The Complete Guide to Fire Risk Assessments in the UK (2026)

The legal foundation sits in Article 9(1) of the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005, which requires the Responsible Person to make a "suitable and sufficient assessment of the risks to which relevant persons are exposed for the purpose of identifying the general fire precautions he needs to take." That phrase — suitable and sufficient — is not defined in the legislation, but it is the phrase enforcement officers, insurers, and courts will use to judge whether the assessment you produced genuinely covers what it needs to cover.

The methodology most fire risk assessors work to is PAS 79-1:2020 for non-domestic premises (offices, retail, warehouses, industrial, education, healthcare) or BS 9792:2025 for housing (HMOs, blocks of flats, student accommodation, specialised housing). PAS 79-1 sets out a nine-step process that goes considerably deeper than the Home Office's simplified five-step checklist. The five-step version is designed for Responsible Persons who feel competent to carry out their own assessment on the simplest types of premises. For anything beyond a single small shop or office, the professional nine-step methodology is the standard a competent assessor will follow.

A fire risk assessment is not the same thing as a fire safety audit carried out by a Fire and Rescue Service. The audit checks whether you are complying with your duties under the Order. The fire risk assessment is the document that proves you are. They are connected — an enforcement officer inspecting your premises will ask to see your assessment first — but they are carried out by different people for different reasons.

The Fire Safety Order defines the Responsible Person in Article 3. In workplaces, it is the employer. Where there is no employer, it is the person who has control of the premises in connection with a trade, business, or undertaking. In multi-occupancy buildings, there can be more than one Responsible Person — a landlord or managing agent with responsibility for the common parts, and individual businesses with responsibility for their own demised areas. The Order requires you to identify other Responsible Persons and cooperate with them.

In practice, the people we meet who are carrying the legal duty fall into three groups. The first is small business owners who know they are the Responsible Person because there is no one else. The second is HMO landlords and letting agents. The third — and this is where we see the biggest gap — is directors of larger businesses. A director of a limited company holds the Responsible Person duty automatically by virtue of their directorship and their control of the premises. But in our experience, many directors have never been told what that actually means in fire safety terms. The day-to-day management sits with a health and safety manager or a facilities manager, but the legal duty sits with the director. It is a surprisingly common gap, and one we try to close gently during the assessment itself.

The Order does not apply inside individual private dwellings — your own home, if it is a single-family house, is not covered. But it does apply to the common parts of HMOs, flats, and maisonettes. If your building is divided into more than one household, the shared hallways, stairwells, and landings are subject to the same duty as an office or a shop.

Since Section 156 of the Building Safety Act 2022 came into force on 1 October 2023, the recording requirement has tightened considerably. Previously, only Responsible Persons with five or more employees were required to record their assessment in full. That threshold has been removed. Every Responsible Person must now record the fire risk assessment in full, record the fire safety arrangements, and record the identity of anyone they appoint to help carry out or review the assessment. A sole trader running a small shop is now under exactly the same documentation requirement as a multi-site retailer.

The Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005

The Fire Safety Order (commonly called the RRO) is the principal fire safety legislation for England and Wales. It came into force on 1 October 2006, replacing more than seventy earlier pieces of fire legislation with a single, risk-based framework. Article 9 sets the duty to assess, Article 11 the duty to maintain fire safety arrangements, Article 13 the requirement for appropriate firefighting equipment and detection, and Article 14 means of escape. Article 32 sets out the offences and penalties for failing to comply.

The Fire Safety Act 2021

The Fire Safety Act 2021 clarified that the external walls, flat entrance doors, and the structure of buildings are all covered by the Fire Safety Order and must be accounted for in fire risk assessments. This was a direct response to the Grenfell Tower fire and closed an ambiguity in how the Order applied to the building envelope of multi-occupied residential premises.

The Building Safety Act 2022, Section 156

Section 156 of the Building Safety Act 2022 amended the Fire Safety Order and came into force on 1 October 2023. It introduced several significant changes every Responsible Person needs to understand.

