A landlord has been handed a heavy fine over several fire safety failings, as reported on the Fire Protection Association website.
Manjit Dulay was prosecuted alongside former firefighter Martin Ballard over the failings at a development he owned in Leicester, which put ‘dozens of tenants’ lives at risk’.
Leicester Mercury reported on the prosecutions of both Mr Dulay and Mr Ballard over the issues at St Clement’s Court in Leicester, which Mr Dulay owns and which contains over 70 flats.
In 2014, Leicestershire Fire and Rescue Service (LFRS) found – after repeated inspections – a range of ‘urgent improvements’ that he needed to make in order to ‘raise fire safety standards’ across the site.
Issues discovered included a ‘non-functioning’ fire alarm system, ‘useless’ smoke detectors, ‘unsuitable’ fire escape routes and a ‘broken emergency air venting system’.
Mr Dulay failed to ‘do all the work required’, so LFRS issued him with an enforcement notice in April 2016, but a ‘more thorough’ assessment by LFRS in 2017 found both ‘recurring problems and new ones’, including that ‘not a single smoke detector in the corridors was functioning’.
LFRS, ‘not wanting to force people out of their homes’, fitted new detectors themselves at the time, and that year Mr Dulay ‘finally’ hired an online company to undertake a fire risk assessment, paying them £400.
However, he ‘never informed them of the enforcement notice or the scale of problems’, and the company sent Mr Bullard – a retired LFRS firefighter – to undertake the assessment.
Mr Bullard was ‘unqualified for the job’, and as such his work on the assessment was ‘so poor’ that he ended up being prosecuted alongside Mr Dulay, who had spent money on ‘illegally’ building two penthouses on the blocks ‘without planning permission’, and yet ‘failed to do the work required to meet fire safety requirements’.
After growing concerns from residents, Mr Dulay was prosecuted at Leicester Crown Court alongside Mr Bullard, pleading guilty to six counts of ‘risking people’s death or injury’ by breaching fire safety regulations, as well as ‘failing to surrender to bail’ in February this year, having ‘absconded for 130 days’ and then missed a later appointment ‘to sign in at a police station’. He was fined £80,000, given a 12 month prison sentence suspended for 24 months, and ordered to pay £66,418 in costs.
Mr Bullard meanwhile was charged with four counts of breaching regulations, and was fined £1,600 and ordered to pay £7,864 in costs. Prosecutor Bernard Thorogood stated: ‘This was a building on occasion without fire alarm protection, which was a very serious situation.
Fire safety failings “increased risk of death”
Each breach gave rise to the risk of death or serious injury. Fire is an indiscriminate killer. Fire and the products of combustion can spread very rapidly.’
He also noted that the building had a ‘serious lack’ of fire resistant barrier, doors that did not fit frames and other units that ‘should have been self-closing’ in a fire, adding: ‘A corridor can quickly become completely filled [with smoke] so that visibility is removed and a single breath can have terrible consequences.’
With 30 to 40 fires in residential blocks every day in the UK, he added, ‘insecure front doors and anti-social behaviour problems’ in the area around the block ‘made the risk of fire greater’.
Mr Thorogood noted in turn: ‘There were repeated attempts by the fire service to help him raise standards. It was his choice to ignore regulatory requirements in the hope they would go away.’
Defending Mr Dulay, Lawrence Henderson said that ‘he’s no businessman – he’s a builder. He has taken on far more than he could manage. He’s trying to keep up with what he’s created’. In response, Judge Robert Brown said: ‘You’re describing a multi-national being run like a corner shop. He’s completely out of his depth.’
He also told Mr Dulay that ‘you’re a builder, not a businessman’, and that ‘a radical new approach to compliance is now necessary’. Defending Mr Ballard, Olivia Beesley said that ‘he was simply out of his depth’, and that ‘it was beyond the training he had.
He knows he’s let down his profession by these offences’. Mr Thorogood concluded by noting that fire safety at the development was ‘much improved’, but still ‘not quite where it should be’.
