Walk your building with this before anyone official does. Most of what we find is on this list, and most of it is free to fix.
Walk your own escape route from the furthest point, at night, with the lights off. If you trip over something or meet a locked door, that is your first finding.
Push every final exit door. If it needs a key, a code, a shove or a knack, it fails. Thumb-turns and push bars are the only reliable answer on a door people must use in a hurry.
Stock, bins, bikes, pushchairs, deliveries and Christmas decorations. Corridors and stairs are not storage, and this is the finding we make more than any other.
Press the test button. Then find the log book. A working alarm nobody records testing is worth less than you think when an inspector asks.
Open each one to forty-five degrees and let go. It should close fully and latch. Wedges, hooks and missing closers are the commonest reason a fire spreads past one room.
Find the test switch or the little green LED. Then imagine the stairwell in a power cut at midnight with a stranger on it.
Look for the EICR. Five years for most premises, and it is a legal requirement in Welsh rented dwellings. Also count the extension leads plugged into extension leads.
Portable heaters, wood burners, LPG, oil, commercial kitchen equipment. Anything that gets hot needs a clearance around it and a plan for what happens if it fails.
Name the person who calls 999, the person who sweeps the building, and the meeting point. If you cannot name all three, neither can your staff at two in the morning.
Since 1 October 2023 the assessment and your fire safety arrangements must be recorded in full, whatever the size of the business. A tick sheet is not a record.
It is not a fire risk assessment and it will not satisfy anybody. A recorded assessment has to identify the hazards, the people at risk, the precautions already in place and the risk that remains, and it has to be written down in full. This list just gets the obvious things off it first, so you are paying us to think rather than to point at a wedged fire door.
If you work through it and find nothing, that is genuinely good news and the assessment will be quick.
Two minutes to work out whether the duty falls on you.
How the visit runs and what to have ready.
Fixed price, agreed before we come out.
Tell us the building and we will give you a price on the phone. Most assessments are booked within the week.