FRA FAQ
Yes. In England and Wales, article 9 of the Regulatory Reform (Fire Safety) Order 2005 requires the responsible person to make a suitable and sufficient fire risk assessment. The duty covers virtually all non-domestic premises and the common parts of multi-occupied residential buildings.
The duty
The requirement lands on the responsible person: the employer where the premises is a workplace, and otherwise the person with control of the premises or the owner. In blocks of flats that is usually the freeholder, a residents' management company or the managing agent, and the assessment covers the common parts rather than the inside of individual homes. Pinning the role down precisely matters, and who is the responsible person in a fire risk assessment walks through how to do it.
The scope has widened since 2005. The Fire Safety Act 2021 put beyond doubt that, for multi-occupied residential buildings, the Order covers the structure, the external walls including cladding and balconies, and flat entrance doors. Individual private dwellings remain outside the Order, though the exemption disappears as soon as any part of the building is shared; do I need a fire risk assessment if there are no common parts covers exactly where the line sits.
The standard and the stakes
Suitable and sufficient is the legal test, and it is qualitative. The assessment must identify the fire hazards, identify the people at risk including anyone especially vulnerable, judge whether the existing precautions reduce the risk far enough, and produce significant findings with an action plan. A generic template with no building-specific reasoning will not meet the test, however neatly it has been filled in.
Section 156 of the Building Safety Act 2022 tightened the recording duty from 1 October 2023: the whole assessment must be written down, including who carried it out. Enforcement sits with the local fire and rescue authority, whose responses run from informal advice through enforcement and prohibition notices to prosecution, where fines are unlimited and imprisonment is available for the most serious cases.
FAQ
Yes. The Order applies to the common parts of multi-occupied residential buildings regardless of whether any commercial activity takes place there. Stairs, corridors, lobbies and plant rooms all count, and for the assessment itself the external walls and the flat entrance doors are within scope as well.
Yes, in full. The old rule that only employers with five or more staff had to record findings disappeared when Section 156 came into force. Every responsible person must now record the whole assessment, the measures taken or planned, and the identity of whoever carried it out.
An inspecting officer will usually start with advice or a notice setting a deadline, but a missing assessment is one of the clearest breaches there is, and prosecutions of landlords and agents have produced substantial fines. Commissioning one properly is covered in how to obtain a fire risk assessment.
FRA Flow helps UK housing assessors capture evidence on site and issue reviewed, signed reports aligned to BS 9792:2025. Free tier, no card.
