A nuclear power station needs only one fire safety regulator … but a humble bedsit requires two.

That perfectly illustrates how new legislation has turned fire safety – one of the single most important issues in rented housing – into a shambles, according to one of the UK’s leading professional associations for landlords.

“And as government bureaucrats cloud the fire safety issue with wholesale confusion they are putting the lives of private sector tenants at risk,” says the Residential Landlords Association.

At the heart of the problem is the fact that two different enforcement authorities are involved - working with two pieces of legislation that have different guidelines.

The latest Housing Act gave local authorities the responsibility to enforce fire safety under the Housing Health and Safety Rating System. And also for the licensing of ‘houses in multiple occupation’ - typically student shared houses - but only for fire safety in individual rooms, not for common areas such as corridors, halls, stairs, landings and shared kitchens or bathrooms.

Meanwhile, Fire and Rescue Authorities have responsibility under the Fire Safety Order. But only for those common areas of flats and HMOs … not the private rooms.

“Confused? So are we,” says Richard Jones - lawyer and lobbying team leader for the Residential Landlords Association whose members own over 100,000 private rented properties throughout the UK.

So the RLA has now written to the national joint working group, set up by local authorities and chief fire officers, appealing for the consistency and simplicity of a single fire regulator for residential accommodation.

“These parallel systems were introduced without any proper consideration of the relationship between them …” says Richard Jones.  “The two enforcing authorities often take different views - with each fire service laying down it’s own fire safety standards.

“So the whole new legislative structure becomes the most complex, conflicting legislation that a regulation-obsessed British government could have devised. The result is complete confusion.

“Landlords don’t know what their obligations are – and that is counter-productive to the importance that fire safety issues should command. Rather than going hand in hand with improving standards it will, on the contrary, lower them and waste the resources that could be better used on genuine improvement.

“Landlords often complain about the difficulty of dealing with different officers of the same authority who often apply different standards - but when it comes to two different authorities operating under different legislative regimes those well-grounded fears only get worse.

“The whole counter-productive chaos really came home when a senior council officer told us there could be three different sets of standards imposed on landlords. These depend whether the local housing authority is dealing under the national minimum prescribed standards for HMOs … or the Housing Health and Safety Rating System …  or the Fire Safety Order.

“The objective should be for one regulator to apply the same standard to the same kind of accommodation, irrespective of what piece of legislation applies.”