Fire risk assessment: the document the responsible person signs

A fire risk assessment is the written examination of how a fire could start in your premises, who would be harmed, and what you have done to prevent and control it. In most jurisdictions it is a legal duty resting on a named responsible person — the employer, the occupier or the building owner — and not on the fire service, the landlord by default, or the consultant who wrote it. The duty is continuous, which is the part that surprises people: the assessment is not a certificate you obtain once but a live document you are expected to keep true.

What a fire risk assessment covers

• Ignition sources and fuel: the electrical installation, heating, cooking, hot work, and what is stored where.
• The people at risk, including those who would not evacuate unaided — visitors, contractors, anyone working alone, anyone with limited mobility.
• Means of escape: routes, distances, doors, lighting and whether the final exit is actually usable at three in the morning.
• Detection and warning, and whether it reaches everyone in every part of the building.
• Fire-fighting equipment and whether anyone present is trained to use it.
• Compartmentation and fire doors, which is where most findings in older buildings sit.
• The emergency plan, the drills, and the training records that show people know it.

Who can carry it out

The law usually requires a competent person, not a certified one, which is a lower bar than people assume and a higher bar than they act on.

1. For a simple, single-occupancy, low-risk premises, a trained member of staff working from the official guidance is often sufficient and legitimate.
2. For sleeping accommodation, complex layouts, multiple occupancies or vulnerable occupants, use a specialist — the consequences of getting it wrong are not recoverable.
3. Whoever does it, record their basis of competence in the document itself.
4. Keep the significant findings in writing regardless of company size; the threshold at which writing becomes mandatory is low and shrinking.
5. Set the review date in the document, and review sooner on any material change — a layout change, a new process, a change of occupancy, or after any fire or near miss.

The assessment is not the deliverable. The action plan is. Enforcement and insurance disputes rarely turn on a missing assessment; they turn on an assessment that identified a problem which was still open two years later. An unactioned finding is worse evidence than no assessment at all, because it proves you knew.

The findings that sit open

• Fire doors wedged, damaged or with failed self-closers — the single most common finding and the cheapest to fix.
• Escape routes used as storage, which reappears within weeks of being cleared unless someone owns the space.
• Emergency lighting never tested, or tested with no record kept.
• Compartmentation breached by cabling and pipework installed after the building was signed off.
• Contractors working without a hot work permit in premises where the assessment assumed none.
• Drills held but not recorded, which for evidential purposes is the same as not held.

The assessment identifies which doors matter; it does not keep them working. Routine fire door testing — gaps, seals, closers and latching, recorded door by door — is the ongoing check that the control the assessment relies on is still in place.

Where the assessment lives

Ettex Records keeps the assessment and its action plan as one linked record: each significant finding with an owner, a target date and a status, so the review a year later starts from what was closed rather than from a re-read of the whole document. It sits alongside the wider risk assessment work and the permit records for contractors on site. Ettex does not carry out assessments, does not certify anyone competent, and has no view on whether your premises comply — the duty and the judgement remain the responsible person’s.