First, the duty to record the assessment in full was extended to all Responsible Persons regardless of employee count or premises type. Previously, only businesses with five or more employees (or licensed premises) had to record more than the "significant findings." That threshold is gone.

Second, the identity of any person appointed to carry out or review the assessment must now be recorded, along with their organisation where applicable. This creates a traceable record of who actually did the work — and a clear audit trail for enforcement officers, insurers, and future owners.

Third, the Act introduced a future requirement that any person appointed to make or review the assessment must be competent. This specific provision has not yet been commenced — the government has committed to publishing guidance and setting a date in due course. In the meantime, Home Office and Fire and Rescue Service guidance strongly recommends that Responsible Persons satisfy themselves of an assessor's competence before appointing them. The duty to ensure the assessment is suitable and sufficient remains with the Responsible Person regardless of who carries it out.

Fourth, the maximum fine for specified offences — including failing to provide a copy of the fire risk assessment when an inspector requests it — was raised from Level 3 (£1,000) to Level 5 (unlimited).

The Housing Act 2004 and HMO-specific duties

For HMOs, the Fire Safety Order sits alongside the Housing Act 2004 and the Housing Health and Safety Rating System (HHSRS). The Fire Safety Order applies to the common parts. The HHSRS applies to the individual rooms and considers fire as one of twenty-nine assessed hazards. Mandatory and additional HMO licence conditions add a third layer. Underpinning all of this is the LACORS Housing Fire Safety Guidance, published in 2008 — not legislation, but treated as the de facto benchmark by virtually every local housing authority and fire and rescue service in England. Councils such as Eastleigh Borough Council explicitly use LACORS as the minimum standard they will accept for HMO fire safety.

HMO fire risk assessments sit under BS 9792:2025 — the current British Standard for housing fire risk assessments, published in 2025 — alongside LACORS. The assessment methodology comes from BS 9792; the practical fire-precaution standards councils and fire services judge your premises against come from LACORS. A competent HMO assessor works across both. We go into more detail on the HMO side later in this guide and on our dedicated HMO fire risk assessments page.

The Home Office publishes a simplified five-step checklist for Responsible Persons who feel competent to assess the simplest premises themselves. That checklist is a useful starting point for very small, low-risk operations, but it is not the methodology a professional uses. PAS 79-1:2020 sets out nine steps, each requiring professional judgement rather than a tick-box response.

The PAS 79-1 nine-step process

Step 1 — Obtain information about the premises and their occupants. Before the visit, we review previous assessments, building plans, servicing certificates, EICRs, fire alarm and emergency lighting records, and fire door inspection reports. On site, we establish the building's construction, use, occupancy patterns, and any processes that introduce fire risk.

Step 2 — Identify fire hazards and the means for their elimination or control. We walk the premises from outside in, looking at ignition sources (electrical equipment, cooking, heating, smoking areas, hot work), fuel sources (paper, textiles, furniture, waste, flammable liquids, stock), and anything that could let a fire start or spread unexpectedly. This is where we often find things the Responsible Person has stopped noticing — daisy-chained extension leads under desks, aerosols stored loose instead of in a flammable cabinet, lithium-ion batteries charging on carpet. The hazards are rarely exotic. The skill is in spotting the ordinary ones that have become invisible through familiarity.

Step 3 — Assess the likelihood of fire. We evaluate how probable it is that the identified hazards could result in a fire, given the controls currently in place.

Step 4 — Assess fire protection measures. Detection and alarm systems, emergency lighting (coverage, condition, testing records), extinguishers (type, location, servicing), fire doors (condition, self-closing mechanisms, intumescent strips and smoke seals), compartmentation, signage, and means of escape.

Step 5 — Assess fire safety management. Emergency plans, fire drill records, staff training, maintenance regimes, and the management structure for fire safety. This is where we test whether the plan has ever actually been tested under real conditions — or only when the building is empty.

