FRA FAQ
The first step in risk assessment is to identify the hazards: everything with the potential to cause harm. It is done with a systematic walkthrough, a read of incident and maintenance records, and conversations with the people who use the building every day.
Doing it properly
The walkthrough covers every space, not only the presentable ones: plant rooms, risers, roof voids, bin stores, external walls and anywhere storage has quietly accumulated. The discipline is to record what is present on the day rather than what the drawings or the previous report say should be there. In housing this inspection is the core of a Type 1 fire risk assessment of the common parts, and photographs taken as you go become the evidence behind every later judgement.
Records fill in what a single visit cannot show. Incident and near-miss logs reveal what has already gone wrong; maintenance and test records show whether protective systems are cared for or neglected; electrical installation condition reports and earlier assessments expose recurring themes. Then talk to people. Caretakers, cleaners, managing agents and residents know about the door that never quite closes and the corridor that fills with belongings, and almost none of that reaches a filing system.
Why it matters
Each later step consumes the hazard list and nothing else. Who might be harmed is judged against the hazards found; likelihood and severity are estimated for the hazards found; controls are proposed for the hazards found. A superficial first step therefore produces a confident-looking assessment with a hole in it, and a hole is harder to spot than an obvious gap because nobody goes looking for what was never recorded. Plenty of the common mistakes in risk assessments trace back to hazard identification done from a template instead of a building.
Competence shows earliest here too. Recognising a hazard requires knowing what one looks like: an assessor who has never considered lithium battery fires will walk past a charging e-bike without a second glance. That is why whoever does this work must be a competent person for the building type in front of them, and why what are some examples of fire hazards is worth reading before any walkthrough of a residential block.
FAQ
As long as the building demands. A small, simple premises can be covered thoroughly in well under a day; a large block with multiple cores, plant spaces and external walls takes far longer. The honest measure is coverage rather than clock time: every space visited, every relevant record checked, every user group heard.
A hazard has the potential to cause harm; risk combines how likely the harm is with how severe it would be. The first step lists potentials, and the evaluation step converts them into risks by judging likelihood and consequence in context. Keeping the two ideas separate keeps the assessment structured and the reasoning auditable.
For a simple, low-risk premises, a careful owner or manager using published guidance often can. For blocks of flats, sleeping risk or complex layouts, a specialist is the defensible choice. Can I do a fire risk assessment myself sets out where that line falls and why.
FRA Flow logs each hazard with photo, location and note on site, turning the first step into evidence the rest of the assessment can stand on.
