The moment contractors arrive on site, your building's fire safety picture changes. Walls get opened up. Escape routes shift. Alarms get isolated. And the people doing the work — through no fault of their own — often have little idea how your building operates or where the risks sit.
We see it regularly: responsible persons who treat fire safety as something to pick back up once the dust has settled. It's an understandable instinct when there's a project to manage, but it's the wrong one. Under the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005, your duties don't pause for a refurbishment. If anything, they become more demanding.
Here's what needs to be in place before, during and after any significant works on your premises.
Why Refurbishments Change Your Risk Profile
In a well-run building, fire safety works because of layered protections — compartmentation, detection, clear escape routes, trained staff who know what to do. A refurbishment can cut through several of those layers at once, and often does so gradually, without anyone standing back to take stock of what's been lost.
Think about what typically happens on a mid-sized commercial refurbishment: fire-resistant walls are breached to reroute services; fire doors get propped open or taken off their hinges; dust and offcuts pile up in areas that weren't designed to store combustibles; alarm zones go offline for days at a time. Add contractors who don't know the building moving through occupied areas, and the risk picture can shift considerably — fast.
Hot Works Permits
Welding, cutting, grinding, soldering, use of open flames — these activities are behind a significant proportion of construction-related fires in the UK, and most of them were preventable.
A hot works permit is a written authorisation issued before any such activity begins. It should set out exactly where the work is taking place, what precautions are in place — flammable materials cleared, extinguisher on standby, nearby detection isolated — who is responsible, and when the work will finish.
The detail that catches people out most often is the one-hour check. Once hot works are complete, someone needs to physically inspect the area sixty minutes after tools have been put down. It sounds excessive until you understand that heat transfers through walls, floors and ceiling voids — the fire that starts at 6pm on a Friday is often traceable to welding that finished at 4pm. That check is not optional.
As the responsible person, oversight of this sits with you — not with the contractor.
Temporary Fire Precautions
Wherever your usual measures are compromised by the works, something needs to fill the gap — and that something needs to be in place before the gap appears, not after.
If a detection zone is being taken offline, think about interim portable detection in the affected area. If your main escape route becomes blocked, make sure an alternative is clearly signed, unobstructed and communicated to everyone in the building before the primary route closes — not on the same morning. If works are happening outside of normal hours, a fire watch arrangement may well be necessary: a competent person conducting regular checks of the works area while the rest of the building is unstaffed.
The standard to keep in mind is that your overall level of protection should remain reasonably practicable throughout. "Temporary" doesn't give you licence to let things slide.
Managing Contractors on Site
The RRO requires the responsible person to coordinate fire safety with anyone else who has control over any part of the premises. On a refurbishment, that means your principal contractor — and, through them, every subcontractor working on site.
Every contractor should get a fire safety induction before they start work. Not a generic site induction — one specific to your building. Where are the exits? Where does everyone go if the alarm sounds? What are the known risks? What do they do if they discover a fire or accidentally trigger the system? Don't assume their employer has covered this. In our experience, it rarely has been covered in enough detail to be useful.
Permit-to-work systems need to be formally managed and documented throughout the project. If you have a principal contractor, get the division of fire safety responsibilities written down before work starts. Verbal agreements are fine until something goes wrong.
It's also worth reading our post on protecting commercial premises from arson — contractor activity, particularly outside normal hours, can raise this risk too.
Keeping Your Fire Risk Assessment Current
A fire risk assessment isn't a document you produce once and file away. The RRO requires it to be reviewed whenever there's reason to think it's no longer valid — and a building refurbishment almost always qualifies.
If you're opening up compartmentation, changing how spaces are used, altering escape routes or introducing new materials, your existing FRA needs to be looked at before works begin. For larger projects, a full reassessment will likely be needed. It's not paperwork for its own sake — it's the record that demonstrates you understood what was happening in your building and had appropriate measures in place. An FRA that pre-dates a significant refurbishment won't protect you if the fire authority comes knocking.
Our post on Swiss Cheese Theory and fire safety is relevant here — refurbishments are exactly the kind of situation where several small failures line up and create something much more serious.
Fire Doors: Worth Watching Closely
Refurbishments are tough on fire doors. They get propped open for convenience. They take knocks from passing plant and materials. They're removed temporarily and not rehung properly. New hardware gets fitted without anyone checking whether it still maintains the door set's integrity.
Before works start, document the condition of every fire door in the affected area. Check them regularly during the project. Check them again before the building is reoccupied. A fire door with a degraded intumescent seal or a missing self-closer isn't doing the job — it just looks like it is.
How Quickly Things Can Escalate: A Real Example
The video below shows exactly why managing your fire risk during a refurbishment is so important. It captures a hotel fire in which waste and combustible material — the kind of build-up that is routine on any active refurbishment site — had accumulated in a way that fundamentally changed the fire risk. What started as a small fire that staff attempted to tackle with extinguishers escalated with terrifying speed into something catastrophic and beyond control. Multiple attempts were made to suppress it. None succeeded. This is what an unmanaged change in risk profile can look like in practice.
Combustible waste accumulated during a hotel refurbishment contributed to a small fire becoming uncontrollable — despite repeated attempts to use extinguishers on it.
A Practical Timeline for Responsible Persons
Once the Contractors Have Left
Any remedial fire safety work identified during the project — fire stopping that wasn't correctly reinstated, compartmentation that was opened and not properly closed — needs to be sorted before the building is occupied again. Passive fire protection that has been breached and not repaired is one of the most common sources of latent risk we come across in UK commercial buildings. It's invisible until it isn't.
If detection was isolated for any part of the works, our post on managing long-term fire alarm faults is worth a read — the system should be fully recommissioned and signed off by a competent engineer before you rely on it again.
We work with businesses, landlords and facilities managers across Chester, the North West and North Wales to manage exactly these challenges. If you have works coming up and want to make sure your fire safety obligations are covered, get in touch — we can help you put a practical, compliant approach in place as part of a professional fire risk assessment.
Planning works on your premises in Chester, the North West or North Wales?
Talk to us before the scaffolding goes up. We can review your fire risk assessment against the planned works, advise on temporary precautions and help you stay on the right side of your RRO obligations throughout the project.