Step 6 — Assess the likely consequences of fire. Who would be affected, how quickly would a fire develop, and would the existing measures give people enough time to escape? This requires professional judgement about fire development, smoke spread, and human behaviour — not a calculation a template can produce.

Step 7 — Assess the overall fire risk. We bring together the likelihood of fire (Step 3) and the likely consequences (Step 6) to produce a qualitative risk rating, with clear reasoning that explains why the risk level is what it is.

Step 8 — Formulate an action plan. Actions are prioritised by urgency and significance, with realistic timescales and clear ownership. The action plan is the part that actually makes people safer — but only if it is acted on. Having an assessment is not the same as being compliant. You are compliant when the actions have been completed.

Step 9 — Periodic review. Article 9(3) of the Fire Safety Order requires the assessment to be reviewed regularly, and specifically whenever there is reason to suspect it is no longer valid or after a significant change. We recommend a review at least every twelve months and a fresh assessment every three to five years.

A good fire risk assessment is a bit like assembling a puzzle: it is about understanding how the premises functions structurally, operationally, and against the relevant regulations, then working out where the pieces do not fit as well as they should. The written report should tell a story. When an enforcement officer, an insurer, or a new Responsible Person reads your assessment in three years' time, they should be able to understand the building, understand the risk, and understand the reasoning.

What counts as a "significant change"?

"Significant change" is broader than many Responsible Persons realise. Installing rooftop solar panels is a significant change. Changing the occupancy pattern is a significant change. Adding a mezzanine floor, converting a storage area to office use, introducing electric vehicle charging, or setting up lithium-ion battery charging stations — all significant changes that trigger a duty to review. If the premises, the people, or the processes have changed since your last assessment, the assessment needs reviewing.

Honest pricing is one of the reasons we started the business. The UK market runs from DIY templates at £25 to boutique consultancies charging four-figure sums for large, complex premises. Understanding what actually drives the price helps you compare like with like.

What drives the price

Floor area is the easiest variable to price against, which is why most providers (including us) publish bands based on square metres or room count. But floor area is a proxy for complexity, not the real driver. The things that genuinely affect the work are:

• Compartmentation — how the building is divided into fire-resisting zones, and whether those zones can be judged reliably on a non-intrusive inspection. Cable and pipe penetrations through compartment walls are a common weak point.
• Sleeping risk — premises where people may be asleep require a fundamentally different escape analysis: waking time, navigation in smoke, protected routes that work in the dark.
• Protected route architecture — the stairwell and escape corridor occupants rely on to reach safety. In most premises, and especially HMOs, the protected staircase is the single point on which the entire escape plan depends.
• Occupancy pattern — a warehouse with ten employees is not the same job as a retail premises with 400 members of the public on a peak day, even at the same floor area.
• Specialist features — kitchen ductwork, solar PV, compressed gas storage, lithium-ion charging, hot work, and flammable storage all add layers to assess against the appropriate standards.
• Document review — previous assessments, servicing certificates, EICRs, fire alarm and emergency lighting records, and fire door inspection reports all need cross-checking against what is actually present on site.

A typical commercial visit takes two to three hours. Writing the assessment up properly takes considerably longer — often twice as long as the visit. That is where the professional judgement happens: turning observations into a reasoned risk analysis, cross-checking findings against the relevant standards, and producing a genuinely prioritised action plan. If the written report does not reflect that level of thought, you have not had a proper fire risk assessment.

Why you should be suspicious of £45 and £90 fire risk assessments

At the bottom of the market, fire risk assessments are advertised at £45, £90, and £150. The honest question is: what is the provider valuing their own knowledge and judgement at? A thorough assessment is five or six hours of work once you include travel, inspection, document review, and report writing. At £90, that is not even minimum wage — before insurance, professional development, software, and overheads.

