Who is responsible for your voice alarm system?

A common belief in buildings of every size is that once an annual maintenance contract is in place with a contractor, the legal duty for the voice alarm system has passed from the building management to the contractor. It has not. The law puts the duty on the person who controls the premises and does not let them contract it away. The contractor takes on duties of its own as well, so in practice several parties are responsible at the same time, and each tends to assume another is covering the gap.

This guide explains where the duties sit in England, what a maintenance contractor does and does not take on, and what to put in the contract so that the arrangement actually protects the people in the building. It is general information, not legal advice about any particular building.

The short answer

Who	What they are responsible for	Where it comes from
The responsible person (employer, or whoever controls the premises)	The whole duty to keep fire safety equipment, including a voice alarm, maintained and working. It cannot be handed over by contract.	Fire Safety Order, Articles 3, 5(1), 5(2) and 17
Anyone else with control of the premises, including a facilities management company, contractor or subcontractor whose contract covers maintenance or safety	The same duties, but only for the matters within their control or covered by their contract	Fire Safety Order, Articles 5(3) and 5(4)
A contractor whose failure causes the responsible person’s breach	The offence itself, whether or not the responsible person is also prosecuted	Fire Safety Order, Article 32(10)
Directors and senior managers	Personal liability where an offence by their company involved their consent, connivance or neglect	Fire Safety Order, Article 32(8)
Any employer or self-employed person whose work affects others	Not exposing people outside their own workforce to risk, so far as is reasonably practicable	Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974, section 3

The responsible person keeps the duty

The Fire Safety Order defines the responsible person in Article 3. In a workplace it is the employer, if the workplace is to any extent under the employer’s control. Elsewhere it is the person who has control of the premises in connection with a business or undertaking, or the owner where the person in control has no such connection. Article 5 then makes that person responsible for meeting the fire safety duties in the Order.

Two of those duties matter most for a voice alarm:

• Maintenance (Article 17). Where it is needed to keep people safe, the premises and any equipment and devices provided for fire safety must be covered by a suitable system of maintenance and kept in efficient working order and in good repair.
• Competent help (Article 18). The responsible person must appoint one or more competent persons to help them carry out the preventive and protective measures. A person is competent if they have sufficient training and experience or knowledge and other qualities to do so properly. Where the responsible person employs someone competent, that employee should be appointed in preference to an outside contractor.

Article 18 lets the responsible person get help. Nothing in it moves the duty. Article 32(11) closes the loophole explicitly: an employer cannot defend a prosecution by pointing to the act or default of its own employee or of a competent person it appointed. Hiring a maintenance contractor is good evidence that the responsible person tried to comply. It is not a transfer of the obligation.

Where there is more than one responsible person, as in a multi-let office building or a block with a managing agent and commercial tenants, Article 22 requires them to co-operate and co-ordinate, and since October 2023 to find each other, share contact details and record which parts of the premises each is responsible for.

The contractor has duties of its own

The contractor is not simply a supplier to the responsible person. The Fire Safety Order reaches it in three ways.

Control by contract (Article 5(3) and 5(4)). Article 5(3) puts the same fire safety duties on anyone else who has, to any extent, control of the premises, for the matters within their control. Article 5(4) adds that a person with a contractual obligation of any extent for the maintenance or repair of the premises, or for their safety, is treated as having that control, to the extent of the obligation. A voice alarm maintenance contract is exactly that kind of obligation. The contractor’s duties go as far as its contract, and no further.

Act or default of another person (Article 32(10)). Where an offence under the Order is due to the act or default of some other person, that other person is guilty of the offence, and can be charged whether or not the responsible person is. A maintainer that signs off a system it has not properly tested, or fails to report a defect it found, is exposed under this provision directly.

Ordinary civil and criminal law. Outside the Order, a contractor can be sued for breach of contract and for negligence, and section 3 of the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974 requires any employer or self-employed person to conduct its work so that people outside its workforce are not exposed to risk, so far as is reasonably practicable.

