Paul Hanson

Paul began his journey in the fire safety industry 40 years ago working for the Greater London Council (GLC) as a fire specialist dealing inter-alia with tall and large volume buildings under the London specific standards championed at the time by the GLC. For the past 34 years Paul has worked for central London Local Authorities providing specialist fire safety advice on fire strategies submitted to Building Control on tall buildings. Currently he heads up the fire engineering team for the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea, as well as providing third party review of fire strategies and CFD fire safety analysis for other London Boroughs .

Paul is a member of a number of industry committees, including the London District Surveyors’ Association (LDSA) Fire Safety Committee, where he has encouraged the use of illustrative techniques to explain key principles that have been published in national guidance by specialist organisation such as the Association of Speariest Fire Protection (ASFP), Smoke Control Association, British Standards and Approved Documents.

Paul has always championed the use of digital technology, to illustrate fire safety provisions pictorially for specific projects and particularly as mentioned above national guidance. He has embraced the use of computer 3D modelling that has become the prime tool of modern fire engineering and championed collaborative thinking to agree core principles used in this field between practicing fire engineers and approving authorities.

With the perspective of working in the industry for a number of years Paul is pleased to see a resurgence of some of the principles he encountered at the beginning of his career being reintroduced back into the industry as a prime focus for the new building safety regime.