A visit from a fire safety inspector can be unsettling. Most visits end with a conversation, some advice and a handshake. Some end with a
A building that is closed or half-empty over Christmas isn’t a lower-risk building. It’s a different one. Fewer people are there to notice a fire, the response to an alarm is slower, and there is more opportunity for arson. Five short checks will tell you whether your normal arrangements still hold up while the building runs differently.
A fire that is put out in minutes still leaves work behind. Some of your fire precautions have been used or damaged, several people may need to be told, and you have just seen how your fire risk assessment performs in a real fire. Here’s what to do in the week that follows.
When a block changes managing agent, the fire risk assessment usually makes the journey. The history, the open defects, the door-check records and the alarm monitoring account often don’t. What the law actually requires to be passed on, what a sensible handover should include, and what the incoming agent should check in the first month.
Should your fire risk assessment look at the public fire hydrant in the street: its location, its capacity, its maintenance? The Fire Industry Association says no, and the law is clear about who maintains it. The same logic tells you which firefighting facilities *do* belong in your assessment, and it’s most of them.
Two buildings with the same use can need quite different fire detection. The category, extent and detector types should come out of the objectives and the risk: who is in the building, when, where, and what could go wrong. They should not come out of “that’s what offices usually have”. Here’s how we’d approach the decision, and the design errors we see most often.
The short answer is no, not in any way that helps you. Fire safety inspectors have legal powers of entry and inspection, and obstructing them or failing to produce records is a separate criminal offence. The more useful question is what an inspection actually asks of you on the day, and how to be ready for it.
For most blocks of flats and HMOs, the answer is simple: e-bikes and e-scooters should not be kept or charged in corridors, stairs, lobbies or service cupboards. The harder part is what you offer residents instead, how you enforce it, and whether your fire risk assessment reflects what’s actually happening in the building.
An inspecting officer doesn’t read your fire safety file to see how thick it is. Each document is used to test something: whether the fire risk assessment still describes the building, whether the problems it found were dealt with, and whether the arrangements on paper actually happen. Prepare with those tests in mind and the paperwork will work for you.
A company prosecuted over fire safety failings at a Dorset care home was fined £70,000 in March 2026 after admitting an offence under Article 11 of the Fire Safety Order: failing to ensure appropriate fire safety arrangements were in place. A fire risk assessment tells you what your premises need, but Article 11 is the duty to make sure it actually happens.
The fire risk assessment profession now has regulated qualifications at Foundation, Intermediate and Advanced levels, tied to a British Standard. For clients, they give you a common language for matching an assessor to a building. They don’t give you a rule saying which building needs which level. Here’s what the new levels tell you, what they don’t, and how to use them when you appoint.