Contractors have been prosecuted. In 2025 Blackburn Magistrates’ Court fined a fire alarm engineering company £30 000, plus costs, for breaches of Articles 13, 17 and 22 at a care home where 45 residents had to be moved after a prohibition notice. In an earlier case, a maintenance contractor who had issued annual certificates for a care home fire alarm system without telling the owners about its defects was fined and ordered to pay costs after a fire there.

When there is a chain of contracts

The two-party picture is the simple case. In many buildings, including quite small ones, the real arrangement looks more like this:

1. The building owner and the tenants, often both responsible persons for different parts of the premises (Article 22).
2. A facilities management company, employed by the owner, the tenants or both, often on a “one-stop shop” contract covering all building services.
3. A main contractor, where the FM company does not do the work itself.
4. A specialist subcontractor, who actually attends site, tests the voice alarm and writes the report.

The law does not stop at the first contract. Article 5(4) applies to every link: anyone whose contract gives them an obligation for maintenance, repair or safety is treated as having control to the extent of that obligation. An FM company that has agreed to maintain the fire safety systems carries duties for them, and so does each contractor below it, each as far as its own contract goes. Article 32(10) reaches whichever of them caused the failure. None of this moves anything off the responsible person at the top of the chain.

What the chain does in practice is dilute scope and information. Each tier prices the work below the tier above, so the visit that finally happens may cover far less than the owner thinks it bought. The subcontractor’s defect list goes to the main contractor or the FM company, and may never reach the responsible person at all. Nobody in the chain is obliged to tell the client that the technician who attends has never been trained on voice alarm systems, or that the weekly test has stopped. The responsible person can end up holding the duty with the least information of anyone involved.

The fix is to make the chain visible: know who actually does the work, see their reports, and make sure the scope written in your contract is the scope written in theirs.

How the duty is enforced

The main offences under Article 32 carry an unlimited fine, and the most serious, a failure to comply with the fire safety duties that puts people at risk of death or serious injury, can also lead to up to two years’ imprisonment (Article 32(1)(a) and 32(3)). Article 33 gives a defence to a person who took all reasonable precautions and exercised all due diligence, which is where clear contracts and good records earn their keep.

Routine enforcement is light. Fire and rescue authorities inspect on a risk basis, and many prosecutions follow a fire or a serious finding on inspection. That is why the gap between the law and practice persists: the cheapest annual visit looks like compliance until the day it is tested. When it is tested, it is usually by a fire safety officer, an insurer or a coroner, and the questions are the same: what did the responsible person ask for, what did the contractor actually do, and what do the records show.

Where BS 5839-8 fits

BS 5839-8:2023 is a code of practice, not law. Nothing in the Fire Safety Order names it. But Article 17 requires a suitable system of maintenance and efficient working order without saying what that means for a voice alarm, and in practice the code of practice is the yardstick an enforcing authority, an insurer or a court will use to judge it.

For voice alarm systems, BS 5839-8 divides the work between the building and the specialist. Premises management is expected to carry out a weekly test from a fire alarm input, keep the logbook and check the panel for faults daily (Clauses 39.1 and 42). The competent specialist carries out servicing at intervals of no more than six months, with additional checks every 12 months (Clauses 40.1 and 40.2), leaves a certificate and a written list of defects (Clauses 40.3 and 40.4), and responds to faults (Clause 41.2). When a new maintainer takes over, the standard recommends an inspection of the existing system and its records first (Clause 41.1). Our guide to voice alarm servicing sets out each interval in detail.

The point for this guide is that the standard itself puts some of the work on the building. A responsible person who has bought only the specialist visits, and whose staff do not carry out the weekly test, has not met the recommendations, however good the contractor is. Equally, a contractor that calls a panel check and a battery reading a “service” has not met them either, and Article 5(4) and Article 32(10) both point at the contractor when it falls short of what it was paid to do.

