Subletting Your Spare Floor: 9 Duties You Take On

A great many organisations took more space than they now need. Attendance patterns changed, headcount moved, and a floor or a wing became surplus while the lease ran on.

The commercial response is sensible: sublet it, license desks to another business, take in a portfolio company, or share with a partner firm. It recovers cost and it is usually arranged by property and legal teams working from a template.

What it also does is change what your organisation is. You were an occupier with duties to your own people. You are now something closer to a provider, with duties to another employer's staff, in premises you control but do not own, under a head lease that may not contemplate any of it.

Nine duties you take on.

1. You owe duties to people who are not your employees

The foundation.

Section 3 of the Health and Safety at Work etc. Act 1974 requires every employer to conduct its undertaking so that persons not in its employment who may be affected are not exposed to risks. Section 4 adds duties on those who have control of premises made available as a place of work for people who are not their employees.

Section 4 is the one that changes with a sublet. It attaches to control of premises, and by providing space to another business you have made premises available as a place of work for people you do not employ.

2. Cooperation becomes a two-way statutory duty

Regulation 11 of the Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999 requires employers sharing a workplace to cooperate, coordinate their protective measures, and take reasonable steps to inform each other of the risks arising from their work.

That is now live in both directions. You need to tell the incoming business about the building's risks and arrangements, and they need to tell you about anything their activity introduces. A firm that brings equipment, holds substances, works unusual hours or receives a different kind of visitor has changed your building.

3. Fire: you may have become a responsible person for their space

The most consequential item, and the one most subletting arrangements do not address.

Under the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005, duties attach to the person having control of premises. Where you control the space you have sublet, you may be a responsible person in respect of it, alongside the head landlord and alongside the occupier.

Article 22 requires responsible persons who share premises to cooperate, coordinate and inform one another, and the strengthened requirements introduced in October 2023 require responsible persons to take reasonably practicable steps to identify the other responsible persons and to record and share contact details.

Two practical consequences. Somebody must decide whose fire risk assessment covers the sublet space, and the answer should be written down rather than assumed. And article 9 requires review on significant change, which subdividing a floor and introducing another occupier plainly is.

4. Evacuation has to work as one building

The operational half of the above, and it fails in predictable ways.

A single building with two organisations in it needs one evacuation arrangement, not two. That means agreeing who sounds the alarm, who sweeps which areas, whose wardens cover the shared routes, where everybody assembles, who accounts for whom, and who decides re-entry.

Two specifics. Personal evacuation arrangements for anybody in the sublet space need to exist and need to be known to whoever is coordinating. And drills should be run jointly, because a drill that tests half a building tests very little.

5. Your welfare and facilities arithmetic changed

Toilets, kitchens, rest facilities and ventilation are provided against the people present.

Adding another organisation's staff changes that number, and a building sized for your reduced headcount may now be back at or beyond the occupancy it was designed for. This is the calculation organisations get wrong twice: first when they shrink and do not adjust, then when they sublet and do not recalculate.

6. First aid cover has to reach everybody

First aid provision follows from an assessment of need, and that assessment now covers a larger and differently distributed population.

Agree explicitly whether your first aiders cover the sublet space, whether the incoming business provides its own, and how somebody in their area summons help. The failure mode is both parties assuming the other has it.

7. The information you hold has to flow down

What you receive from your landlord is now something somebody else needs.

The premises fire risk assessment, alarm and emergency lighting testing, extinguisher servicing, water hygiene records, lift examination and asbestos information all bear on the space you have sublet. Where the building predates 2000, regulation 4 of the Control of Asbestos Regulations 2012 requires information about location and condition to be provided to every person liable to disturb it, which now includes anybody the incoming business instructs to do work.

If you cannot obtain those documents from your landlord, you are in a poor position to provide them, which is a reason to establish that before signing rather than after.

8. Your head lease may prohibit or condition this

Not a health and safety point, and it determines whether the rest applies.

Subletting, sharing occupation and licensing desks are frequently restricted by the head lease, and the landlord's consent may come with conditions about alterations, fire strategy, occupancy limits and insurance.

Establish the position before committing. An arrangement that breaches the lease is also an arrangement your landlord has not accounted for in the building's fire strategy or its insurance, which is a safety problem as well as a legal one.

9. Write down who does what, before anyone moves in

The mechanism that makes the previous eight manageable.

A short schedule to the sublease or licence, covering: whose fire risk assessment applies to which areas, who maintains what, how the alarm and evacuation work, whose first aiders cover which space, what information passes in each direction, who authorises works, and who each party contacts about a safety concern.

That document takes an afternoon and resolves almost every dispute that otherwise arises eighteen months later, usually during an incident.

The nine, in short

Duty	Common position	What is needed
Duties to non-employees	Not considered	Sections 3 and 4 both engage
Cooperation	Informal	Two-way, and covering their activity too
Fire responsibility	Assumed the landlord's	Decided and recorded between the parties
Evacuation	Two arrangements	One building, one arrangement, joint drills
Welfare	Not recalculated	Sized against combined occupancy
First aid	Both assume the other	Agreed explicitly
Landlord information	Held, not passed on	Flows down, including asbestos
Head lease	Discovered later	Checked before committing
Written split	Nothing	A schedule agreed before move-in

Rows three and four are where an incident would expose the arrangement, and row nine is what prevents the other eight from being argued about afterwards.

For international groups

Two considerations.

Shared premises duties are expressed more prescriptively elsewhere. Bulgaria requires a written agreement between employers sharing premises. Lithuania requires the receiving undertaking to instruct visiting workers at the specific workplace even where their own employer has done so. Qatar, Slovakia and Morocco each address coordination between employers expressly, and Morocco and Argentina place coordination of simultaneous work within the safety service's remit.

So the written schedule recommended above is good practice in Britain and closer to a requirement in several of the countries where your group operates.

Surplus space is a group-wide phenomenon. Where a group is subletting in more than one country, the arrangement should be consistent in principle and local in its documentation. Holding those arrangements in one register is where health and safety consultants and software are worth more together than either alone, and periodic health and safety audits will establish whether the split described in the agreement is the one operating in the building.

Where Arinite fits

Arinite works out who holds which duty when a building has more than one organisation in it, which is the question subletting creates and property documents rarely answer. We support 1,500+ businesses across 50+ countries and protect 100,000+ employees, with 95%+ client retention over 15+ years. Our health and safety consultants work extensively with legal, finance and banking and IT and software organisations, many of which are now carrying more space than they occupy.

Our fire risk assessment work covers buildings whose occupancy has been subdivided, and where a group is doing this in several countries, our global health and safety consultants and international health and safety consultants establish what each jurisdiction requires of the arrangement.

If you have let space to another business and nobody has written down whose fire risk assessment covers it, a free gap analysis is the right place to start.

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