Prosecutions of the Week.......

The importance of accurate risk assessments and staff training in fire procedures has been underlined by the prosecution of a Leicester hotel business, which was slapped with a £40,000 fine for breaching regulations.

Park Hotel Limited and its manager Ashwin Ratan were ordered to pay the sum after their fire safety breaches were discovered following a fire in August 2009 and a subsequent prosecution mounted by Leicestershire Fire and Rescue Service.

Investigators discovered ten infringements of the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005, which included a fire alarm that could not be heard in the basement where one member of staff resided. When the fire broke out, the member of staff did not know about it until someone went down to the basement to warn them.