What changed after Grenfell

Three pieces of legislation have widened the responsible person’s duties in England since 2021, mainly in residential buildings.

• Fire Safety Act 2021 (in force 16 May 2022). Confirmed that, in buildings containing two or more sets of domestic premises, the Fire Safety Order covers the structure, the external walls and the doors between flats and common parts.
• Fire Safety (England) Regulations 2022 (in force 23 January 2023). Added specific duties for multi-occupied residential buildings, with more as height increases. In high-rise residential buildings (at least 18 m or seven storeys), regulation 7 requires monthly routine checks of essential fire-fighting equipment, which includes fire alarm and evacuation alert systems in the common parts, and requires any fault not fixed within 24 hours to be reported to the fire and rescue service.
• Building Safety Act 2022, section 156 (in force 1 October 2023). Amended the Fire Safety Order so that every responsible person must record the full fire risk assessment and the fire safety arrangements, co-operate with other responsible persons, pass fire safety information to whoever takes over from them (Article 22A), give residents of multi-occupied buildings fire safety information (Article 21A), and co-operate with accountable persons in higher-risk buildings (Article 22B). It also raised several fines to unlimited. A further change, requiring anyone appointed to help with a fire risk assessment to be competent (Article 9A), has been made but is not yet in force.

The direction is consistent. More must be written down, more must be shared, and it is harder for a responsible person to say they did not know.

What to ask your contractor and put in the contract

A good contract does not move the duty, but it makes the split visible. These are the points worth writing down.

1. The standard and edition. Name BS 5839-8:2023 and the clauses the maintainer will work to, rather than “in accordance with current standards”.
2. What each visit includes. List the six-monthly and annual activities, including every loudspeaker circuit measured and compared with the previous reading, and a listening test in every zone at least once a year.
3. What the building does. State who carries out the weekly test, the daily panel check and the logbook, and how the maintainer will check they are being done.
4. Defect reporting. Require a written defects list after every visit, sent to a named person, with a timescale for quotations and an escalation route for defects that stay open.
5. Fault response. Set an attendance time for faults, normally within 8 hours on a 24-hour basis under BS 5839-8 (Clause 41.2 a)), and say what happens out of hours.
6. Records. Agree who holds the as-fitted drawings, cause-and-effect and commissioning records, and require the maintainer to update them when it modifies the system.
7. Competence. Ask what training the technicians who attend have had on voice alarm systems specifically, and whether the company holds third-party certification for the work. Certification is voluntary, but it is evidence that someone other than the contractor has checked its procedures.
8. Takeover. If the contractor is new, require the takeover inspection and the list of non-conformities before the first routine service.
9. Subcontracting. Ask whether the work is subcontracted and to whom, require the same scope and standard to flow down to every subcontractor, and require the subcontractor’s own certificate and defects list to come to you unedited, not summarised.
10. What is excluded. Ask for the exclusions in writing. A routine service is not a design review, and a contract that never mentions intelligibility, building changes or loudspeaker coverage probably does not include them.

If a quotation is much cheaper than the others, compare it against this list. The difference is usually in what is left out.

Five questions for the responsible person

1. Do you know who the responsible person for your premises is, and is it written down?
2. Has anyone in the building read the maintenance contract against BS 5839-8, rather than just the price?
3. Is the weekly test being done from a fire alarm input, and recorded?
4. Do the service reports show circuit readings, zone listening tests and a defects list?
5. Is every defect on the last report either fixed or recorded as a decision with a reason?

If the answer to any of these is no, the duty is still yours, and so is the gap.

This guide gives general information about the law in England as it stood on the date shown above. It is not legal advice. Wales applies the same Fire Safety Order with some differences in commencement, and Scotland and Northern Ireland have their own fire safety legislation. For advice on a particular building, consult a fire safety solicitor or your enforcing authority.