Monitoring News
Every month our Managing Director, Steve Kimber, fills us in on the latest monitoring news.
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Below is an archive of the previous year's monthly columns or click here for earlier news columns.
| March 12 | February 12 | January 12 |
| December 11 | November 11 | October 11 |
| September 11 | August 11 | July 11 |
| June 11 | May 11 | April 11 |
Connections
June 2011
Hello again,
Some news on the grapevine would indicate that sadly it appears that a fire and rescue service that had not adopted the national CFOA policy for the monitoring of automatic fire alarms refused to attend a site as no confirmation of a fire had been given locally, unfortunately a woman subsequently died.
This probably will lead to legal action by the affected parties after an inquest has been held. That legal action must result in a challenge that the fire and rescue service decision not to follow the recommendations of best practice as defined by their own industry body CFOA was flawed. It is such a great shame that it has to come to this to get the respective fire rescue services to acknowledge (or be told) that in isolation they are not best placed to decide what is best practice and in the interests of the tax paying public.
Hopefully something positive can come from this sad incident and all the "independent" fire and rescue policies will be brought into line with the agreed CFOA national policy.
Whilst on the subject of responding to fire alarm signals, I have also been made aware of another incident relating to a Telecare centre that failed to receive a fire alarm signal as all receiving lines were permanently engaged due to insufficient phone lines. Again, this resulted in a loss of life.
The sooner the UKAS inspectorate bodies insist (as they do for installers) that ARC's are certificated against ALL the scopes that they provide service for the better. It is not unreasonable that the public (and insurer) expectations are that a certificated fire installation is monitored by an appropriately certificated monitoring centre. I would suggest inspectorates would find themselves exposed for not supporting best practice if called to account.
The whole area of supporting standards and best practice must be underpinned in Fire Brigade policy's by supporting 3rd party UKAS accreditation for design, installation, commissioning, maintenance and monitoring of fire alarm systems, as there is always the risk of loss of life, which is far more important than material possessions as is the case with most security systems.
Then there is the question of the different types of centre's ranging from Category 1 Telecare (see example above) to category 2 ARC's with a 28 day contingency plan for reinstatement of service and finally category 2 ARC's certificated for high integrity monitoring, with no interruption to service.
Which type would you want your loved ones monitored by?
It's about time that some of the fire and rescue services and the inspection bodies in conjunction with insurers tidy up the discrepancies around best practice and consumer expectations.
Bye for now,
Steve
P.S. Still not seen the SMS/NMS 'Work Smarter' Presentation Videos? Here they are again:
