FRA FAQ
Yes. UK health and safety law is built on the assumption that duty holders assess their own risks, and most workplace risk assessments are written in-house. The condition is competence in proportion to the risk, which is exactly the condition that gets demanding when the risk is fire in a residential building.
The general rule
The five steps of risk assessment were published by HSE precisely so that a sensible manager could apply them without specialist help: identify the hazards, decide who might be harmed, evaluate and control the risks, record the significant findings, review. For general health and safety a written record only becomes compulsory once you have five or more employees, though writing it down is good practice at any size.
Competence in this context is a proportionality test rather than a certificate. A duty holder who understands the activity, involves the people who do the work and follows the published guidance for their sector is usually competent to assess it. The failure mode is not amateurism; it is overconfidence, assessing risks whose mechanics you do not understand because the form looked simple.
The fire exception
Fire risk assessment under the Fire Safety Order 2005 uses the same self-assessment logic, and for a simple shop or office it works the same way. The logic strains when the premises is residential: in a block of flats the assessor is judging hidden construction, fire door performance and an evacuation strategy for people asleep in their homes, and a mistake endangers residents who never chose to rely on it.
Two things change at that end of the scale. The competence demanded becomes specialist, which is why can I do a fire risk assessment myself gets a more cautious answer than the general question, and the recording duty hardens: since October 2023 a fire risk assessment must be recorded in full, with the five-employee threshold stripped out for fire, so even a sole trader writes everything down. The general rule survives; the margin for error does not.
FAQ
For general health and safety, significant findings must be written down once you employ five or more people. For fire the position is stricter: the whole assessment must be recorded regardless of size. Can I write my own risk assessment covers what the written record has to contain.
No qualification is required by law. You need enough knowledge of the activity, the hazards and the published guidance to reach sound conclusions, and a competent person is defined by exactly that mix of training, knowledge and experience rather than by a certificate on the wall.
When the consequences of being wrong outgrow your knowledge: fire in premises where people sleep, hazardous substances, complex machinery, structural questions. Can anybody write a risk assessment sets out the competence test to apply to yourself as honestly as to anyone you hire.
FRA Flow is built for UK housing fire risk assessment: evidence capture on site, AI-drafted reports, and sign-off by a named reviewer.
