Fire safety legislation in Hong Kong

One of the key issues to emerge from disaster literature is that, regardless of the nature of the disaster, there exist both internal and external pre‐conditions that cause an incident to become a disaster. While it may be difficult for governments to exert control over internal preconditions, it is possible to provide a regulatory environment which exerts control over external preconditions. Increasingly governments are moving towards the adoption of performance ‐ rather than prescriptive‐based codes in the provision of legislation. By examining a number of disastrous fires which have taken place in Hong Kong, the paper traces the prescriptive approach adopted by the Government towards forming fire safety legislation and considers whether performance codes would provide a more appropriate regulatory environment.