Yes. There is no law requiring a qualified assessor, and anyone telling you otherwise is wrong. Whether you should is a different question, and it depends entirely on the building.
The Fire Safety Order puts the duty on the responsible person to make a suitable and sufficient assessment. It does not name a qualification and it does not require a certificate. The test is competence, which the Welsh Government describes as sufficient training, experience and knowledge.
There is a statutory competence requirement written into the Order by the Building Safety Act, but it has not been commenced. So as things stand today, in Wales, a capable owner assessing their own straightforward premises is doing something entirely lawful.
What did change, on 1 October 2023, is the record. You must now record the assessment in full, whatever the size of the business, and the record must name the person who carried it out and the business they act for. That applies to you as much as to anyone you hire.
You have been in the roof space, you know what the walls are made of, and you know which doors were replaced and when. Somebody who has owned a shop for fifteen years often knows more about it than any visiting assessor will learn in ninety minutes.
A single-storey shop, salon, office or workshop with one or two ways out and no sleeping risk is a genuinely manageable assessment. Sleeping changes everything, because people are slow, disoriented and downwind of the smoke.
One business, one building, one set of exits. Shared buildings bring co-operation duties and arguments about who owns the stairs.
If you do not need to form a view on compartmentation, fire door ratings, alarm system grades or a stay put strategy, the technical ceiling is a lot lower.
Walk it cold. Go round as though you have never been there, at the time of day the building is busiest, and try every exit door. Half of all findings are a locked or obstructed final exit.
Write the findings, not the form. The record has to carry all the findings now, not just the significant ones. Photographs with dates are worth more than a hundred ticked boxes.
Put your name on it. Name, date, and what you looked at. An assessment nobody has signed is not a record of anything.
Yes. The law does not require a qualification, a certificate or a registered assessor. What it requires is that whoever carries it out is competent, which the Welsh Government describes as having sufficient training, experience and knowledge. If you genuinely have that for your building, you may do it yourself.
Three reasons, none of them fear. You may not have the knowledge for the specific judgements your building needs. You will not have the practice at writing findings that survive an audit. And an assessment written by the person who also has to pay for the remedial work is a harder document to trust, both for you and for anyone reading it later.
No, and anyone who implies otherwise is selling badly. The duty stays with the responsible person. The Fire Risk Assessment Competency Council puts it plainly: the duty holder retains responsibility for ensuring the assessment is adequate. What you are buying is a competent pair of eyes and a defensible record, not a transfer of liability.
Yes, and this is the part most people miss. Since 1 October 2023 the recorded assessment in Wales must include the name of the individual carrying it out and, where they act for a business, the name of that business. A template with nobody's name on it does not meet that requirement, whoever filled it in.
The government templates are perfectly sound as a structure. The problem is never the form, it is the judgements the form asks you to make. Whether a thirty-minute fire door is doing anything, whether that stair is the only way out, what grade of alarm a two-storey letting cottage needs. A form cannot answer those and will happily let you write the wrong thing in a tidy box.
Most enforcement follows an ignored formal notice rather than a first honest attempt. An inspector who finds a genuine, dated, thoughtful assessment with some gaps is in a very different conversation from one who finds nothing, or finds a tick sheet from 2019 with a different building's name on it.
What to look at, in the order a fire officer would look at it.
The duty, the record, and what changed in October 2023.
How Mid and West Wales Fire and Rescue Service actually inspects.
Tell us the building and we will give you a price on the phone. Most assessments are booked within the week.