn from this and address their own fire safety issues.
As legally required, “Had they had a suitable and sufficient fire risk assessment in place and a system for regularly reviewing it, they could have resolved the problem earlier or put some temporary measures in place to avoid this penalty.”
An enforcement notice served on the hotel in December 2007 covering all these breaches was discharged early in 2008.