What tends to arrive is a templated report — often part-generated by an AI tool — with generic findings that do not reflect the specific building, a tick-box action plan, and no substantive risk reasoning. We have been called in to replace these after Fire and Rescue Service audits rejected them, after insurers refused to accept them, and after HMO licensing officers served improvement notices. The saving is false: the replacement costs what a proper assessment would have cost in the first place, and the Responsible Person has lost time, money, and credibility.

A fair price for a small commercial premises or a small HMO in 2026 sits in the £200–£400 range; for larger or more complex premises, £400–£700 is normal. Anything significantly below that warrants careful questions about what you are actually getting.

The National Fire Chiefs Council publishes guidance on finding a competent assessor, and Dorset & Wiltshire Fire and Rescue Service — which covers part of our area — specifically recommends appointing an assessor with third-party accreditation. The criteria below are what any Responsible Person should check before appointing anyone, including us.

Qualifications and professional membership

At a minimum, expect a Level 3 Certificate in Fire Risk Assessment or equivalent. For more complex premises, Level 4 or Level 5 becomes appropriate. Look for membership of a recognised body — the Institute of Fire Safety Managers (IFSM), the Institution of Fire Engineers (IFE), or IOSH for the wider health and safety context. Third-party certification schemes such as BAFE SP205 add independent verification.

The new BS 8674:2025 competence framework

In August 2025, the British Standards Institution published BS 8674:2025 — the first formal British Standard defining competence for individual fire risk assessors. It sets three tiers: Foundation (low-complexity premises such as small shops and offices), Intermediate (moderate-complexity premises including hotels, shops, offices, small schools, apartment-block common areas, and HMOs with standard layouts), and Advanced (complex or high-risk premises including care homes, large multi-occupancy residential, healthcare, and high-rise buildings).

BS 8674 is not yet law, but it is already being used by insurers, enforcement authorities, and certification bodies as the benchmark for "competent." A well-run practice will be clear about which tier they work at and will not take on work above it. At Clear Fire Compliance, we work at the Foundation and Intermediate tiers — standard commercial premises up to around 4,000 square metres, and HMOs assessed under BS 9792:2025 (Type 1 and Type 3, non-intrusive) with reference to LACORS for practical fire-precaution standards. We do not take on care homes, complex healthcare, large blocks of flats, or high-rise residential, because those require Level 4/5 qualifications and a different methodology. When someone asks us to do work outside our scope, we say so and refer them on. Scope discipline protects clients, their premises and occupants, and us.

Experience in your type of premises

Qualifications set a floor; experience in similar premises is what makes the assessment useful. A competent assessor who has never walked an HMO should not be assessing yours; a specialist in HMO common parts may not be right for a 3,000 square metre distribution warehouse. When you request a quote, ask how many similar premises the assessor has worked on recently and what they typically find.

Professional indemnity insurance

Any competent assessor should carry professional indemnity insurance appropriate to the premises they assess. Ask for evidence. If they cannot show you the certificate, that is a red flag.

A sample report that tells a story

Ask for a redacted sample before you appoint. A good report reads as a narrative: how the premises is laid out, how it operates, where the hazards concentrate, who is at risk and why, how the existing measures perform against the relevant standards, what the residual risk rating is and why, and what actions will bring the risk down. If the sample is a tick-box document with no reasoning, you are looking at the work of someone whose value proposition is low price rather than professional judgement.

Most failings we find are not dramatic. They are the small, steady accumulations of ordinary use that no one is actively watching for. Here are the ones that come up on almost every job.

Electrical and charging risks

Daisy-chained extension leads turn up on near enough every commercial job. Desks become spaghetti. Power boards get plugged into other power boards. Kitchen appliances share sockets with coffee machines and chargers. It looks harmless because it is normal, but overloaded sockets and chained extensions remain a significant cause of workplace electrical fires.

