Guide
Fire safety compliance checklist: the recurring items and their cost
Updated
Work through this once and you will know what your building should be spending money on, and which quotes in front of you are missing something.
The recurring lines
| Item | Priced on | Common gap |
|---|---|---|
| Fire risk assessment and review | Building size, complexity, sleeping risk, first assessment or review | The action plan is delivered but nobody is funded to close it |
| Fire alarm servicing | Device count, panel count, visits per year, system age | Parts and out of hours attendance excluded from the headline price |
| Emergency lighting testing | Number of luminaires, self-test or manual, duration testing | The annual full duration test priced separately from the monthly checks |
| Fire extinguisher servicing | Number and type of units, site count, travel | Extended service and refills quoted only after the engineer has been |
| Fire door inspection | Number of doors, sampled or complete, access | A defect schedule with no budget to fix the defects |
| Staff training and drills | Headcount, shifts, turnover, number of wardens | New starters and night shifts never trained |
| Records and logbook | Buildings and disciplines covered | Records held on a supplier's system you lose access to on exit |
Where the money is usually wasted
- Buying inspection without remediation budget. Every inspection produces a defect list. A programme with no money behind the list generates paperwork proving you knew.
- Overlapping contracts. Estates that grew by acquisition often pay two suppliers to visit the same building. A single register of assets and contracts finds this in an afternoon.
- Buying on annual price alone. Callout rates, parts mark-up and price indexation decide the three-year cost, not the year one figure.
- Ignoring occupancy change. New tenants, a new layout or a change of use can invalidate assumptions in the assessment long before its review date.
A workable annual rhythm
- Start with the assessment. Everything else is downstream of it, and its action plan should be the budget line, not an appendix.
- Put the servicing on one calendar. Alarms, emergency lighting, extinguishers and doors all recur; visits that arrive at random are how records develop gaps.
- Keep the in-house checks running. The weekly and monthly checks your own staff do are free and catch most faults between visits.
- Review after change, not just after twelve months. Article 9 requires the assessment to be reviewed regularly and where there is reason to suspect it is no longer valid or there has been a significant change.
- Reconcile the file once a year. Every asset should map to a service report and every defect to a closure date.
Nothing here is fire safety advice. It is a purchasing checklist built from the duties in the Fire Safety Order, so that the quotes you compare cover the same ground.