FRA FAQ
Review risk assessments at least once a year and immediately after an incident, a near miss or a significant change to the activity, the people or the premises. No UK law sets a universal interval; the duty is to keep every assessment valid.
The two clocks
Run two clocks on every assessment. The calendar clock schedules a review at least yearly, shortened where the environment shifts quickly or the consequences of error are severe; a depot that reorganises weekly needs more frequent attention than a stable office. A calendar review can be brief when nothing has changed. Its value is the recorded confirmation that a competent pair of eyes asked the question, plus the first step of the method repeated: looking again for hazards that were not there before.
The event clock overrides the calendar whenever reality moves first. Accidents and near misses, new machinery or substances, altered processes, staffing changes and new regulation all knock out assumptions the assessment was built on, so the review happens immediately rather than at the next anniversary. Organisations that only ever review on schedule end up with documents describing operations that no longer exist, which is precisely the failure the validity test in the law is aimed at.
Fire as the worked example
Fire shows the pattern with the duty written down explicitly. The fire risk assessment must stay under review and be revisited whenever its validity is in doubt, and since Section 156 of the Building Safety Act 2022 every finding and measure has to be recorded in full, so a missed review is visible on the face of the file. The cycles UK premises run in practice, from annual norms in managed housing to licensing expectations for HMOs, are covered under how often do you need a fire risk assessment UK.
Embedding beats remembering. Reviews survive contact with busy years when their dates live in the same system as other compliance deadlines, overdue items surface at safety meetings, and each assessment has a named owner rather than a shared inbox. For fire specifically, the free review frequency tool suggests a defensible starting cycle from building type and risk factors, and the legal analysis of why no fixed interval exists sits under how often should a fire risk assessment be done.
FAQ
The Management of Health and Safety at Work Regulations 1999. They require employers to review an assessment when there is reason to suspect it is no longer valid or after a significant change, and they name no interval. The annual habit is convention: easy to plan, simple to evidence, hard for a regulator to fault.
Anything that alters the hazards, the people exposed or the controls: new equipment, substances or processes, changed layouts, staffing shifts that affect competence or vulnerability, and incidents that show the assessment missed something. In buildings, works and occupancy changes are the classic cases; the fire version is handled through a significant change review.
Yes, because an unrecorded review is indistinguishable from no review. Capture the date, the reviewer, what was examined and the conclusion, even when the conclusion is that nothing has changed. Fire law now makes full recording explicit for fire risk assessments, and the same habit protects every other assessment in an audit.
FRA Flow tracks review dates and open actions for every fire risk assessment in a portfolio, with the record kept audit-ready. Free tier included.