Lithium-ion battery charging is a fast-growing concern. UK fire services recorded around 1,330 lithium-ion battery fires in 2024 — a 93% increase on 2022, according to data compiled by QBE Insurance through Freedom of Information requests to UK fire services. E-bikes alone accounted for 362 fires, double the 181 recorded in 2022. Separately, the Office for Product Safety and Standards recorded 211 notified e-bike and e-scooter fire incidents in 2024, resulting in 86 injuries and eight fatalities. When a lithium-ion battery enters thermal runaway it burns far hotter and faster than a conventional fire, and is extremely difficult to extinguish — QBE notes these fires typically need around ten times more water to put out.

For a fire risk assessment this means looking at where staff charge phones, vapes, e-bikes, e-scooters, mobility scooters, and power tools; whether there are charging policies; whether charging happens on or near combustibles; whether there is any building-wide restriction on where charging can happen; and whether staff have been made aware of the risks of counterfeit chargers and aftermarket conversion kits. We expect practice to tighten significantly here over the next few years.

Rooftop solar panels that trigger a review

Rooftop photovoltaic installations are a significant change under Article 9(3) of the Fire Safety Order, which means they trigger the duty to review the fire risk assessment. This is not widely understood, and in fairness, Approved Document B does not currently contain specific provisions for building-applied PV — a gap that RICS and major insurers have flagged publicly.

PV systems introduce new risks the original assessment would not have considered. Panels generate electricity in any light, so parts of the system are always live — making firefighting harder. The air gap between panels and roof can create a stack effect that accelerates fire spread. PV inverters are a recognised ignition source, particularly when installed in combined plant rooms alongside gas meters and main electrical supplies without compartmentation. Insurers such as Zurich have published explicit guidance that a suitable and sufficient fire risk assessment should be carried out for all industrial, commercial, and domestic PV installations under the Fire Safety Order.

If you have had solar panels installed in the last three years and your fire risk assessment has not been updated since, you almost certainly have a live compliance gap.

Emergency lighting — internal and external

Internal emergency lighting tends to be in place, but we regularly find three problems with it. First, servicing: monthly functional testing is either not being done, not recorded, or done by someone who does not know what a correct result looks like. Second, coverage: the lighting installed does not actually illuminate the full escape route, leaving dark spots at corridors, changes of direction, fire exit doors, and final exits where people would navigate blind in a power failure. Third, it is rarely tested in actual darkness. We almost always recommend clients turn the mains lighting off and walk the escape route under emergency lighting alone. Clients never think about what darkness plus a smoke-filled room actually looks like until they try it.

The bigger gap, particularly across rural and semi-rural premises in Hampshire and Dorset, is external emergency lighting. Many premises have none once you leave the building. On a winter evening with no borrowed light from streetlamps, people evacuating into a dark car park or yard are effectively walking blind. Very few assessments by non-specialist providers pick this up.

Servicing certificates that no one has read

Almost every commercial premises we visit has servicing certificates for extinguishers, alarms, and emergency lighting. Very few Responsible Persons have read them. The certificate says the extinguishers were inspected — but not the type or rating of every unit. The fire alarm certificate carries an engineer's notes recommending follow-up actions — not read, let alone acted on. The EICR sits in a folder carrying an unsatisfactory status from three years ago with no remedial works completed. "Serviced" is not the same as "compliant."

Compartmentation failures at service penetrations

Compartmentation is the passive protection that buys people time to escape. Walls, floors, and ceilings designed as fire-resisting barriers do their job — until a cable, pipe, or ductwork penetration passes through them without proper fire stopping. We find this most often in service cupboards, above suspended ceilings, and around kitchen extract ductwork. A small unsealed penetration turns a thirty-minute compartment into something considerably less useful. On a non-intrusive inspection we cannot open every void, so we flag what we cannot see and recommend intrusive follow-up where the risk warrants it.

