421.1.7 Arc fault detection devices ... shall be provided for ... Purpose-built student accommodation.

I suggest that, "shall" obviates a fire risk assessment.

Chris Pearson said:

Purpose-built student accommodation.

An interesting concept.

I suggest that modern high-quality purpose-built student accommodation ought not to require AFDD: arc faults ought not to develop.

Then we have the medieval universities: do they not contain "purpose-built student accommodation"? On historical grounds alone, they need best quality fire precautions.

By contrast, the ancient university colleges have bought buildings and converted them into student accommodation. Clearly they were not "purpose built" so they do not fall under 421.1.7. Surely they require AFDD, especially if they are timber-framed.

I am bound to conclude that the prescriptive nature of 421.1.7 is unhelpful.

That is a good point and one I suspect most readers will have missed - the most dangerous accommodation buildings  can be the 'change of use' kind rather than the 'purpose built' as the adaptions are quite often necessarily something of a compromise, and may be associated with all sorts of things that do not quite meet modern building regs.. As you say as worded the regs could be read as  excluding the most vulnerable cases. (Thinking back to my own uni accommodation that had originally been for gentleman and their batmen, with oak paneled rooms built in the 1700s, and the remains of about 3 different other sorts of lighting predating the late 1950s electrics ). There are also loads of crummy Victorian town houses that have been partitioned into flats and things - again clearly not purpose built, unless you accept 'purpose built for an entirely different purpose'

Mike

That is a good point and one I suspect most readers will have missed - the most dangerous accommodation buildings  can be the 'change of use' kind rather than the 'purpose built' as the adaptions are quite often necessarily something of a compromise, and may be associated with all sorts of things that do not quite meet modern building regs.. As you say as worded the regs could be read as  excluding the most vulnerable cases. (Thinking back to my own uni accommodation that had originally been for gentleman and their batmen, with oak paneled rooms built in the 1700s, and the remains of about 3 different other sorts of lighting predating the late 1950s electrics ). There are also loads of crummy Victorian town houses that have been partitioned into flats and things - again clearly not purpose built, unless you accept 'purpose built for an entirely different purpose'

Mike