Who Is Allowed To Carry Out a Fire Risk Assessment?
Almost anyone is legally allowed to carry out a fire risk assessment. That is the problem. The question for responsible persons is not who is permitted, but who is competent, and how you can tell the difference before the fire service, your insurer, or a coroner tells it for you.
The Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005 places the duty on the responsible person, not the assessor. If the assessment turns out to be inadequate, it is the responsible person who answers for it. The law does not currently require a fire risk assessor to hold any particular qualification, belong to any register, or be certified by any body. In practice, this means that the standard of assessments on the market varies enormously, and the burden of telling a good assessor from a poor one falls on the person least equipped to judge.
The figures published by the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government for the year to March 2025 give some sense of the scale of the problem. Fire and rescue services carried out 51,020 fire safety audits in England. Only 58 per cent were recorded as satisfactory, the lowest proportion since 2011. Formal notifications rose to 2,972, a 29 per cent increase on five years earlier. The single most common breach cited was under Article 9 of the Order, which covers the risk assessment itself. In other words, fire services are finding, year after year, that the documents responsible persons are relying on do not hold up to scrutiny.
What the law actually says
Article 9 of the Fire Safety Order requires the responsible person to make a suitable and sufficient assessment of the risks to which relevant persons are exposed, and to review it regularly. Where the responsible person does not have the expertise to do this themselves, Article 18 requires them to appoint one or more competent persons to assist. Competence is defined, in essence, as having sufficient training, experience, knowledge and other qualities to do the job properly.
That is the whole of it. There is no prescribed qualification, no licence, no list of approved providers. The Home Office guidance published alongside the Fire Safety Act 2021 and the Section 156 changes to the Order in October 2023 is explicit on this: the responsible person is liable in law if the fire risk assessment is not suitable and sufficient, and it is for them to satisfy themselves that the assessor they appoint is competent. Due diligence is the responsible person's burden, not the assessor's.
Can you do it yourself?
In principle, yes. In practice, almost never. A responsible person who happens to be a trained fire safety professional can plainly assess their own building. Everyone else should think carefully. For very simple, low risk premises, such as a small single-storey office occupied only during working hours by alert adults, a diligent responsible person following published guidance may produce something adequate. Once the building involves sleeping accommodation, vulnerable occupants, multiple storeys, shared escape routes, or any degree of complexity in its construction or use, self-assessment becomes a substantial legal risk.
Fire services see this regularly. An assessment that looks tidy on the page, produced by someone who knows the building well but has no fire safety training, can miss the things that actually kill people: a breach in compartmentation above a suspended ceiling, a fire door that will not close under its own weight, an evacuation strategy that assumes occupants who do not exist. The document reassures everyone until something goes wrong.
What competence actually looks like
The industry has spent several years trying to give the word competence more shape than the Fire Safety Order provides. The most significant development is BS 8674:2025, a British Standard published earlier this year that sets out a tiered competence framework for fire risk assessors. It defines three levels, foundation, intermediate and advanced, each mapped to the type and complexity of building the assessor is equipped to handle.
A foundation level assessor is suitable for small, simple premises such as low-risk offices and basic commercial units. An intermediate assessor is competent for medium-risk buildings of greater complexity. Advanced assessors are those who can properly handle high-risk or complex premises, such as care homes, high-rise residential blocks, large industrial sites, healthcare facilities and heritage buildings. The framework is new, and adoption across the industry is still developing, but it offers responsible persons something they have never really had before: a language for asking the right question, which is not "are you a fire risk assessor" but "at what level are you competent, and is my building within it".
Underneath the standard, a number of schemes and registers give the framework practical expression. The most widely recognised are third-party certification schemes accredited by the United Kingdom Accreditation Service, of which BAFE SP205 is the best known. An organisation holding SP205 certification has been independently audited against defined competency criteria, and its fire risk assessments are signed off internally by a validator before release. Alongside certification, the Institute of Fire Engineers and the Institute of Fire Safety Managers maintain registers of individual assessors whose experience and qualifications have been reviewed. Membership of a professional body is not the same as being on its assessor register, and neither is a substitute for third-party certification at organisation level, but together they provide responsible persons with evidence to rely on.
Where regulation is heading
The Grenfell Tower Inquiry's Phase 2 report, published in September 2024, recommended that fire risk assessors should in due course be required to prove their competence through independent accreditation. The government has accepted the direction of travel and is working with the Fire Sector Federation and the Home Office's Fire Risk Assessor Competency Verification Project Board on how to implement it. Formal legislation has not yet arrived, but the expectation has. Insurers are already asking to see evidence of assessor competence. Fire and rescue services are already treating uncertificated assessments with more scepticism. The standard of care responsible persons will be judged against is moving, and it is moving in one direction only.
Who is typically not competent
Some of the most common arrangements we see in the field do not meet the standard the law sets, even where they are done in good faith. General maintenance staff, handymen and site managers are rarely qualified to assess fire risk, however well they know the building. Letting agents and property managers without specific fire safety training should not be producing assessments, even for straightforward HMOs. Generalist health and safety consultants, unless they hold specific fire safety qualifications and current experience, are a common source of thin or formulaic reports. Fire alarm engineers and electricians know their own trade well but are not, by virtue of that trade, fire risk assessors. Tenants and leaseholders cannot assess on behalf of the responsible person. Template-driven assessments produced without a proper site inspection, regardless of who signed them, do not satisfy Article 9.
How to vet an assessor
For responsible persons appointing an external assessor, a small number of questions do most of the work. Ask whether the assessor or their organisation holds third-party certification under a UKAS-accredited scheme such as BAFE SP205, and ask to see the certificate. Ask which professional registers they appear on, and at what level. Ask what training and qualifications they hold, and how they keep them current. Ask for examples of assessments they have carried out on buildings similar to yours in type, size and use, and for references from those clients. Ask whether the assessment will be based on a full site inspection, whether it will be validated internally before release, and what the report will actually contain. Ask about professional indemnity and public liability insurance.
The answers matter, but so does the manner of them. A competent assessor welcomes these questions. A less competent one is often visibly unsettled by them.
Why this is worth getting right
A competent fire risk assessment protects the people in the building, which is the point of the exercise. It also protects the responsible person's legal position, the insurance that depends on it, and the operational continuity of the business or portfolio. A poor assessment does none of these things. It creates a paper trail that appears to show compliance while the underlying risks go unaddressed, and it does so until a fire service audit, an insurance claim, or an actual fire brings the gap to light.
The shift in the industry is towards evidence. Evidence that the assessor was competent to assess the building in question. Evidence that the assessment was based on an inspection. Evidence that the findings were acted upon. Responsible persons who move in that direction now, ahead of the regulatory curve, will find themselves on the right side of it when it arrives.
The Fletcher Risk approach
We carry out fire risk assessments across Chester, Cheshire, the Wirral, Merseyside, Greater Manchester and North Wales. Every assessment is based on a full onsite inspection, with findings supported by photographic evidence, priority-coded actions, realistic timescales and practical recommendations written to be usable by the responsible person rather than to impress them. We match the assessor to the building, so the level of expertise applied is appropriate to the level of risk. We work with managing agents, landlords, investors and operators across the region who want assessments that will stand up to scrutiny, not just sit on a shelf. Alongside assessments, we also offer fire door inspections and fire safety training for responsible persons and their staff.
Need a fire risk assessment you can rely on?
If you are responsible for a building and you want an assessment that meets the standard the law expects, please get in touch.
Contact Fletcher Risk