Fire drills that have never been tested under real conditions

This one surprises people. Large retail and hospitality premises often have comprehensive fire drill records — but the drills are always carried out before opening or after closing. The evacuation has never been tested with members of the public on site. If your drill has never run with 200 customers in the building, you do not know how long evacuation will actually take, how many people will ignore the alarm, how the fire wardens will cope, or whether the final exits will be usable when people are trying to reach them under stress. An e-learning certificate is not the same as a tested evacuation plan.

Portable heaters, flammable storage, and the ordinary

Cost-of-living pressure has pushed many businesses and HMOs from gas heating to electric portable heaters, which get moved around, left unattended, placed next to cardboard, and knocked over. Flammable aerosols and solvents are stored loose without flammable cabinets. Waste paper accumulates in exit routes. Wedged fire doors, blocked final exits, and broken emergency lighting are among the most common breaches recorded in Fire and Rescue Service audits. These ordinary failings are still the most frequent ones.

The premises was a garden centre with a main retail building, an attached warehouse, and a separate restaurant building. It was popular, well-run, well-loved locally, and the staff took fire safety seriously. It had all the right certificates. Everything looked fine on paper.

On a busy weekend the combined site could hold around 400 customers, with an average age somewhere between sixty and seventy-five. The restaurant had a new solar PV installation on the roof, with the kitchen extract ductwork running through the void directly beneath it. The plant room contained the main electrical supply, the gas meter, and the PV inverter — all together, with no compartmentation between them. Fire drills had been carried out diligently and recorded, but always when the site was closed. The evacuation had never been tested with a single customer in the building.

As we worked through the assessment, the picture built up piece by piece. The solar panels introduced an ignition source directly above the unprotected ductwork in the kitchen void. The combined plant room meant a fire starting in any of three sources could compromise all of them. The open-field siting meant lightning was a credible low-probability ignition path for the rooftop electrical equipment. And the real complication was human: an older customer base, many seated with a cup of tea, some with mobility limitations, none expecting to be told to leave. How quickly would they actually move? Would they believe the alarm was real? How many fire wardens would be needed to move everyone through a single unrehearsed evacuation? How much time would the fire have to develop while people finished their drinks?

Writing the assessment, I kept coming back to the same question. If my own grandmother had gone to that garden centre to buy a potted plant and have a slice of cake, and a fire had started in the wrong place at the wrong time, what would I expect to be in place for her to get out safely? That is the test I apply to every assessment I carry out. It is a test you can apply yourself to any premises you are responsible for.

BS 9792:2025 was published by the British Standards Institution in 2025 and took effect on 31 August 2025, replacing the withdrawn PAS 79-2:2020. It is the current British Standard for housing fire risk assessments and covers HMOs, blocks of flats, student accommodation, and specialised housing. It sets out a formal Type 1 to Type 4 framework that matches the depth of inspection to the risk profile of the building. Alongside BS 9792, the LACORS Housing Fire Safety Guidance (2008) remains the practical standard local authority licensing teams and fire services use to judge whether the precautions in an HMO are proportionate to the risk. A good HMO assessment reads off both — the methodology from BS 9792, the practical benchmarks from LACORS.

At Clear Fire Compliance we carry out Type 1 and Type 3 HMO assessments — both non-intrusive. A Type 1 covers common parts only; a Type 3 covers common parts plus a sample of individual let rooms. We do not carry out Type 2 or Type 4 intrusive inspections, which require destructive opening-up and a different competence profile. For older buildings with multiple extensions, former hotel conversions, or complex escape routes, we refer the work to assessors equipped for intrusive inspection.

The single most important feature of any HMO assessment is the protected staircase. In most HMOs the main staircase is the only route of escape from every upper floor. If the compartmentation between the staircase and the letting rooms fails — wedged fire doors, unsealed service penetrations, missing intumescent strips, door closers removed because they are annoying — the entire escape plan fails with it. For a third-floor sleeper, the time budget to wake, recognise the alarm, leave their room, navigate a corridor possibly filling with smoke, descend two flights, and reach a final exit is tight enough without any of those failures. It is why we spend a disproportionate amount of time on fire door condition, compartmentation, and alarm coverage in HMO assessments.

