Ask most commercial cleaning contracts who’s responsible for the fire risk assessment on the building, and the honest answer is that the contract simply doesn’t say. It’s assumed to sit with the client, because that’s where the legal duty usually lives, but the cleaning team is often the last people through the building each night, the ones propping doors for a trolley, storing waste bags by the entrance, and moving through escape routes that need to stay clear. Fire risk assessment and cleaning contracts overlap far more than most agreements acknowledge.
Who legally owns fire safety, and why that isn’t the whole story
Under UK fire safety law, a building’s “responsible person”, usually the owner, landlord, or managing agent, carries the legal duty to maintain a current fire risk assessment. A cleaning company doesn’t inherit that legal duty just by working on site. But the day-to-day actions that create or prevent a fire hazard, a door propped open with a mop bucket, an escape route lined with cleaning trolleys, waste bags stacked against an external wall, are routine cleaning-team decisions made without anyone from the client side present to catch them.
Where this quietly shows up in a real contract
A method statement built for a commercial site should say something about fire doors and escape routes, but most don’t, because they’re written to cover cleaning tasks, not building safety. This sits close to the paperwork covered in RAMS and COSHH compliance for commercial cleaning contracts, which increasingly gets requested before a client signs, and fire-safety awareness is a natural addition to that same document rather than a separate process. It costs nothing extra to add a line confirming escape routes stay clear and doors are never propped, but very few contracts actually include it.
Sites where the stakes are already higher
On regulated sites, care homes, schools, and healthcare buildings covered in posts like what CQC-regulated care home cleaning contracts actually require and what a school checks before signing a cleaning contract, fire safety expectations are usually spelled out more explicitly because the consequences of getting it wrong are more severe. A standard commercial office contract deserves the same clarity, it just rarely gets it written down until after an incident forces the conversation.
Nobody signs a cleaning contract expecting to have caused a fire hazard. Most just never wrote down who’s checking for one.