HMO assessment also has to account for something commercial premises largely do not: the behaviour of people in their own living space. Occupants smoke, charge devices unsupervised, overload sockets in rooms the landlord rarely sees, leave flammables on windowsills, put candles near curtains, cook at odd hours with the smoke alarm temporarily disconnected. A good HMO assessment acknowledges the landlord cannot control occupant behaviour, but evaluates whether the physical fire safety measures are robust enough to tolerate realistic behaviour.

HMO licensing and why fire risk assessments are now required with your application

Two of the largest councils in our service area now require a fire risk assessment as part of the HMO licence application — not as an afterthought, not on request, but as a standard documentation requirement.

Portsmouth City Council runs a city-wide Additional HMO Licensing Scheme (launched September 2023, for five years), covering HMOs with three or more occupants from two or more households. A fire risk assessment must be submitted with the application. If you do not have a current one at the time of application, Portsmouth issues a one-year licence with a special condition requiring you to obtain it — and will not grant the full five-year term until you do.

Southampton City Council launched an Additional HMO Licensing Scheme running from 1 October 2025 to 30 September 2030, covering smaller HMOs (three or four occupants) and HMOs within purpose-built student accommodation blocks across nine designated wards: Banister & Polygon, Bevois, Bargate, Portswood, Swaythling, Bassett, Freemantle, Shirley, and Millbrook. A fire risk assessment is a required part of the application, alongside gas safety, electrical safety, and floor plans.

Other councils in our area — including Eastleigh Borough Council — require fire risk assessments for HMOs under mandatory licensing and reference LACORS as their minimum standard. Whether or not your council has an additional scheme, a fire risk assessment of the common parts of any HMO is a legal requirement under the Fire Safety Order. The additional schemes simply mean councils are now actively checking, rather than relying on self-declaration.

The national compliance picture, based on the most recent published MHCLG figures, is worth knowing before you take your own arrangements for granted. In the year ending March 2025, Fire and Rescue Services completed 51,020 fire safety audits. Only 58% were judged satisfactory — the lowest proportion since 2011.

The three most common reasons audits failed, from the same data, were breaches relating to emergency routes and exits (10,323 recorded instances), maintenance failures including untested alarms and non-operating fire doors (8,666), and inadequate or missing fire risk assessments (8,471) — the third most common breach category overall. Among premises types, buildings converted into flats and blocks of flats are consistently among the worst performers; analysis of the same data found that blocks of four or more storeys failed roughly 45% of audits.

The direction of travel on enforcement is equally clear. 2,972 formal notices were issued in 2024/25, up 5.3% on the year. In the 2023/24 figures, prosecutions for fire safety violations rose by 79% year-on-year. And since October 2023, the maximum fine for specified offences under the Fire Safety Order has been unlimited. The practical risk of being on the wrong side of a fire safety audit is higher now than at any point in the last decade.

A fire risk assessment is not a document you obtain to make a compliance officer go away. It is the one piece of work that forces you to look at your premises the way a fire would. It asks a direct and unsentimental question: if a fire started here tomorrow, with the people who are actually in the building tomorrow, would the arrangements you have in place be enough?

The legal framework — the Fire Safety Order, the Building Safety Act, the Housing Act, the current British Standards — is the scaffolding around that question. It is important scaffolding, and we have spent the last few thousand words walking through it. But the scaffolding is not the point. The point is whether the answer to the question is yes. And the uncomfortable truth is that for a significant proportion of non-domestic premises in England, the honest answer today would be no, or at best not quite.

That is fixable. A thorough fire risk assessment, carried out by someone competent for your type of premises, will identify what needs to change, prioritise it, and give you a defensible record of how fire safety is being managed. It will stand up to an enforcement officer, an insurer, a tribunal, and — if it ever comes to it — a fire investigation.